What America First Says to the World

In the age of Trump, our nation lives under the banner of America First. In domestic policy, this means securing our border, deporting those who are in the country illegally, and reestablishing law and order in our cities, among other key goals. But what does America First mean for the world beyond America? To answer that question, we must look back centuries.

The onset of the American Revolution was not purely a local affair. The war eventually became a global conflagration, with battlefields stretching from the Caribbean to India. But the enduring contest was ideological, not geopolitical. Non-American lovers of liberty—Paine, Pulaski, Lafayette, Von Steuben, and Salomon for starters—from an array of nations arrived to fight for the American cause, and sometimes became Americans themselves. They understood that fighting for freedom here meant rekindling hope for their own countries.

A century later, the American Civil War stirred similar passions. It was rooted in a kindred understanding that what happened in America would have consequences that went well beyond our nation. “For a time,” observed George Bancroft in 1866, “the war was thought to be confined to our own domestic affairs, but it was soon seen that it involved the destinies of mankind.” And so it did: as Lincoln observed at Gettysburg, the war’s fundamental question was the endurance of republican government in principle, and in this the peoples of Europe especially felt a great stake. Again, the liberty-loving patriots of Europe came to the New World, including veterans of its 1848 liberal revolutions who wore Union blue. Even Giuseppe Garibaldi, hero of Italian unification, nearly took a general’s commission with federal forces.

A century after that, it was the American model that inspired the remaking of European governance, and the world order at large—a framework that endures to this day. To borrow James Thomas Flexner’s description of George Washington as “the indispensable man,” America has been the indispensable nation for securing liberty—and remains the beacon of free government for nations around the world. It was true in the ages of Washington and Lincoln, and it remains true in the age of Trump. The U.S.’s role is inescapable, and humanity at large has been blessed by the choices we have made in our own interests.