The 2002 National Security Strategy was one such moment. Clocking in at more than 12,000 words, only 12 of them really counted, as they articulated a dramatic new doctrine of preventive war. Preventive war is often casually conflated with preemption — striking first at an adversary that is about to attack — but it is something very different, and, as American practice, was radical and unprecedented: “America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed.” The 2002 strategy was written as window dressing for the soon-to-be-unleashed Iraq War — and it was an invitation to disaster. As I wrote at the time, the so-called Bush Doctrine “will backfire” and “transform world politics in a way that diminishes U.S. power and influence”.

The 2025 US National Security Strategy is another exception to the rule of the disposable démarche. Aside from a shared, counterproductive longing for intimate relationships with Persian Gulf oil sheiks, the two documents reflect markedly disparate dispositions. Yet the 2025 strategy will prove similarly consequential — and once again, it is a harbinger of ruin. The new missive accurately describes the United States as it now appears on the world stage: nakedly extractive, dismissive of friends, appeasing of adversaries, cozy with autocrats, profit seeking (with the ruling clan in on the action), and animated by a rancid, eugenicist-inflected, white-nationalist crusade.

As an articulation of strategy, however, it is less than coherent. The logic behind its fixation on two regions in particular, the Middle East and the Western Hemisphere, is opaque at best, and the document more generally is often inconsistent, commonly expressing contradictory notions within the same paragraph. It is, above all else, preening — a boatload of boasting buttressed by vague platitudes — although the emphasis on unchecked American unilateralism is a sustained theme.

Lurking behind all the bravado is something more disturbing. This administration’s release is reminiscent of another missive that came wrapped in an American flag: Sly and the Family Stone’s cry-for-help of an album There’s A Riot Goin’ On (1971), which was well described by one critic as “numbing” and “darkly self-referential” and by another as “an album made by a disillusioned, drug-addicted multimillionaire rock star going slowly mad in a mansion”. Unlike Riot, however, the 2025 National Security Strategy is so simplistic and puerile it is hard not to laugh at it — until you realize that it must be taken both literally and seriously.

As if written by a narcissist untutored in the most basic understanding of international relations, the document reveals a naive unawareness that international relations are recursive — actions lead to reactions, and thus understanding and anticipating those responses should inform strategy. Yet it begins with a dozen paragraphs that start with the phrase “we want” — sounding, fittingly, like a spoiled child pounding its highchair. These wants are expressed primarily via vacuous trash talk, which for the most part doesn’t much engage with actual foreign policy. There is a notable exception, the spit-take inducing “We want to maintain the United States’ unrivaled ‘soft power’ through which we exercise positive influence throughout the world that furthers our interests”, which is a more-than-curious aspiration for an administration that has seemed determined to insult and alienate its traditional allies and friends, starting with neighboring Canada, with which, until recently, the US enjoyed the extraordinary luxury of uncommonly close and warm relations.

A second set of petulant “we wants” define the administration’s “core foreign policy interests”, as well such a statement should. However, as noted, the logic behind these key choices is somewhat hard to fathom. The strategy emphasizes, and gives the lion’s share of its attention to, the importance of Latin America. It pronounces a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, although it is not clear what that actually means as practical policy, beyond the President’s fetish for welding his name onto things — even institutions declared unnecessary, such as, recently, the US Institute of Peace, which his agents had previously raided, gutted and shuttered. But the world will take note of one important, declarative passage: the plan for “a readjustment of our global military presence to address urgent threats in our Hemisphere”. Prioritizing one thing requires reduced emphasis on others.

Indeed, an American retreat to the safe harbors of the Western Hemisphere is clearly afoot. This 19th-century instinct, however, faces a number of 21st-century challenges. Even if the US could somehow command the destiny of Latin America, it is an odd place on the table for a great power to place all of its chips. As the document itself notes, “the Indo-Pacific is already the source of almost half the world’s GDP”. The European Union (about two-thirds the size of the enormous US economy), accounts for another 15%. Whereas South America weighs in with about 4%.

