America First

Based on Wikipedia: America First

Two words. That's all it takes to ignite a century of American political controversy.

"America First" sounds like the most obvious political statement imaginable. Of course a country's leaders should prioritize their own nation's interests. What else would they do? Put America third? America eventually, if we get around to it?

But those two simple words carry enough historical baggage to fill a transcontinental freight train. They've been spoken by presidents and Klansmen, isolationists and interventionists, newspaper tycoons and reality television stars. The phrase has meant different things at different times, and understanding those meanings reveals something deeper about America's perpetual struggle to define its place in the world.

The Birth of a Slogan

The phrase first emerged from the nativist American Party in the 1850s, a political movement that feared Catholic immigrants were secretly loyal to the Pope rather than the Constitution. These "Know-Nothings," as they were called because members claimed to "know nothing" about their secretive organization, wanted to preserve America for native-born Protestants. From its very beginning, "America First" was entangled with questions about who counted as a real American.

The slogan gained national prominence during a moment of genuine existential crisis. In 1914, a Serbian nationalist assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, setting off a chain reaction that plunged Europe into the bloodiest war humanity had ever seen. Trenches stretched from the English Channel to Switzerland. Machine guns and poison gas turned battlefields into slaughterhouses. Young men died by the millions for a few hundred yards of muddy ground.

President Woodrow Wilson watched the carnage from across the Atlantic and decided America wanted no part of it. In his 1916 reelection campaign, he ran on a promise of neutrality, using "America First" to articulate why American boys shouldn't die in Europe's ancient quarrels. He won. Then, five months later, German submarines started sinking American ships, and Wilson asked Congress to declare war anyway.

The phrase survived the contradiction.

The Roaring Twenties and Its Dark Undercurrents

After the war ended in 1918, Americans wanted nothing more than to forget about Europe and its endless conflicts. Senator Warren G. Harding of Ohio captured this mood perfectly in his 1920 presidential campaign, promising a "return to normalcy" and adopting "America First" as a guiding principle. He won in a landslide.

But the 1920s version of America First had a sinister twin. The Ku Klux Klan, which had been founded after the Civil War and then faded into obscurity, roared back to life with membership reaching somewhere between four and six million people. This wasn't a fringe movement. Klan members won governorships, controlled state legislatures, and marched forty thousand strong down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C.

The Klan's "America First" meant something very specific: America for white Protestants, and nobody else.

This sentiment found its legislative expression in the Immigration Act of 1924, one of the most restrictive immigration laws in American history. Its chief sponsor, Representative Albert Johnson of Washington State, enjoyed strong support from the Klan. The law created a quota system designed to freeze America's ethnic composition in place. It virtually banned immigration from Asia and sharply limited arrivals from Southern and Eastern Europe, which meant fewer Italians, Greeks, Poles, and Jews. The law remained in effect for over forty years.

The Committee That Nearly Changed History

If "America First" had a golden age, it came in the years between the world wars, and its headquarters was in a Chicago office building.

The America First Committee formed in September 1940, fifteen months before Pearl Harbor, with a simple mission: keep the United States out of the European war that had erupted when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. The committee's membership eventually reached eight hundred thousand paying members organized into four hundred and fifty chapters across the country. It was the largest antiwar movement in American history.

The committee attracted an eclectic coalition. There were sincere pacifists who believed war was always wrong. There were strategic thinkers who argued that two oceans protected America better than any army. There were businessmen worried about the economic costs of military mobilization. There were progressives who thought President Franklin Roosevelt was using foreign threats to expand executive power.

And there were some people with darker motivations.

The committee's most famous spokesman was Charles Lindbergh, the aviator who had become the most celebrated American of his generation after flying solo across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927. Lindbergh had visited Nazi Germany multiple times, accepted a medal from Hermann Göring, and seemed genuinely impressed by the Third Reich's accomplishments. In a September 1941 speech, he blamed "the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt administration" for pushing America toward war. The anti-Semitism was impossible to ignore.

Other America First supporters included Elizabeth Dilling, who wrote a book claiming that President Roosevelt was a secret Communist, and Gerald L.K. Smith, a minister who would later become one of America's most notorious anti-Semites. The movement attracted genuine isolationists and hateful bigots in roughly equal measure, and critics argued the bigots were running the show.

Dr. Seuss, the children's book author, was then working as a political cartoonist, and he relentlessly mocked the America First Committee in drawings that portrayed its members as Nazi sympathizers. In one cartoon, he drew a mother reading "Adolf the Wolf" to her children, with the caption: "and the Wolf chewed up the children and spit out their bones... But those were Foreign Children and it really didn't matter."

