An America First Foreign Policy
Deciphering the meaning of a vague slogan.
In Tuesday’s post “Trump and the Liberal Order,” I started breaking down a conversation between Ezra Klein and Fareed Zakaria on what foreign policy will look like under the Trump 47 administration. The most stark predictions come in their discussion of what the slogan “America First” means in this context.
Klein:
What is “America First”? What would it mean for that to be successful? What are we looking like?
The trade deficit is going to be the main output of our foreign policy — which, by the way, he’s not consistent on in any way. He was talking the other day about building a renewed Keystone XL pipeline to Canada. But if we start importing a bunch of Canadian oil, that’s going to increase the trade deficit with Canada.
Is it manufacturing employment that we’re supposed to be targeting here? If “America First” was working, it would be manufacturing. Is it G.D.P. growth?
I haven’t heard them describe what this new golden age of American strength is. Is it median wages for men? They certainly have not articulated a coherent view of American power or success.
Is America stronger if AfD takes over Germany? Why?
Zakaria:
I would guess that “America First” for Trump and for many of his followers — and I wouldn’t put some of the ideologists of MAGA in the same category — but I think for Trump, it’s the idea that the United States has been constrained for too long by globalism, by worrying about the international environment, by worrying about all these alliances. The U.S. is constrained by these international organizations. And again, we’ve been the sucker. And what “America First” means is we’re going to break through all that [expletive] and we’re just going to do what’s good for America.
But what is left undefined, as you’re saying, is: Well, what is good for America? Why would it be good for America to break apart the international trading system? Why would it be good for America to break apart this world?
So that part, I think, is undefined. But you can see the impulse and what the attraction is to a lot of people who have always felt that the United States is run by this elite cabal of overeducated urban liberals in places like New York and Washington who have been selling America out.
They veer away from this for quite a while, focusing on the bits I addressed in the previous post. But they eventually return to the theme.
Klein:
What is “America First”?
One of the things that I actually think it is is a total devaluing of non-American lives. You were talking about how Musk calls U.S.A.I.D. “a ball of worms” — not worms in the apple, just “a ball of worms.” That’s a horrible thing to say.
I know people who work in aid, like you do. Musk is a billionaire who jets around the world fathering children with Lord knows how many women. And sending missives on X 300 times a day. And these people who went to amazing schools, go work on marginally improving economic growth by making the textile sector more efficient in Ghana. So it just appalls me.
But at least the Americans who are working for U.S.A.I.D. exist in the calculus. The administration hates them and wants to demonize them and wants them to go to the private sector where they’ll be more productive.
But the children who needed the antiretrovirals from PEPFAR don’t exist in the conversation here at all. And it’s always a difficult thing from the perspective of a nation, which does have a preference for its own citizens. Any individual economic migrant’s life would be much better off if they could come to the U.S. And for reasons of stability in the economy we can’t let everybody who would like to come to the U.S. in. How do you value that?
It’s a really hard question, and we don’t have very good answers. And we tack forward and backward. How do you value people we save from dying of malnutrition?
The answers have been complex, not really debated: that we value those lives somewhat. It’s not how we think about Americans, but it’s not nothing.
And I kind of think one of the messages now is: The value of foreign lives is nothing. The value of people in the West Bank whose land is going to be annexed is nothing. Our care about the Ukrainians is nothing.
That’s some of the message of it, too, particularly domestically — that U.S.A.I.D. was about spending American money to not really serve our interests, first and foremost. It’s about expressing our values, which is that other lives matter. And particularly, if there are cost-effective ways we can help them, we should.
And the message now is: They don’t, and we shouldn’t.
Zakaria:
One of the ironies here is that I do believe, as you do, that American aid was never entirely about geopolitics and geostrategy. Part of it, I think, came out of a deep, high Protestant impulse of saving the world. And I think it is one of the central messages of Christianity that all human beings are equal in the eyes of God, and it is incumbent upon the rich to look after the poor.
If you read the Sermon on the Mount, if you read Paul’s letter to the Galatians, that’s what Christianity is about —
Klein:
Not if you hear JD Vance’s version of it.
