The death of 'America First'

In 2019, John Bolton described how he defined “America First."

"The idea that actually protecting America was the highest priority,” he said. A fair, though vague, point by one of the most hawkish men in Washington at the time.

Bolton continued, “In 2008, John McCain, the Republican nominee, had as his slogan ‘Country First.’ Now who in this room wants to guess what country he was talking about?”

The United States obviously. But what was Bolton really trying to say? With a straight face, he added, “So explain to me what's so different, at least at the bumper sticker rhetorical level, between the McCain and Trump approaches.”

Oh boy.

A major reason John McCain lost the 2008 presidential election is because Americans wanted a change in the disastrous interventionist foreign policy of the Bush administration, and the Arizona senator, who had been in Washington since 1982, was only promising more of the same. In 2016, Donald Trump was promising a less interventionist foreign policy, something President Barack Obama had also pledged, but ultimately failed to deliver as he escalated a major killer drone war through the aughts.

McCain was clearly the pro-war, neoconservative candidate. Obama ran as an antiwar candidate. So did Trump.

The Trump phenomenon was supposed to be a changing of the old Republican guard, however imperfectly, for a new foreign policy ethos that was closer to Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul than Bill Kristol and David Frum. That’s exactly why so many neoconservatives and War Party Republicans got behind the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

So seven years ago, when Bolton tried to redefine Donald Trump’s America First brand as a continuation of McCain-Bush interventionism, I laughed. Did Bolton really think the conservative base was this gullible?

I’m not laughing anymore.

Hawks, including old neoconservatives, now present pro-war interventionism as America First all the time.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the neoconservatives’ preferred presidential candidate in 2016 to continue the Bush-Cheney foreign policy legacy in the same way McCain once tried to do, is perhaps more effective at rebranding America First than any other Trump official. He says America First means U.S.-led regime change in Venezuela, a potential American takeover of Greenland, and threatening a new war with Iran. Regime change in Cuba is also on the table.

Vice President JD Vance says that America First could mean negotiations with Iran, but could also mean bombing Iran. “We’re running out of time,” he also warns, echoing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s three-decade long claim — that Iran is on the cusp of developing a nuclear weapon.

Last month Vance framed ousting Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro as being an American national interest, “In our neighborhood, the United States calls the shots. That's the way it's always been. That's the way it is again under the President's leadership.”

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said seven months before the U.S. struck Venezuela, “to put America first, we will put the Americas first. We will do this by confronting shared threats across this hemisphere, serious threats that require a serious response.”

In June, Hegseth announced that the U.S. had “obliterated” and "devastated the Iranian nuclear program.”

"What you're watching in real time is peace through strength and America first," Hegseth said just before those June attacks.This week he said the Pentagon was “more than prepared” to bomb Iran again should it refuse negotiations over its nuclear program, something Americans were told was already destroyed last summer.

Frustrated that his base wasn’t entirely in lockstep behind those Iran strikes, Trump told Michael Scherer at The Atlantic that he decides what America First is. “Well, considering that I’m the one that developed ‘America First,’ and considering that the term wasn’t used until I came along, I think I’m the one that decides that.”

No one is saying that Trump always stuck to a restraint America First script. He clearly didn’t and doesn’t. His first term was littered with interventionist decisions that often contradicted his rhetoric.

But he is further away from those days than ever before, aided by supporters and surrogates who are happy to appropriate that script.

Take steadfast neoconservative Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who has been allowed to hijack MAGA with zeal, even going so far as to say Trump’s mission is to “Make Iran Great Again” by the U.S. waging war on it. The president has deployed the same motto without irony.

Pro-war conservative personalities in Trump’s base, like Mark Levin, have also taken these cues.

Is “America First” so empty that it is essentially unusable, if not dead?

Those who have embraced the anti-interventionist spirit of America First, like populist former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, and libertarians like Congressman Thomas Massie and Senator Rand Paul, are now loathed by Trump in exchange for golf rounds with Sen. Graham. Trump just called Massie a “moron” at the National Prayer Breakfast.

Libertarian historian Brion McClanahan wrote approvingly of Trump after he delivered a major foreign policy campaign speech in April 2016: “

Trump’s traditional American foreign policy is a refreshing departure from the bomb-away mentality of the modern Republican Party. Certainly Ron Paul offered a similar reprieve from American adventurism during his failed presidential bids, and Pat Buchanan made nonintervention a core theme of his run for the presidency in the 1980s and 1990s, but Trump has been able to rally more people around his candidacy and thus has made nonintervention sexy again.”

“Perhaps the endless wars and pointless American bloodletting will finally stop under a Trump administration,” McClanahan added. “In forty years, historians might call this period ‘America First.’ Or maybe it will be the Age of Trump.”

Historians might call this time America First. Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham might call it that, too. But so much of it won’t be. Not anymore. The people in charge have ruined that.