Moreover, and ironically, the administration’s elbow throwing in its asserted backyard is more likely to reduce rather than enhance its political influence even on what it imagines to be its home turf, a region with deeply felt and long-standing sensitivities to US aggrandizement. And to the extent that the “Trump Corollary” is motivated by anxiety about the increasing economic influence of China in the region, it is distinctly ill-suited to push back against that tide. China is an enormously important export market for all the major South American economies — Brazil, Chile and Peru each export more than twice as much to China as they do to the US. Add to this the fact that the Trump Administration sees trade in zero-sum terms (at best), has been busy haphazardly slapping tariffs on countries all over the world, and views imports with a visceral hostility, and it becomes hard to imagine South American states lining up to undermine their trading relationships with the People’s Republic.

The new US doctrine will also have pernicious consequences for the rest of the world, encouraging what can be called “the dictator’s takeaway”. By announcing unquestionable geopolitical primacy over its near abroad and declaring repeatedly that the US will never allow itself to be constrained by international norms, laws and institutions, combined with its recent willingness to use force with impunity (and even criminally) as it sees fit, it invites other powers to do the same. Resetting the standards of what is understood to be legitimate behavior will have widespread consequences — even (or perhaps especially) when undertaken by a great power that sneers at the very notion of legitimacy that is not defined by the barrel of a gun. The lesson is clear, and will not go unnoticed by militarized powers who would seek to dominate their own neighborhoods, and, just as important, by smaller players who might face intimidation. From a US perspective, local spheres of influence are to be expected — and respected.

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The thinking behind the administration’s second geopolitical priority, the Middle East, is even harder to grasp at face value, and the National Security Strategy itself struggles to strike a consistent tone in this regard. It touts America’s vast energy production, independence, and even “American energy dominance”, and notes, correctly, that US military commitments to ensure the flow of Persian Gulf oil might have made sense decades ago, but no longer do so today. Surely if there was a place to scale back US commitments in a changing geopolitical environment, this would be it. Yet instead it recites stale platitudes about (unspecified) threats by outsiders to dominate the region, and it is pleased to celebrate “President Trump’s successful revitalization of our alliances in the Gulf”, which involves the handing out of security guarantees like candy to local potentates.

This analytical knot is untied by the humbling realization that US foreign policy cannot currently be understood in terms of a state pursuing the National Interest (as realists like myself tend to imagine), but as a personalist regime motivated by private advantage. This is the most nakedly corrupt Executive Branch in American history, with policies for sale to the highest bidder, motivated to provide enrichment opportunities for the presidential family and its coterie of affiliates. Elites in the Middle East have been swift to both recognize this and provide the necessary largesse. This, along with the influence of powerful domestic constituencies (especially evangelical Christians), also likely explains why the security of Israel is defined as a “core” national security interest of the United States, despite acknowledging, with uncharacteristic understatement, that “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains thorny”.

If anything, beyond its two pet projects, the definition of US interests is even more inscrutable. It is one thing to abandon the idea of democracy promotion, an approach that always had its serious and thoughtful detractors, and which was practiced with more than a modicum of hypocrisy, as the US routinely sidled up to some unsavory regimes (at times gratuitously so — here’s looking at you, Dr Kissinger). But it is very much another to renounce the laudable values that the US has always espoused, and instead rearticulate the American disposition as one designed to make the world safe for autocracy.

This well describes the bizarre policy articulated with regard to Russia, which is: settle Putin’s war of aggression on the terms he lays out, and call it peace. Indeed, another “core interest” is defined as “an expeditious cessation of hostilities in Ukraine”, with the goal of reestablishing “strategic stability with Russia” (a phrase used twice in two pages). The eager, unconditional embrace of Russia is another would-be puzzle, but the logic of which falls into place in the context of the President’s unabashed admiration for personalist authoritarians; what falls under the category of legitimate international behavior; and, surely, some salivating at the perceived business opportunities that might lie on the horizon. Not since Neville Chamberlain has a world leader been so eager to “cut a deal” without interest in or regard for the implications and viability of its terms.

