Donald Trump’s announcement that he will run for president again has brought a renewed focus on his worldview, his vision for America’s role in a world shaped by the very global institutions the U.S. created in the aftermath of World War II. Mr. Trump’s “America First” platform has the backing of a large right-wing think tank ready to push those ideas should he return to the White House.
Historically, “America First” has been associated with isolationism, an oft-misunderstood ideology that dominated domestic politics before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. On Sept. 11 of that year – just three months before the U.S. would be vaulted into war – American hero Charles Lindbergh delivered a speech in Des Moines, Iowa, attacking those he believed were trying to pull the country into a disastrous war.
“The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration,” Lindbergh said. “Behind these groups, but of lesser importance, are a number of capitalists, Anglophiles and intellectuals who believe that the future of mankind depends upon the domination of the British empire. Add to these the Communistic groups who were opposed to intervention until a few weeks ago, and I believe I have named the major war agitators in this country.”
Because of figures such as Lindbergh, the America First Committee became associated with antisemitism and Nazi sympathizing, a departure from the peace-movement vision of its idealistic student founders at Yale University. And after 1945 isolationism fell into disrepute as the U.S. emerged as a global superpower in a Cold War against Communism – but it never entirely vanished. Once the Cold War ended, Pat Buchanan ran for president in 1992 on an America First platform of tough border security, economic nationalism and suspicion of international alliances.
In this episode of History As It Happens, historian Christopher McKnight Nichols explores the history of isolationist thinking in American history, tracing continuities (and major differences) between the America First Committee of the early 1940s and Trumpist populism today.
“The first invocations of America First go back to the 1880s in the U.S.,” said Mr. McKnight Nichols, an expert on the history of the U.S. and its relationship to the rest of the world. “A key part of that is limiting immigration, and that is one of the throughlines you’ll see” connecting past and present.
Another throughline is opposition to free trade, or protectionism, said Mr. McKnight Nichols, the author of “Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of a Global Age.” In this way, Mr. Trump’s criticism of multilateral trade deals such as NAFTA also has a long lineage. In other words, there is more to notions of isolationism than opposition to military interventions alone.
Listen to Mr. McKnight Nichols discuss the origins of “America First” in this episode of History As It Happens.