Zakaria:
[Laughs.] Right, which, to me, is bizarre. And yet here you have this Christian administration neglecting what strikes me as the central tenets of Christianity, which are: Be nice to poor people, help people who are in need, the good Samaritan, all that stuff.
And this was our one expression of it. For every $100 the federal government spent, we were saying we’re going to give one dollar to clothe the naked and feed the hungry.
This is followed by some back-and-forth on the effectiveness of aid programs, with both agreeing that the money could be better targeted and that it would be perfectly legitimate for a Republican administration to have different instincts than a Democratic one on, for example, the value and nature of cultural programs we should be funding.
Klein:
And this administration is not doing any of that. They didn’t want U.S.A.I.D. audited. Because a lot of things sound great if you audit U.S.A.I.D., even from any kind of humanitarian perspective they could come up with. PEPFAR is an amazing program.
The expression of values was the point there. And the expression of values of Trump and “America First” is that we are the only ones who count. It’s why JD Vance’s riff that Christianity has this understanding of this intense partiality of favor. It’s our family and our neighbors and our community — and out and out and out, until you have basically no responsibility to the world.
They then play a clip of Vice President J.D. Vance:
And as an American leader, but also just as an American citizen, your compassion belongs first to your fellow citizens. It doesn’t mean you hate people from outside of your own borders. But there’s this old school — and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way — that you love your family and then you love your neighbor. And then you love your community. And then you love your fellow citizens in your own country. And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.
They note that Vance is ostensibly a Catholic and that Pope Francis made an announcement from his sick bed that, no, this is not what his Church teaches.
At this point, the America First discussion converges with the Liberal Order discussion: a return to a worldview from previous centuries. I’ll save the implications of that for my third and final installment.
Understanding the limitations and all, I still can’t escape my conviction that Fareed Zakaria, wise and knowledgeable as he is, is the wrong person to ask these questions to.
Sanewashing. Two of our Leading Public Intellectuals ™ attempting to find the underlying logic of Trump’s random impulses.
I checked to see that “sanewashing” is properly one word. I found Urban Dictionary defining sanewashing as “Attempting to downplay a person or idea’s radicality to make it more palatable to the general public.” I don’t think that’s right. In fact, I think it’s sanewashing. It’s not that Trump’s impulses are radical, it’s that they’re nuts. How many examples have we seen of the MSM cleaning up Trump’s rambling, babbling rally speeches?
I’ve talked here of “intuitionist” v “rationalist”. The discourse defaults to rationality. We can’t seem to be able to discuss and argue with someone’s statements until we somehow make sense of them. But intuited beliefs don’t have to make sense. Particularly with Trump, we shouldn’t be arguing that he’s wrong, we should argue that he’s lost it.
@gVOR10: I did not find the discussion to be sanewashing.
There was no “Attempting to downplay a person or idea’s radicality to make it more palatable to the general public” in my view.
I tend to think the other way on this. If anything because I am less convinced than many here that he has, in fact, lost it. Worse, however, those around him believe in a lot of what he is doing. So even if Trump is cra-zee, getting him out of the way doesn’t really solve anything.
The notion that understanding a bad leader is sanewashing rather undercuts all the analysis of Hitler that was produced (or, indeed, any studies of Stalin, Pol Pot, Mussolini, Franco, etc.).
I respect Zakaria and Klein, but this really crosses me as trying to read signal into noise. America First is basically whatever random neuron fires in Trump’s head. The Mexico-Canada trade deal was America First. Then tariffs were America First. Then rescinding them was America First. THen reinstating them was America First.
To the extent there is a philosophy, it’s one of isolation. Abandoning our allies, abandoning the world’s poor, abandoning global health. And then screaming like a stuck pig when those decisions bite us in the butt.
There isn’t any substance to the phrase America First because Trump doesn’t think in terms of principles.
He uses the phrase to mask his role as a gangster chief. Everything is for sale, including his country so long as he gets his beak wet.