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How Trump conquered Europe

By Wolfgang Munchau

And if the rest of Europe is left less secure by a one-sided resolution that rewards Russian aggression, that would not ruffle the new American worldview. The Trump administration postures as one that will not lecture other states about their domestic affairs, which it renounces as “America’s misguided experiment with hectoring these nations—especially the Gulf monarchies—into abandoning their traditions” (like murdering journalists). There is one exception to this new hands-off tolerance, however — Europe. The administration can merrily break bread with the worst of the worst when it comes to human rights abusers, but the “elite driven” policies found in the liberal democracies of Western Europe it simply cannot stomach. And under the banner of “Restoring European Greatness” (nation rebuilding?), the US will do much more than simply hector. Rather, it demands — and its foreign policy will be designed to bring about — basic changes in how European countries choose to govern themselves. In particular, they must bend their regulatory structures to meet America’s needs (or at least the demands of US-based tech behemoths), take immediate and urgent measures to increase their whiteness (“we want Europe to remain European”), and, as JD Vance had previously lectured, to be nicer to the extreme far-Right populists in their midst.

As the US, following its new National Security Strategy, retreats to “its” hemisphere, counts the Middle East as a core interest, is increasingly protectionist and admiring of autocrats, and models the behavior that great powers should be unconstrained in dominating their neighborhoods by any means, the news for America’s traditional friends and allies in Asia cannot be good. They must contemplate the possibility that if a war breaks out, the Americans will not attend. Bullies tend to cower when confronted with an adversary that might be able to punch back.

Ultimately, the 2025 National Security Strategy of the United States reads like a living will. Its beneficiaries are Russia, China, and the Gulf States. As for America’s (former) friends, the message could not be clearer: we no longer stand behind you. We will, however, at times stand in front of you, menacingly, and inquire about your lunch money. Adam Smith quipped “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation”. Years from now, this may be seen as the moment when America finally exhausted its supply.

That might sound like an odd thing to say about a country with, indisputably, the mightiest military machine on the planet, one that currently allocates about a trillion dollars a year on defense spending, which is more than the next seven biggest spenders combined. But such figures can be deceptive. Material capabilities are at least crudely measurable — you can count tanks, ships, soldiers and planes, among other things — but our understanding of how those assets translate into international political power remains extremely shallow. In 1985, the Soviet Union loomed as a fearsome military titan. In 1992, the Soviet Union did not exist.

The US is not much like the USSR. But it is, discomfortingly, a lot like interwar France: a great power with a glass jaw. Scholars still debate the sources of France’s military collapse in the Second World War, but its internal atrophy (which also contributed to the ease with which it descended into docile, humiliating collaboration), was well understood, then and now. William Shirer, an eyewitness to the catastrophe, shared the widely held view that in 1925 France was “the greatest power on the continent”. Yet, as others would subsequently observe, it would take “just ten years for the leading country in Europe to become a helpless victim”. And though it is exceedingly unlikely that the US will suffer France’s particular fate, the collapse of its international political influence will probably be as sudden, and as wrenchingly consequential.

There is a yawning gap between apparent military capabilities and the ability to apply that power to well-articulated ends. And there are also limits to what the use of force can achieve. Very often, force fails to deliver the political goods. At the turn of this century, the mighty US could not, despite marshalling overwhelming military force, impose its will or secure its desired outcomes in long wars against two very weak states, Afghanistan and Iraq. More generally, the limits to the exercise of military power also include unintended political consequences. Russia’s war on Ukraine (which also exposed a very large gap between Russia’s material military capabilities on paper and its actual prowess), was disastrous for some of its most closely held international political objectives — witness, for example, the ascension of Sweden and Finland to the NATO alliance. This isn’t to suggest that the use of military force can never achieve political objectives; it is simply to observe that a massive military machine may be a necessary component of what makes a great power, but it is scarcely sufficient.

Against whom is the US likely to use its military might, and to achieve what? It may be that America will unleash its air force against Iran. If so, it will have been dragged into that conflict, over its previously stated reluctance to do so, by another country, and with uncertain and cascading long-term implications. Such stumbling circumstances are hardly the hallmarks of a great power commanding the grand chessboard of world politics. Moreover, beyond Iran, it is hard to imagine the country against which the US will deploy its vast military power, to bend that adversary to its will. That essential, sobering thought experiment serves as a reminder that political influence is the day-to-day currency of international power — and that the exercise of power, in any form, is only successful if it advances a country’s goals on the world stage. We are, by that metric, witnessing measures in contemporary American foreign policy that are nothing short of geopolitical suicide. And as a result, despite its new obsession with posturing masculinity, the US will be increasingly impotent as a world power, often flexing its large, impressive, and well-oiled muscles — but rarely, if ever, achieving its objectives.

