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.
