“America First” was always more of a campaign slogan than a strategy. But if the Trump doctrine has materialized in any coherent way, it’s a reflexive rejection of the hawkish foreign policy of the Republican Party’s recent past.
President Trump controversially attempted to pull American forces out of Syria, tolerated Russian protection of Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, and let Kim Jong Un waffle on weapon agreements. “America First” points to a less interventionist ideal.
But what it does not mean and what it has never meant is that the administration would tolerate foreign adversaries violently attacking American citizens and sovereign U.S. territory.
A straight news profile by the New York Times on Fox News’s Pete Hegseth tries to insinuate otherwise. Hegseth’s support for Trump’s order to kill Qassem Soleimani, the Times headline argues, constitutes an “exception” from his allegiance to the “America First” principle.
“Mr. Hegseth’s rallying around Mr. Trump’s order to attack General Suleimani has turned off some opponents of the ‘forever wars’ who see opportunism,” Jennifer Steinhauer writes. “Voices like Tucker Carlson, another Fox host who has become strongly antiwar, and Concerned Veterans for America, a conservative group that Mr. Hegseth once led, have remained true to their war fatigue. Not Mr. Hegseth.”
The Times’s framing is not unique, but rather a distillation of a flawed refrain echoed by Trump’s critics in the past week. They fail to understand that his Soleimani strike was the embodiment of “America First,” not an abandonment of it.
Two weekends ago, Trump’s detractors thought themselves clever when they branded the Iranian-backed assault on the American embassy in Baghdad as his “Benghazi.” They now seem surprised that Trump, unlike Obama, wasted no time in holding the plotters of this and other attacks on U.S. soil directly responsible.
Soleimani was an enemy combatant in uniform, reportedly behind violent attacks against American interests within Iraq, where U.S. troops have already been legally authorized to occupy.
Many people, myself included, have argued against Trump’s failures to acknowledge and prioritize our national interests in Syria. But in the case of Iranian aggression, there was no ambiguity for Trump’s supporters or for his more hawkish critics. For some time now, Iran has been ratcheting up attacks on American and Western interests abroad. It has attacked U.S. military and British civilian vessels at sea, and this recent attack on our U.S embassy is only the latest example. But there is a long history of this, and (for those tempted to argue that Iran poses no threat to us here) it involves plots against our homeland. Soleimani is suspected of involvement in the 2011 assassination plot against the Saudi ambassador in Washington, D.C.
Trump’s intentionally disproportionate response, in this case, makes clear that there will be a cost to such violent acts and violent schemes.
If responding to a slap with a punch can’t serve as an example of “America First,” then I don’t know what could.