The collapse of American power is due to two interrelated factors that will be difficult to repair. The US is a broken society, riddled with domestic political dysfunction. And those pathologies have led to the election (and, ruinously, the reelection) of a singularly unsuited steward of its foreign policy. Again, though the US is in little danger of foreign conquest, in its domestic political disarray it does eerily resemble interwar France — a troubled and deeply divided society characterized by what one historian described as “the embrace of unreason”. As Raymond Aron recalled in his memoirs, “basically, France didn’t exist any longer.” Instead, “it existed only in the hatred of the French for each other.” Shirer saw a country whose strength was “gradually sapped by dissention and division”, as well as “the ineptness of its leaders, the corruption of its press, and a feeling of growing confusion, hopelessness, and cynicism… of its people”.

America’s political disarray and paralyzing polarization is partially organic (over many issues, it is a sharply divided society), but that polarization has also been exacerbated by its instrumental manipulation. As Martin Wolf argues in his recent book, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, soaring inequality and massive concentrations of wealth at the very top presented a political challenge to the Republican Party: “How, after all, does a political party dedicated to the material interests of the top 0.1% of the income distribution win and hold power in a universal suffrage democracy? The answer is pluto-populism.” That is, of plutocrats masquerading as populists, “a specific elite political strategy” that involves the purposeful inflaming of cultural issues to divert attention from their economic plundering. One consequence of this strategy is that it heightens, intensifies and even radicalizes existing domestic divisions.

America’s disfigured political landscape has led its electoral system to produce what would have previously been unthinkable — a personalist autocrat with an utter disdain for the Republic’s core ideals. Where does support for such a figure come from?

As Hans Kohn observed in Revolutions and Dictatorships (1939), “No nation is necessarily Fascist; no nation is entirely immune against Fascism.” In interwar Europe, fascism emerged from disorder, where it found the support of many who craved the restoration of their understanding of “order” — including, crucially, “certain conservative forces” who believed they could harness its power to crush their domestic adversaries, naively thinking they could “control fascism once they had helped it into power”. Or as the filmmaker Paul Schrader succinctly put it a few months ago, “When you vote for a strongman, your assumption is that he’ll ‘take care’ of those other people, and that his strength will benefit you in some way. But you’re just gonna end up on a list. Everyone does.”

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The collateral damage of all this is the end of American power. One part of the broader Trump-tastrophe is that fundamental foreign policy questions no longer have obvious answers. What is the purpose of contemporary American power? Can we still speak of something as general as the American national interest? Personalist regimes tend not to pursue national interest, but the interests of the ruling clan and its intimate affiliates. Worse still, in the case of the Trump administration, is the pursuit of foolish, impulsive, and incoherent policies, which leave in their wake the wreckage of shattered international political partnerships that will create opportunities for others to exploit.

Trump’s most astonishing foreign policy blunder has taken place closest to home. One of the unique advantages that America has long enjoyed as a great power — it is hard to think of another example in history — is its uncommonly warm relations with its nearest neighbors. Yet Trump has managed to sabotage US relations with Canada, an act of geopolitical self-immolation that is largely without precedent. It is a blunder on the order of Japan’s decision to attack Pearl Harbor, but at least that howler followed an identifiable deductive logic: since rapacious Japanese militarists aspired to take over half the world, they calculated that at some point the effort would finally bring them into conflict with the sluggish, isolationist US, so perhaps it was best to try to seize the initiative with a devastating preventive surprise attack. That turned out to be a very bad bet, but at least its rationale had a sliver of logical plausibility, which is more than can be said for America’s current behavior towards Canada.

Burning bridges with Canada has turned out to be the template, not the exception, of the Trump administration’s foreign policy. It has alienated allies in Europe with the barely contained glee of a child playing with matches. In Asia, where, in theory, the US would be well served to try to limit China’s growing political reach, its trade policies have left natural allies, such as Japan, South Korea and Vietnam, injured by, and necessarily on guard against, American behavior. When it comes to South America, which some would see as falling under the purview of a US “sphere of influence”, Trump’s self-defeating economic policies have once again invited political inroads by others, especially China and the European Union. And beyond a curious concern for a handful of white South Africans, Team Trump recoils from Africa to such an extent that it has withdrawn life-saving humanitarian assistance, achieving little more than sullying the American image.

