America First An Idea That Actually

“America First”: sounds harmless enough, right? Who, after all, would argue “America Second?” Moreover, every country pursues its own interests, which includes placing high priority on taking care of its own citizens. But actually, it’s a pernicious notion that works against America’s strengths and makes life more unpredictable and dangerous for Americans.

It is important to remember that we live in an interdependent world. Goods, services, and supply chains straddle the globe. Regardless of any efforts a country might make to grow enough food to feed itself or provide at home all the raw materials or manufactured goods it needs, it is either impossible or prohibitively expensive to make this happen. This is not a recent development, one that can be ascribed to any one political party or Administration. It describes, in the most basic terms, the world’s condition ever since World War II, from which the United States was the only country to emerge with an intact economy, as everyone else suffered from various states of collapse. Looking around at that shattered world, the U.S. led in establishing various arrangements among countries – the United Nations, various alliances, and cooperative institutions to manage specific fields, such as energy flows, improvements in global health, and international air transport – to reduce the risk of war and create greater prosperity, including America’s. It is just not true that those international institutions, as is frequently heard now, are somehow no longer necessary to our and others’ well-being.

“America First” is not a new idea. It was a popular notion in the 1930’s. Many adherents wanted to ignore the outside world, or saw that world only as a place of entangling risks, of no benefit to the United States. Those people ignored the dangers posed by increasingly aggressive and powerful dictatorships. Others even wished to emulate those dictatorships, imagining them capable of better ordering their societies through racist and anti-democratic doctrines. Nazi admirers, in imitation uniforms, marched openly. A Nazi replica summer camp for boys and girls, who paraded on the camp’s Adolf Hitler Strasse, even existed for several years on Long Island, New York. Those delusions fizzled in late 1941, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States.

The current version of “America First” does not seek to ignore the outside world but to shape it in nefarious ways. The idea is to create spheres of influence, in which the allotted “top dog,” – i.e, the state that possesses or can grab primary influence in an area of the globe, such as the U.S, Russia, or China – is left unmolested by anyone else to run things in the given region as it pleases. This includes the right to trample on the rights of neighboring countries, ignore other accepted principles of decent behavior, pay no attention to human rights, and only care about one’s own prosperity. Operating on unfounded or imaginary assumptions that the U.S. has been treated unfairly, this version of “America First” is not interested in making the effort to talk to other countries as equals about existing issues but instead prefers to threaten them into submission. Not only does this scheme contradict traditional American values of justice and fair play – regarding as worthless any trust that has been built up over many years with friends and adversaries alike — it ignores, as the 1930’s “America Firsters” did, risks to America originating elsewhere in the world. Subjects of those threats might comply as demanded in the short term, but they will remember the punishment they took and be far less willing to accede to any subsequent requests for help in our turn. Adversaries, seeing a free hand to fill vacuums left by American withdrawal from previous areas of strength, will be delighted to step in, often to the U.S.’ disadvantage.

Some people interpret “America First” as a principle that we should primarily look after our own: However much we might sympathize with misery and tragedy elsewhere in the world, Americans’ needs should come first. Of course, protecting the welfare of people in this country is one of the primary purposes of our governments, Federal and state. (One can raise sharp and legitimate questions about how well this is being done, as people lose their jobs, federal benefit programs are slashed, and the economy worsens.) But in terms of “America First,” this general commandment misses an important point: programs to alleviate misery around the world directly benefit Americans, too. Such programs rely heavily on purchasing goods and services in the United States: Midwestern wheat farmers, for example, make significant sales to contribute to “Food for Peace” distribution to poor countries. Efforts abroad to combat disease greatly increase the chance of containing outbreaks of dangerous illness, preventing it from spreading to the U.S. And interceding elsewhere on behalf of those whose human rights have been violated strengthens our moral resolve to oppose any such abuses at home whenever they occur.

Supporting democratic processes in other countries keeps our own moral senses sharp as we conduct our affairs at home. If we wish to protect our own democratic freedoms, it is smart to understand how they can be lost abroad.

Tom Wolfson is a former senior U.S. diplomat who has lived and worked in six foreign countries, occasionally multiple times. His work representing the U.S. has included assignments at the United Nations, in the U.S. Congress, and with an international democracy-building organization. He holds degrees from Dartmouth College, the University of Chicago, and the National War College.