What is an America First foreign policy?
Though President Donald Trump’s first term provided noteworthy clues, no one on his team ever articulated clear, overarching themes. The question continues to reverberate even among his supporters, pitting neo-isolationists against those who argue that a fundamental reassertion of America’s national interests requires rethinking and reworking—but not necessarily reducing—our global engagement.
Count me among the latter contingent. American foreign policy is ripe for a revolutionary overhaul.
In foreign policy, as in so many other areas, a cadre of recognized “experts” agree upon a general framework, then debate within that framework. As long as the framing is reasonably accurate, recommendations emanating from different parts of the expert debate can lead to solid results.
When the framing is—or becomes—incorrect, the entire expert class finds itself trapped, subject to assumptions so deeply internalized that a fundamental reframing is unimaginable. Experts’ debates devolve into finger-pointing exercises, claiming that the most recent disaster derives from having followed one particular school of thought, rather than from a failure of the overarching framework.
That’s where foreign policy is today. Its governing framework was derived in two parts. The first was developed after World War II. A consensus emerged around the importance of global organizations and protocols of a “liberal international order.” Because the emergent set of agreements reflected the global power structure and overriding concerns of the late 1940s reasonably well, a period of relative foreign policy success followed from Presidents Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan.
The end of the Cold War called for a refinement. Francis Fukuyama’s extraordinarily influential essay (then book) about “The End of History” posited that history’s great question—the best way to organize human societies—had been answered in favor of liberal democracy.
The neoliberal Washington consensus put the theory into operation. It provided a set of economic prescriptions to countries seeking to transform their economies—from whatever stage of development they may have reached—into advanced market economies.
Human rights and democratic governance were then expected to emerge as a matter of course. Failure to tread this path was proof of a dictatorship ripe to be overthrown; the newly liberated, long-oppressed people would then morph into Madisonians.
Those of us old enough to remember the 1990s, of course, recall that there was another theory then vying for expert acceptance. Samuel Huntington posited a coming “Clash of Civilizations,” in which different cultural traditions would fracture the globe into differing modes of organization, preferred political systems, competing economic systems, and varying trade-offs between community preservation and individual rights.
Perhaps the key difference between these theories from the perspective of the expert class was the importance they placed on traditional notions of defense and power. Under Fukuyama, the future belonged to technocrats and experts, safely ensconced in ivory towers and Washington Beltway think tanks. Under Huntington, military power would be as important as ever. Needless to say, the overwhelming expert consensus favored a future of governance by the expert class.
Because that assessment was fundamentally wrong, American foreign policy imploded. Its unraveling began during the late Bill Clinton years, most clearly in Palestinian Yasser Arafat’s rejection of independence and development in favor of a terrorist war. Because this move was ragingly inconsistent with dominant theories, the foreign policy expert class found it entirely inexplicable.
Choosing to ignore or fabricate away what their theories could not explain, different factions of this broad consensus then brought America the disastrous foreign policies of the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations.
Trump’s first term succeeded most clearly where he violated the assumptions underlying that flawed conventional wisdom (e.g., moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem or assassinating Iranian terrorist mastermind Qassem Soleimani), but his transactional approach never led to a replacement framework. Biden then moved back toward the consensus that was both flawed and dated, producing results even more calamitous than Bush and Obama had.
Trump thus returns to office inheriting a foreign policy establishment mired in an analytic framework that combines a fair reading of 1945 and a flawed reading of 1992—as the basis for decision-making in 2025.
A new America First foreign policy must do more than ignore that flawed framework. It must obliterate it, reject its underlying assumptions, and present a set far more attuned to current realities.
The bipolar and unipolar moments that characterized much of the post-World War II period have faded into history. They’re irrelevant to navigating today’s world—a far more historically common array of major and minor powers.
The U.S., China, Russia, Iran, Turkey, and Israel are all projecting power outward. Warfare has broadened beyond guns, bombs, and missiles to operate on economic and informational fronts. International organizations are overwhelmingly corrupt, contributing to more problems than they solve.
Many nongovernmental organizations and humanitarian aid organizations are even worse. Liberal democracy is in retreat everywhere, with core fundamental rights like religious freedom, free expression, and freedom of assembly facing challenges in places that had long considered them “inalienable,” “natural,” or “God-given.”
Western foreign policy intelligentsia have fallen way behind the times. They need to be swept from positions of power and influence, along with their failed frameworks and assumptions. Instead, America needs a foreign policy oriented around a few simple principles:
- Keep America first.
- Empower allies to defend their regions.
- Resolve problems, don’t manage them.
- Prioritize peace and stability over justice.
- Stop imposing culture.
- Control the border.
- Prevent monetary infiltration.
- Recognize and confront economic and information warfare.
