In the age of Trump, our nation lives under the banner of America First. In domestic policy, this means securing our border, deporting those who are in the country illegally, and reestablishing law and order in our cities, among other key goals. But what does America First mean for the world beyond America? To answer that question, we must look back centuries.
The onset of the American Revolution was not purely a local affair. The war eventually became a global conflagration, with battlefields stretching from the Caribbean to India. But the enduring contest was ideological, not geopolitical. Non-American lovers of liberty—Paine, Pulaski, Lafayette, Von Steuben, and Salomon for starters—from an array of nations arrived to fight for the American cause, and sometimes became Americans themselves. They understood that fighting for freedom here meant rekindling hope for their own countries.
A century later, the American Civil War stirred similar passions. It was rooted in a kindred understanding that what happened in America would have consequences that went well beyond our nation. “For a time,” observed George Bancroft in 1866, “the war was thought to be confined to our own domestic affairs, but it was soon seen that it involved the destinies of mankind.” And so it did: as Lincoln observed at Gettysburg, the war’s fundamental question was the endurance of republican government in principle, and in this the peoples of Europe especially felt a great stake. Again, the liberty-loving patriots of Europe came to the New World, including veterans of its 1848 liberal revolutions who wore Union blue. Even Giuseppe Garibaldi, hero of Italian unification, nearly took a general’s commission with federal forces.
A century after that, it was the American model that inspired the remaking of European governance, and the world order at large—a framework that endures to this day. To borrow James Thomas Flexner’s description of George Washington as “the indispensable man,” America has been the indispensable nation for securing liberty—and remains the beacon of free government for nations around the world. It was true in the ages of Washington and Lincoln, and it remains true in the age of Trump. The U.S.’s role is inescapable, and humanity at large has been blessed by the choices we have made in our own interests.
This raises the question as to what the age of Trump has to say to the friends of liberty abroad. The misapprehension that the answer is “nothing” is widespread—and indeed the president’s own unpopularity in places like Canada and Europe contributes to the supposition that America has turned inward and has less to say to other nations. But this accepts the narrative propagated by regime media organs that are hostile to their own people and populist figures like the American president.
A proper understanding of America First reveals neither novelty nor rupture but a severing from the previous regime, which was itself unmoored from the American Founding. With that Founding as our point of reference, we can see the era of America First as both deeply rooted and essentially restorative.
It is a reorientation toward the actual purpose of governance, not just in the Jeffersonian sense (the defense of rights) but also in the Aristotelian one (the preservation of the nation). The basket of major Trump policies is anchored firmly in our history, from High-Federalist views on citizenship and immigration to Jacksonian views on national defense and Hamiltonian views on trade and industry. The extent to which this seems radical is the extent to which radicals hijacked the American experiment in generations past. We nearly lost the republic of our Founders, but now it’s coming back.
We call this America First. But it is not for America only.
What skeptics, both foreign and domestic, entirely miss is that the fundamentals of America First are good governance and the proper ordering of the nation and society. A nation is supposed to put its citizens first, secure liberties, and privilege its own over the alien. The president and the vice president well understand these principles. While President Trump rewards foreign regimes that conform to these principles, Vice President Vance memorably reprimands the sclerotic regimes of Europe that do not.
This is not simple ideological affinity at work, an ersatz neoconservative pretension that what’s good for America is always good for everyone else. It rather understands the reality that nations and regimes that operate along these lines are good for America—and nations that do not are inimical to our interests.
We see the baleful examples of the latter in the United Kingdom, in which an illiberal regime cruelly represses its own citizens’ natural rights; in Canada, in which the medical murder of the sick and the elderly has become a hideous prop of the state; and in France and Germany, in which reckless mass migration threatens both violence and cultural extinction in equal measure.
Americans care because of plain moral sentiment to be sure—but we also care because of legitimate self-interest. These nations have become, to varying degrees, mere consumers rather than partners. In their ideological adventurism outside the bounds of the Western tradition, they have let leftism and secularism flourish, leaving traditional conservative Christians virtually homeless in politics. In these conditions, alliances become increasingly difficult and relations become fraught. It is exceptionally hard for Americans to defend a Canadian ruling class that indulges in moral panics that result in the burning of Catholic churches, or a British regime that descends into unhindered extermination of the unborn coupled with enthusiastic promotion of Islamism.
We must recognize that nations have concentric circles of relationships that are defined not merely by treaties or economic calculus but by deep cultural and historical affinity. This has been deliberately suppressed by 20th-century globalists whose delusions about universal convergence have been plainly exposed.
It is no longer tenable to believe as they did (and as Britain has all too eagerly indulged) that China and others like it will adopt Western values. Instead, the project of America First must be focused on building relationships with nations that share our civilizational inheritance. The European continent remains our ancestral home in spirit and thought. The U.S. must not forget that our transatlantic bond is grounded in a shared philosophical inheritance, Christian roots, and ordered liberty.
The good news is there are movements—some nascent, some robust—within these nations that wish to do for themselves what America First has done for us. We should wish them well—and where possible, we should help them while always keeping our own interest at the forefront.
Ultimately each citizenry chooses its own fate. What we can do, however, is share both principles and policies that can help them choose a better path. We have much to contribute. For example, collaborative work between our respective movements could begin almost immediately on immigration, security, artificial intelligence, the sanctity of life, and more. Furthermore, we have a lot to learn from those foreign partners. In Europe, we see the late stages of progressive manias, from mass migration to the curtailment of free speech. The brave few defying the tide have much experience and insight to share.
In this coalition, each member nation would see qualities among the others it would adopt and recognize that doing so would be of benefit. This has rich precedent in American and European history. Reviving the “republic of letters”—a community of European and American intellectuals in the 17th and 18th centuries who strove for liberty—can help restore conservatism and tradition if allowed to flourish. Perhaps this is America First’s great gift to Western civilization.
What does America First have to say to the world beyond America? In a word: return. Your futures depend upon it, and so does ours. It’s time to be great again. Your ancestors saw America as the beacon of ordered liberty for all mankind. They were right then, and they are still today.
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Author: Kristen Ziccarelli and Joshua Treviño
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