Ultimately, the only countries in the world that have reason to feel confident in the stability of their ties to the US are the Gulf States, because their relationships are not a function of the American national interest, but rather a reflection of the business interests of the presidential family and their affiliates. (Indeed, any sober assessment of US security guarantees in the region would conclude that, although they may have made sense in the Seventies, they are plainly anachronistic today.)

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The folly of America First

By Jonathan Kirshner

Trump’s torching of American power extends to many of his domestic policies as well. His war on America’s elite academic institutions, which are the envy of the world, will eventually come at the cost of US innovation in science and technology, undermining almost every aspect of its domestic economy — as well as jeopardizing future military innovations. There is an auditorium full of foreign-born Nobel Prize winners who eagerly, often desperately, made their way to the US over the years. One shudders to think what would have been if Trumpism had been embraced earlier. That auditorium would be empty. The next auditorium will be empty. This is to the detriment not only of America’s soft power — its global appeal to the best and the brightest — but also its hard power, as crucial scientific breakthroughs increasingly take place beyond the gated community of this xenophobic kingdom.

Students of international relations are properly trained to recite that in world politics, the future is unwritten, and anything is possible. In an anarchic world, countries must ultimately be prepared for the unexpected, and for the worst. But with the second coming of Trump, the US is stretching that wise admonition beyond the breaking point. American foreign policy is now directed by a wildly mercurial and bracingly untutored would-be despot. Worse still, and in contrast to season one of the Trump show, the president is surrounded by sycophants (some of whom actually know better, but, shamelessly lusting for proximity to power, have renounced their own beliefs), unchecked by timid legislators submissively clinging to their seats, and abetted by a monied class seemingly determined to prove that no value is more important than insatiable chase of still more wealth.

The world no longer has the comforting luxury of pretending that Trump 1.0 was some freak aberration. And the world has surely observed that Trump 2.0 — which must be understood as representing what “America” now is — is a much more radical, and dangerous, and unpredictable enterprise. Such a country simply cannot be counted on by others. Its word is meaningless, its values absent, and its interests, beyond enriching the royal family, are indecipherable. Who is the US rooting for in the Russia-Ukraine war? Would the US come to the defense of its NATO allies in Europe? Would the US really care if China comes to dominate all of East Asia? Not so long ago, it would have been absurd to even ask such questions. Now, who knows?

All of this will matter, and it will matter in ways that will undermine American power by the most narrow calculus of its interest: its ability to get what it wants in the international arena. President Trump is known for his reverence of an early mentor, Roy Cohn, the notorious hatchet man for Joseph McCarthy, and one suspects that Hans Morgenthau would describe American foreign policy today as he did McCarthyism: “a fraudulent, stupid and dangerous farce.” It will not be long before the rest of the world reaches that conclusion.

The trouble is that “America First” might be an appealing sales pitch, but Trump does not have a coherent foreign policy vision. Instead, the former president has consistent (and concerning) foreign policy dispositions: wariness of allies, admiration for authoritarians, and deep-seated protectionist instincts. Moreover, he is untutored in (and incurious about) most foreign policy questions, is often impulsive, and easily swayed by flattery — attributes that matter because, in contrast to the first Trump Administration which was largely staffed by experienced professionals, the second would likely be populated by sycophants and yes-men.

The fact is, America First is disingenuous, tissue-thin rhetoric. No administration in modern US history did not think it was prioritising the American national interest. Certainly, different presidents had distinct visions regarding how those interests might best be advanced, but none of them — none — however profoundly misguided their actions might appear in retrospect, ever pursued a foreign policy course that they did not think would be the best choice for the country.

What is distinct about America First is its tactics and vision. It is short-sighted and transactional, viewing every interaction with other countries, friends and foes alike, as a zero-sum confrontation in which the objective is to extract the largest possible share of the perceived visible gains. This is to be achieved by uninhibited, sharp-elbowed diplomacy, with little regard for historical legacies or long-run implications. In this vision, alliances are viewed with scepticism, representing an albatross of unnecessary obligations, which, like a protection racket or a mercenary force, only makes sense if they turn a monetary profit.

