Michael Hirsch writes for Politico: For all the lamentation about the level of rhetoric in this Trumped-up election year, the race between Donald Trump and all-but-certain Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton is already shaping up to be a debate over America’s global role of the kind we haven’t had for decades, perhaps since the last “America First” movement of the late ‘30s. And it is a debate that some foreign-policy experts suggest is long overdue, even if it tends to distress U.S. allies around the world. (“The unthinkable has come to pass,” Germany’s Die Welt wrote after Trump became the presumptive GOP nominee this week.)
It is also a debate that, were they still around to witness it, a majority of past U.S. presidents going back to George Washington would probably welcome—and most of them, believe it or not, might well take Trump’s side.
In his big foreign-policy rollout speech last week, Trump declared it was time “to shake the rust off of America’s foreign policy” and drop American pretensions about remaking the world in our image any longer. Or as he put it, in an obvious reference to the failed invasion of Iraq and intervention in Libya, America should abandon the “dangerous idea that we could make Western democracies out of countries that had no experience or interest in becoming a Western democracy.” Brazenly calling his agenda “America First”—never mind that was the name of the notorious pre-World War II isolationist movement—he also directly challenged the 70 years of bipartisan consensus over the post-World War II global order that America created. He suggested that the world needs America far more than the other way around, and he effectively warned U.S. allies that without a new global deal that demands a kind of tribute paid to Washington for its defense umbrella—he wants them to “prove” they are our friends, he says—he’d walk away from the world’s trade table, so to speak.
“We will no longer surrender this country or its people to the false song of globalism,” Trump said. “The nation-state remains the true foundation for happiness and harmony. I am skeptical of international unions that tie us up and bring America down.”
Predictably, Trump’s views have outraged commentators who lament the allusions to the prewar, anti-Semitism-laced isolationism of Charles Lindbergh and other members of the America First movement. His statements have also invited mockery from allies of Clinton, who as a pro-interventionist former secretary of state sees Trump’s turn away from the world as a naive and dangerous anachronism. Madeleine Albright, a mentor to Hillary on foreign policy and, as a refugee from Nazi Germany, a lifelong and passionate advocate of the idea that America is the “indispensable nation” in overseeing global order, accused Trump of historical illiteracy. “Maybe he never read history or he doesn’t understand it,” former Secretary of State Albright told reporters in a conference call organized by Clinton’s campaign…
So Trump may be an “id with hair,” as Hillary Clinton calls him, but at least when it comes to his foreign policy views, he’s an all-American id. His “America First” campaign theme has far deeper roots in the history of this country than most pundits are acknowledging. Indeed, Trump shouldn’t be dismissed as a mere apostate in his view of America’s role in the world; against the backdrop of all 239 years of America’s existence, he represents more a reversion to the American norm. Trump, in condemning one of the worst instances of American overreach in U.S. history, the Iraq invasion, declared in his speech: “The world must know we do not go abroad in search of enemies.” The line was an allusion to the famous injunction of John Quincy Adams in 1821 that America “does not go in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” Adams went on to warn, somewhat presciently, America should know that “once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.”
