Israel’s airstrikes on Iran and US involvement shatter the illusion that America First guides President Trump’s Middle East policy. The hijacking of “America First” for hawkish goals is clear as Trump treads the same failed interventionist path in the Middle East. Beyond policy, these attempts to co-opt the legacy of America First for the sake of the status quo discard key insights once associated with the label. The America Firsters of old would be appalled at the US government’s continued entanglement with a foreign power, one that undermines liberty at home, hazards further involvement, empowers secret diplomacy, and undermines American sovereignty.
Yesteryear’s America First understood the impact of American involvement in foreign wars on our liberties, and picking sides in foreign quarrels undermined domestic tranquility. In recent days and weeks, supporters of America’s cheek-to-jowl relationship with Israel have willfully, even gleefully, transferred foreign political dynamics onto their domestic political opponents. Supporters of this conflation have gone as far as to resurrect the myth of an enemy fifth column in our midst, accusing their fellow Americans of disloyalty for opposing their preferred foreign policy. The America Firsters, once targets of such venomous behavior, would likely be appalled to see those who claim its mantle engaging in the same behavior, especially to the benefit of a foreign power.
The America Firsters of old understood the perils of incremental involvement in other people’s wars. Looking back at World War I, America Firsters understood that foreign entanglements fed on themselves, leading policymakers into the perils of sunk-cost thinking. This observation, born of two world wars and sustained through the smaller-scale entanglements of the Cold War, was once a commonly held conservative position in American foreign affairs. This once foundational insight appears lost on many who claim the mantle of America First, openly mocking concerns about further involvement in the latest Middle East crisis.
The America First movement of the interwar period recognized the pernicious nature of an empowered executive branch and secret diplomacy. On the eve of World War II, they recoiled at a Congress that willfully ceded its oversight functions and authorities to an expanded executive. Citing the machinations of the Great War, they criticized the Old World’s penchant for secret and duplicitous diplomacy. Indeed, the movement’s raison d’être was to oppose the power of an executive to make secret deals predicated upon often ambiguously defined alliances. Today, those who claim to speak for an America First foreign policy cheer at the idea that the president and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu feigned diplomacy while preparing for war.
Finally, America First understood that the United States was a distinct place with its own history, institutions, and destiny that demanded a foreign policy independent of foreign entanglements. While that embrace of particularism had a nativist and illiberal dark side, it also served as a mechanism of restraint, one that rejected the burdens of empire abroad. Today, those who have subverted the America First label now justify continued subsidy and entanglement with Israeli foreign policy, claiming that its politics align with our “civilizational values” or “shared interests.”
The idea that the United States ought to continue to write diplomatic, moral, and fiscal blank checks to a client state on the other side of the world, all the while incurring the risk of war, would seem utterly appalling to those who coined the phrase America First.
If those who claim to serve America’s interests plunge the United States into a deeper involvement in Israel’s war on Iran, they should, at the least, relinquish the label. For, despite their claims otherwise, such actions and ideologies would, in fact, put America last.