The whole idea of the tariffs is to institute a regime of arbitrary tariffs from which special indulgences can be purchased.
His disdain for NATO is because he can’t use it like a protection racket.
Assigning his actions to some higher abstract principle, even an evil one, is giving it some sort of legitimacy. It turns gross corruption into a debatable topic on which reasonable people can differ.
@Steven L. Taylor: I’m inclined to think that claiming that Trump says what he does because he’s “nuts” is the sanewashing. Allowing my inner Manichean out of the abyss momentarily, I don’t think Trump says what he does because he’s nuts, he says what he does because he’s morally depraved, selfish, and evil. He’s just like the rest of us, only more so.
But he may well be the perfect choice as a leader for people who rejoice at their own children losing their jobs because “something has to be done” about gubmint spending.
Please stop using the word ‘policy’ in reference to the crooks and clown cabal. In the morning our FP was to slap sanctions on Putin, and two hours later it was, ‘whatever Putin wants.’ Trump has no capacity to understand let alone formulate a policy beyond, ‘hurt people I don’t like, pay off people I do like, and never mess with Daddy Vlad.’
@Steven L. Taylor:
Trump may not be cra-zee, so sanewashing may not be the right term of art to describe the punditry deciphering the meaning of what he says and does. But, what he says and does is not sane, because it is untethered from reason and sensibility. And Trump’s worldview should NEVER be described as foreign policy, because it is untethered from reality. It’s “the simpleton’s version of…” again – this time regarding America’s place in the world.
@Chip Daniels: @Michael Reynolds: I will consent to your collective assertion that calling any of this “policy” is granting it more gravitas than it deserves. Good point!
ETA: Trump is more in the line of a banality of miasmic evil than the term “policy” would imply or warrant.
@Chip Daniels:
It may not be a higher abstract principle, but “America First” is a brand and there’s a market for that brand. And Trump has and will continue to get his beak wet as long as he continues to sell the scam.
From the closing of Trump’s address to Congress this week:
Read the proceeding sales pitch for America through this lens from Zakaria:
Trump is going to give you MAGAts everything you desire and it’s going to easy and without cost, because if we insist the world will stop taking advantage of us and just accept our dominance as willed by God.
It’s the guy selling magic elixir out of the back of a wagon only at a global scale.
@gVOR10: @Hal_10000: @Chip Daniels: @Michael Reynolds: As I’ve been writing for a while now, while I absolutely don’t think Trump is an ideologue or a policy wonk, I don’t think he’s either completely rudderless or intentionally a stooge for Putin. Rather, I think he has some pretty strong instincts that drive his actions.
Like @Steven L. Taylor, I’m inclined to look for patterns to see what the end game is. And all signs to me point to a man who is transactional and who utterly rejects the principles that pretty much every U.S. administration going back to Woodrow Wilson had for managing foreign policy. As Klein rightly notes, they were often hypocrites, rejecting the “rules” when it suited other interests. But Trump fundamentally finds the rules baffling and a mug’s game.
As distressing as the 90-minute Gish Gallup that was the non-SOTU the other evening was, it struck me as quite deliberate public communication to his audience rather than the rantings of a madman. We simply aren’t the target audience.
@James Joyner:
FTFY
Instincts (in animals) generally lead to positive outcomes. However, Trump’s tantrums (while indeed sharing a common theme) are actively fucking over the US.
Calling Trump’s nonsense “instincts” is already giving it too much credit.
@Hal_10000: @just nutha:
This … This is pretty much where I’ve landed.
Historically I believe that he’s trying to take us back to where America was before Woodrow Wilson yanked us into World War I and into the beginnings of the modern era of ‘foreign entanglements.’
Not coincidentally, Wilson was a president who, contrary to his ‘progressive’ reputation, rolled back whatever civil rights progress had been made since pulling the plug on Reconstruction. Trump is, in his warped way, with federal employment and DEI, is rolling back progress too. But that’s another discussion.
A problem with “America First” is that various other countries have been inclined to defer to US preferences because the US would also, consider their interests, and often try to accommodate them.
