Assessing ‘America First’

Published October 9, 2020 3:00am ET



When Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, he upended the Republican Party’s status quo by campaigning against the Iraq War and the hawkish foreign policy that had defined the GOP for decades. His slogan was “America First,” and his speeches were loaded with Jacksonian rhetoric, though flexible on the details.

Trump did point to some specifics on the campaign trail, such as ending the 19-year-and-counting war in Afghanistan and forcing our “free-riding” allies in NATO to pay their “fair share” of defense spending. But his overall “America First” message was defined by generality. And the president’s coalition of advisers has at times featured foreign policy voices as disparate as the ultra-hawkish John Bolton and the anti-interventionist stalwart Sen. Rand Paul.

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