The committee dissolved three days after Pearl Harbor. The question of intervention had been settled by Japanese bombs.

Decades in the Wilderness

For the next fifty years, "America First" was essentially unusable in mainstream politics. The phrase was too closely associated with having been wrong about the most important foreign policy question of the twentieth century. America had tried to stay out of World War II, and then had to fight it anyway after being attacked. The lesson seemed clear: isolationism was naive, dangerous, and ultimately impossible.

The Cold War reinforced this consensus. The United States built a global network of alliances, military bases, and trade agreements designed to contain Soviet communism. American troops remained stationed in Germany, Japan, and Korea for decades. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, better known as NATO, committed America to defending Western Europe. The United Nations, headquartered in New York City, gave America a permanent seat on the Security Council. Internationalism became the bipartisan default.

Pat Buchanan was one of the few politicians willing to challenge this consensus. A former speechwriter for Presidents Nixon and Reagan, Buchanan ran for president three times, in 1992, 1996, and 2000. He explicitly praised the America First Committee's "monumental achievements" and called for withdrawing from international institutions, restricting immigration, and protecting American manufacturing with tariffs. The political establishment treated him as a curiosity at best, a dangerous reactionary at worst.

Buchanan never came close to winning the presidency. But he was building a template that someone else would eventually use.

The Return

Donald Trump had actually run against Buchanan in the 2000 Reform Party presidential primaries, briefly seeking the nomination of Ross Perot's third party before dropping out. Fifteen years later, Trump revived Buchanan's slogan without crediting him.

The resurrection began quietly. In November 2015, Trump published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal laying out his foreign policy vision. His campaign manager promoted him as "a nationalist who seeks to put America first." Sarah Palin and Chris Christie used the phrase when endorsing him. By March 2016, during an interview with The New York Times, Trump had fully adopted the slogan as his own.

"America First will be the major and overriding theme of my administration," he promised.

Critics immediately pointed to the phrase's troubling history. The Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish civil rights organization founded to combat anti-Semitism, publicly urged Trump to stop using the slogan. Scholars reminded audiences of Charles Lindbergh's anti-Semitic speeches. Commentators asked whether Trump was deliberately evoking the isolationist movement or simply ignorant of its history.

Trump dismissed the criticism. "I'm not isolationist," he said. "But I am America First."

The Doctrine in Practice

After winning the 2016 election, Trump made America First the official framework for his foreign policy. His inaugural address emphasized the theme. A poll released five days later found that sixty-five percent of Americans responded positively to the message, though only thirty-nine percent rated the speech as good overall.

What did America First mean in practice? Primarily, it meant skepticism toward the international architecture that previous administrations had built and maintained.

Trump withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement that would have linked the United States with eleven other Pacific Rim nations. He renegotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement, which had governed trade between the United States, Canada, and Mexico since 1994. He pulled out of the Paris Climate Accords, in which nearly every nation on Earth had pledged to reduce carbon emissions. He abandoned the Iran nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which had been negotiated by the Obama administration to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

He repeatedly questioned the value of NATO, suggesting that European allies were freeloading on American military protection. He derided the European Union as a vehicle for German economic dominance. He threatened to reduce funding for the United Nations.

The 2018 federal budget proposal carried both "Make America Great Again" and "America First" in its title, with the latter phrase attached to increased military spending and cuts to foreign aid. The 2017 National Security Strategy called itself "an America First National Security Strategy" and promised "principled realism that is guided by outcomes, not ideology."

The Critics

Not everyone agreed that Trump's version of America First was actually non-interventionist. Daniel Larison, a columnist for The American Conservative, a magazine generally sympathetic to restraining American military power, argued that Trump wasn't truly against foreign wars. He was just against foreign wars that didn't produce tangible benefits for the United States.

"Trump was quick to denounce previous wars as disasters," Larison wrote, "but his complaint about these wars was that the U.S. wasn't 'getting' anything tangible from them. He didn't see anything wrong in attacking other countries, but lamented that the U.S. didn't 'take' their resources."

Trump never called for ending the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq, Larison noted. He talked about "winning" them.

Other critics worried about the broader implications. If America retreated from international institutions, who would fill the vacuum? China and Russia seemed like obvious candidates. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned that focusing solely on the Western Hemisphere might embolden adversaries abroad. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who had served in Trump's own cabinet, agreed that America needed to maintain its global influence.