If the US ceases to do so, it may well find those partners also tending to be less accommodating.
And in some cases, inclined to actively work against the US.
The first rule of international relations is that, unless necessity obliges otherwise, one returns a favour for a favour, and an injury for an injury.
I think everyone, including Klein and Zakaria, may be missing the forest for the trees here.
It isn’t America First.
It isn’t even America only, though that’s closer to the truth—as hinted by the discussion of the zero value of non-American lives (except Israelis, maybe wealthy foreigners willing to be supplicate).
It is Trump supporters and the ‘right’ kind of Christians only. Not first. Only.
Anyone who isn’t that? Not just zero value. Negative value. Not just not real American or even un-American, anti-American.
Enemies.
Vermin.
The slogan, jingoistic and simplistic as it would be if it were accurate, is a lie.
Me. You. Everyone in this thread: Vermin.
To understand what MAGA people mean by “America First”, you need to understand their priors. Namely:
This was clumsily worded – the “average respondent” really means the average response.
If a MAGA member believes that even 10% of their taxes are going to other countries, it’s no wonder they are angry about it. If they believe it’s a quarter or more, it’s no surprise they’re furious. Especially when they eagerly swallow every malicious bit of disinformation they read on social media (bet you didn’t know Zelenskyy has luxury homes in London and Italy, as well as several in Ukraine, plus million-dollar cars, a big yacht and all sorts of other expensive assets, all bought with the billions he’s skimmed off the money America sent).
@Kurtz:
Which may work in the US, where MAGA is currently ascendant.
It’s not likely to work so well with intentional partners who have the capacity for independent agency.
Just seem your Friday forum comment re, Canada.
Thus far the UK government is keeping determinedly quiet on this topic.
Because they continue to hope that Trump can be cozened.
Or if not, we can at least play for time.
But if Trump does actually attempt to annex parts of Canada, public opinion will compel the British government to a full breach with the US.
@James Joyner:
Trump’s instincts so far are, Tariffs on, tariffs off, tariffs on, tariffs off. Threaten Putin, declare Putin the winner. That’s neither policy nor is it relevant instinct.
I’ve always said Trump is a great white shark, dumb AF but with excellent predatory instincts. But he’s a small time grifter at heart, his instincts don’t work on the international stage. He’s out of his depth. So now he flails, searching randomly for some way to sound tough and in charge.
He’s managed to be humiliated by Canada. Canada FFS, it’s like being beaten up by your little sister.
@Michael Reynolds:
Trying to act like a mixup of a mob-wannabe and a WWF kayfabe barker might have mileage in assembling a US voter base of grievance ridden fools, evangelicals, neo-nationalists, tech-bros, conpiraloons, and “cut my taxes” types.
The same play in the international arena is not likely to work out so well.
Europeans, and others, have a deep collective historical experience of such, and are liable to react accordingly.
While the cynical autocratic states are just going to chuckle to themselves and calculate how to mug the moron.
@James Joyner:
The one thread that unites his politics and his business is a sort of quasi-Marxist worldview. He think the world is zero sum. Either you’re getting hosed or you’re hosing someone. The idea of mutual benefit completely eludes him. IIRC, his book is explicit on this. He doesn’t see business deals as being mutually beneficial but a way to hose someone. So he takes millions out of a business and it goes bankrupt and he thinks he did well. Nevermind that the well-run business would have made him tens of millions.
Trade and alliances are the same way. He doesn’t see them as something that benefits both countries. Either you’re being hosed or you’re hosing the other country. With alliances, you’re pulling out protection money. With trade, you’re ripping them off. Mutual benefit eludes him. At at 78, it always will.
@Hal_10000: Trump wouldn’t be so dangerous were it not for the hordes enthusiastically following him. So do they have the same mentality, or are they hoping to grab power and wealth on his coattails?
@Hal_10000: Summed it up perfectly. Another example is military bases: he doesn’t consider that stationing troops in foreign bases is a benefit to America, despite them being American initiatives in most cases. He regards them as onerous impositions; other countries getting “free protection” at America’s expense.