Some advocates of America First will call this Realism. It is not. The realist approach to international relations emphasises the consequences of anarchy: that international relations are commonly characterised by clashes of interest, and in that context actors in world politics may resort to the use of force to get what they want — and there are no guarantees the behaviour of those others will not descend into horrifying barbarism. Thus states must be prepared to defend themselves and look out for their own interests.

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This is admittedly a gloomy perspective, but there is nothing in Realism that implies what America First suggests. If anything, the opposite is true: it is a rare realist indeed who imagines that the path to geopolitical paradise is paved by short-sighted, nakedly selfish measures. Indeed the US tried this approach once before, after the First World War, and it was a catastrophic failure. After victory, an America First disposition led the US to pursue obtusely myopic demands for repayment of the debts incurred by its wartime allies, whose exhausted economies lay in ruins. A young John Foster Dulles urged the US to forgive those obligations, not because he placed priority on the interests of others, but because it was in America’s own best interest to do so. As he argued cogently, pursuing the apparent immediate interest — which the US had every right to do — was foolish, unrealistic, and would undermine “the big objective” of global “political and financial stability”.

Similarly, as the economic going got tough, the US also turned to an America First trade strategy, most famously with the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930. More than 1,000 economists urged President Hoover to veto that tariff bill, again, not because they were looking out for the interests of other countries, but because they thought it would be bad for America. They were right. Imports to America fell dramatically — but America’s exports fell even more, as the legislation engendered retaliation and contributed to the collapse of world trade and the deepening of the global Great Depression.

And, of course, there was the signature foreign policy of America First, isolationism. It is possible that by withdrawing from Europe and acting timidly in Asia, the US naively thought that the world’s problems would somehow not encroach upon its shores. However, as Jacob Heilbrunn details in America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators, many of the prominent proponents of isolationism were also, at best, authoritarian curious, and, at worst, rooting for the wrong team. “America First” now, in both its politics and its economics, is a direct descendant of America First then.

Neither incarnation is well described as Realism. Indeed, after the Second World War, the US learned the lessons of its previous, self-mutilating policy choices and chose instead to embrace a more far-sighted foreign policy vision. In pursuit of what classical realist Arnold Wolfers would describe as “milieu goals”, it sought, often at some cost, to shape the international political environment in ways that would be conducive to the long-run American national interest. With the generosity of the Marshall Plan and the cultivation of alliances , America’s postwar grand strategy, measured, as Raymond Aron would insist, against the only metric that matters — what otherwise might have been — could not have been more successful.

Of course, all things must pass, and America now is not America then. Its foreign policy disposition should, and must, adjust to present realities. It is not just wise, but essential, to take stock of the National Interest and assess how best it might be advanced. A survey of contemporary world politics suggests that America First, take two, will be as disastrous for the US as it was the last time around.

Nowhere is the folly of American First redux more plainly visible than with regard to the Russia-Ukraine war. Reputable scholars can debate the long-run underlying causes of Russia’s invasion; also up for legitimate discussion is how deeply the US ought to be (indirectly) engaged in that conflict, and whether some of its policies might invite unintended and dangerous risks. There is no doubt, however, that the murderous authoritarian Vladimir Putin initiated this war of conquest, and that it is in the strong interest of the West for the lesson of the war to be that “wars of conquest by Russia do not pay”. Yet team Trump is eager to see this conflict end on exactly Russia’s terms, likely due not to reasoned geostrategic analysis, but the former president’s personal pique at Ukraine’s leadership, and his bizarre admiration for ruthless dictators.

More generally, it is hard to imagine US membership in Nato surviving a second Trump term. Once again, the former president’s analysis is curious, imagining the alliance as a dues-paying organisation in which the Europeans are not adequately kicking back to their American protectors. In his mind, the US would save money by pulling out. The first argument is fatuous, the second somewhat far-fetched, as the US is almost certain to increase rather than decrease its defence spending, regardless of its Nato membership.