Some of these principles require a bit more explanation than others, but all are fairly straightforward. Moreover, they all stand in stark contrast to either the dominant foreign policy framework, the call for renewed isolationism, or both:
Keep America first: The U.S. must retain and advance its edges in power-projection capability, military technology, and diplomatic clout.
Empower allies: The U.S. must identify, empower, and partner with regional allies committed to maintaining their own military prowess. Viable candidates must have geostrategic interests that overlap significantly with America’s own. Ideal candidates will also share core American values and ethical beliefs. Supporting such allies with materiel, occasional military backup, and diplomatic cover will preserve American influence while reducing dollar costs, footprint, casualties, and entanglement.
Resolve problems, don’t manage them: The U.S. must jettison its preference for crisis management and limited war in favor of problem resolution and victory. For too long, the American response to a cauldron boiling over has been to weld it shut, rather than to douse the flame.
No more! The U.S. must adopt two governing rules of war. Rule 1: Stay out at all costs. Rule 2: If Rule 1 fails, win. We must insist upon the same from our allies—and support them fully if they ever find themselves enacting Rule 2.
Prioritize peace and stability: A focus on resolution rather than management requires elevating objective peace and stability above subjective claims for justice. Peace and justice usually point in opposite directions.
Justice looks backward: It deems some grievances “legitimate” and attempts to compensate victims. Peace looks forward: It envisions a future in which former antagonists can each retreat to their own spheres and focus on development. Crisis management elevates justice. It approaches each crisis seeking to restore the status quo ante—yielding endless wars that are brutal to the locals and hellish for American military, but highly lucrative for arms dealers, diplomats, and pundits (much like the push to treat rather than cure disease).
Conflict resolution is peace-based. It enables clear winners and losers, separates populations, and redraws lines on the map. Its goal is to create a new reality motivating former combatants to work toward improving the lives of their respective people.
History has shown that population transfers across redrawn national boundaries are often critical steps toward peace and prosperity. The U.S. must drop its opposition to redrawing maps and relocating people in the aftermath of war in favor of settlements capable of stabilizing crisis-riven regions.
Stop imposing culture: The American system began as a product of 18th-century liberalism, a very specific movement derived from biblical morality, English jurisprudence, and the Westphalian peace. It grew through the assimilation of cultural inputs from various parts of the globe and the consequent Americanization of the immigrants who contributed them. Few countries can claim comparable provenance.
American exceptionalism means that most of what has worked here cannot be exported. Attempts to do so have proven catastrophic. American foreign policy must respect that shock-treatment cultural impositions typically do more harm than good.
Control the border: If “America First” means anything, it means recognizing the clear difference between citizens and noncitizens. Only citizens have a right to be in the U.S. Everyone else who seeks to enter, from anywhere in the world for any reason, is requesting a favor and entering as a privilege.
We must conduct a robust internal debate about the number of people to admit, the criteria we employ to vet them, and the resources we expend to Americanize those eager to assume the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. Anyone who fails to meet our selected criteria must be denied entry, and those who enter anyway must be arrested and deported.
Prevent monetary infiltration: Physical invasion may be the most obvious sign of an unacceptably porous border, but it’s hardly the most serious threat. Numerous foreign organizations have infiltrated our country via monetary contributions and entanglements, funding the creation of anti-American forces within our own borders.
Past administrations have been far too lax in their designation of pernicious foreign organizations. In today’s world, there are relatively few terrorist pure plays. Most Islamist, communist, anarchist, and broadly anti-American organizations combine violence and terrorism with social, religious, educational, and professional offerings. Many do so through a web of organizational affiliations, precisely to maintain a legal fig leaf.
These organizations both fund activities in the U.S. and solicit charitable donations—effectively leveraging American taxpayer dollars and American institutional resources to harm America. Many even bear the imprimatur of official international organizations and/or nongovernmental organizations.
An America First foreign policy must do a far better job of purging such organizations—and their networks of affiliates—from participation in American life.
Confront economic & information warfare: Stone Age weapons were stone. Iron Age weapons were iron. In today’s age of information, the most sophisticated weapons are informational and financial. Very few countries possess the ability to project military power far from their borders.
The desire to control, influence, and manipulate global affairs, however, is as great as ever. International programs like BRICS (an intergovernmental organization comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the United Arab Emirates) and China’s Belt and Road Initiative are potentially devastating, nonmilitary programs designed to curtail American influence and power. We must respond in kind, using a full variety of tools and weapons.
Very few members of the foreign policy establishment of the past few decades are capable of jettisoning their flawed biases to recognize—much less embrace—large parts of such an agenda. That’s particularly true for the radical shift in mindset necessary to favor conflict resolution rather than crisis management—and the consequent reassessment of redrawn borders and resettled populations.
Trump needs a team of bold new thinkers. So far, his headline foreign policy and national security nominees mostly fit the bill. The challenge will be drilling down so that this sort of America First thinking about foreign and security policy permeates the entirety of our foreign services and military leadership.
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