The New Yorker magazine summarized the critique with a pointed variation on the slogan: "America Alone."

Cracks in the Coalition

By 2025, during Trump's second presidency, fissures had begun appearing within the America First movement itself. The fault line ran through an unexpected place: Israel.

American conservatives had generally been strong supporters of Israel for decades. But some voices in the America First coalition argued that unconditional support for Israel contradicted the doctrine's core principles. If America First meant staying out of foreign conflicts, why was the United States so deeply entangled in Middle Eastern disputes?

Steve Bannon, Trump's former chief strategist, and Tucker Carlson, the conservative media personality, criticized Trump's support for United States strikes on Iranian nuclear sites. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia advocated for what she called an "America only" approach and opposed unconditional support for Israel. Carlson went further, characterizing right-wing support for Israel as "Israel First."

Trump responded with characteristic confidence. "Considering that I'm the one that developed 'America First,'" he said, "and considering that the term wasn't used until I came along, I think I'm the one that decides that."

The historical record, of course, disagreed.

The Strange Irony

There's something deeply ironic about "America First" as a political philosophy. The phrase emerged from movements that wanted America to withdraw from the world, to focus on domestic concerns, to let other nations handle their own problems. But the United States has never been able to maintain that posture for long.

Woodrow Wilson campaigned on neutrality and then led America into World War I. The America First Committee disbanded after Pearl Harbor forced American entry into World War II. The Cold War made isolation impossible for forty-five years. Even Trump, who campaigned on ending foreign entanglements, continued military operations across the globe.

America is too big, too rich, and too interconnected to stay out of the world's affairs. Its economy depends on global trade. Its security depends on alliances. Its technology companies operate in every country on Earth. American culture, from Hollywood movies to Silicon Valley apps, shapes daily life on every continent.

Perhaps this is why "America First" keeps returning despite its troubled history. It expresses a genuine longing, a fantasy of simplicity in a complicated world. If only America could just worry about America. If only the oceans were still wide enough to provide protection. If only other nations would solve their own problems.

But the oceans have shrunk. Missiles cross continents in minutes. Viruses spread across the globe in weeks. Supply chains stretch around the planet. What happens in Wuhan affects Wisconsin. What happens in Ukraine affects energy prices in Ohio.

America First assumes that America can separate itself from the rest of humanity. The twenty-first century keeps proving that it cannot.

The Satirists' Response

Shortly after Trump's inauguration in January 2017, a Dutch comedian named Arjen Lubach created a video that perfectly captured international bewilderment at the America First doctrine. The video featured a narrator mimicking Trump's speaking style, offering a comedic introduction to the Netherlands while accepting Trump's premise that America would come first.

"We totally understand it's going to be America first," the narrator concluded, "but can we just say: The Netherlands second?"

The video went viral, and television programs across Europe and around the world created their own versions, each pleading for their country to be placed second in Trump's affections. Germany second. Switzerland second. Denmark second. Australia second.

The joke captured something true. In a globalized world, America's choices affect everyone. When America puts itself first, every other nation has to figure out where that leaves them.

What the Phrase Reveals

Perhaps the most useful way to understand "America First" is not as a coherent policy doctrine but as a mood, a feeling, a response to the anxieties of globalization. It expresses the frustration of workers who watched their factories close and their jobs move overseas. It channels the resentment of communities that feel forgotten by coastal elites. It articulates the suspicion that international institutions serve someone else's interests.

These feelings are real, even if the proposed solutions are debatable. The question is not whether American leaders should care about American interests. Of course they should. The question is how to define those interests in a world where everything is connected to everything else.

Is it in America's interest to maintain alliances that require spending money on foreign defense? The internationalists say yes: those alliances prevent larger wars. The America Firsters say no: that money could be spent at home.

Is it in America's interest to participate in international institutions that constrain American sovereignty? The internationalists say yes: those institutions create a rules-based order that benefits everyone. The America Firsters say no: America is strong enough to make its own rules.

Is it in America's interest to accept immigrants from around the world? The internationalists say yes: immigrants drive innovation and economic growth. The America Firsters say no: immigration changes American culture and competes with American workers.

These are genuine debates with reasonable arguments on both sides. But "America First" doesn't really engage with them. It offers a slogan instead of a strategy, a feeling instead of a policy, a destination without a map.

Two words. A century of controversy. And still, no one quite agrees on what they mean.