Here at least the argument against Nato can be expressed in a more sophisticated way: should the US leave the alliance, some smart scholars argue, its European members would (finally) increase their own defence spending. That is a deductively sound argument, although not necessarily an experiment that most realists, whose watchwords are politics and prudence, would want to run. A post-Nato Europe might emerge as a more coherent and capable force, or the withdrawal of American participation might expose and invite political rifts across the continent; in either event it would surely reduce US political influence there. Given that Europe is one of the world’s political and economic epicentres, those are not risks to be embraced casually.

In marked contrast, the one region of the world where the isolationist instincts and alliance wariness of America First make the most sense is the Middle East. US security commitments in the Persian Gulf might have had an underlying logic to them in the Seventies, but they are plainly anachronistic today, given basic changes to world energy markets, the nature of security threats to the region, and limits of American power. In addition, if Israel explicitly renounces any commitment to a two-state solution, or devolves into its own version of a radical theocracy, it becomes increasingly hard to understand how that special relationship would continue to reflect the American national interest.

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Here the experiment of withdrawing American power and risking what might follow makes much more sense. Unfortunately, and uncharacteristically in US history, Trump’s foreign policy instincts are more similar to those of a personalist authoritarian than the temporary steward of democratic state. Thus for reasons of family business (Saudi Arabia has a multi-billion-dollar investment in his son-in-law, for example) and domestic politics (for the crucial conservative Christian base of his support, an unconditional US commitment to Israel is an inviolable act of faith, not the cool calculation of strategic interest), even under Trump the US might remain deeply enmeshed in the region, preventing the often-strained logic of America First from prevailing in the one part of the world where it might actually well apply.

Setting aside the prospect that a second-term President Trump — now unrestrained by anything remotely resembling “adults in the room” — might do something impetuous and outlandish (such as bombing Mexico), a proper reckoning of the consequences of America First must look to Asia. Here again the prospects are less than heartening. Trump talks forcefully about confronting China, and on this one issue, there does seem to be a general bipartisan consensus in the US. The barriers to success of an America First approach in this new epicentre of the world’s geopolitical chessboard, however, are formidable. Rhetoric, swagger, and more militarised confrontations are ill-suited to the challenge at hand. As American diplomat George F. Kennan emphasised during the Cold War, the problem — and the prize — are political. The danger is not that China will serially invade its neighbours, in a foolish and self-defeating bid for regional hegemony; the danger is that China might come to dominate the Asia-Pacific politically.

But America First is not very good at politics. A sound China policy will require close political partnerships with key countries throughout the region. And here is where Trump’s hatred of allies (or freeloaders, as he imagines them) might prove most catastrophic. The former president previously made noises about abandoning Korea, and his foreign policy instincts cannot but raise concerns in Japan. Moreover, if the US indeed undermines Nato, actors in Asia might further question whether the US would stay committed to the region. Whereas China is going to stay in the region, indefinitely, for obvious reasons of geography. Thus the risk is that US heavy-handedness with allies, alongside assessments of its reduced reliability more generally, might lead some states to “bandwagon” with China — that is, reach some political accommodation with Beijing that cedes to its preferences on major international issues. Such an outcome would not be in the US national interest, no matter how narrowly defined.

Compounding all of this, enormously, will be the Trump Tariffs, a centrepiece (indeed obsession) of both his domestic and foreign policy vision. There are precious few consistencies across Trump’s political thinking over the decades, but he has always been a passionate protectionist. And, as noted, if Trump is re-elected, it would be shocking if we did not witness what will surely be celebrated as Huge Tariffs. Again, one can responsibly debate the fine grained tactics of trade policy. The protectionism-as-panacea fantasy, however, will swiftly prove to be a nightmare. It will be both very bad for the US economy, and very bad for the world economy — miseries likely to be compounded by retaliatory tariffs imposed by others, which will likely not bring out the best in an administration that prides itself on “toughness”.

Worst of all, perhaps, is that the enormous economic distress caused by Trump Tariffs, among otherwise friendly states in Europe and Asia, will further undermine the broader goals of US foreign policy, and likely spark a growth inhibiting trade war that will contribute to a panoply of geopolitical stressors globally. In sum, America First will likely lead to America Alone, getting less of what it wants, in a more dangerous world, populated by players increasingly disposed to find distance from the madness of its king.