Trump’s personalist rule over the MAGA GOP, meanwhile, is increasingly bound up with the pro-Israel cause. And indeed, it was just these two forces — MAGA and pro-Israel hard-liners — that came for Massie, a principled libertarian in the Ron and Rand Paul mold, who opposes the war with Iran and has called for cutting all foreign aid, including to the Jewish state.

The GOP under Trump has ideological underpinnings, but fealty to Trump comes first. That is the only tangible reality. As Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) put it on X, “This is Donald Trump’s Republican Party. The rest of us get the privilege of living in it.” Fine — who combines such utter servility to Trump with grossly anti-Muslim rhetoric (“the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one”) — fits in much better with the second Trump term than the independent-minded Massie ever could.

And Massie realized what he was up against. It wasn’t only that Ed Gallrein, a former Navy SEAL, was personally recruited by Trump to run against him. It was the money: more than $34 million poured into the primary, much of it funding anti-Massie attack ads by pro-Israel groups, making this the most expensive House primary in US history. Combined with Trump’s frothing opposition, and anti-Massie messaging from the likes of Pete Hegseth, it was enough to easily sink him.

Rarely has a House primary been about one person (rather than an opposition between two of them). Several months ago, Trump said publicly that he just wanted a “warm body to beat Massie.” Gallrein made it clear he would happily serve in that role, promising to back Trump 100% of the time. That was all there was to it. He granted almost no interviews, and declined numerous debate invitations from Massie. Here was a foot soldier for Trump, going against a Republican who was willing, time after time, to go his own way.

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By ross barkan

Trump reviled the Kentucky libertarian for holding up a Covid relief bill in 2020; for voting against the “Big, Beautiful Bill” tax-and-spending package; and for leading the bipartisan fight to force the Justice Department to release the Epstein Files. For Trump, that last was the point of no return. Massie would have to suffer for linking up with Democrats like Rep. Ro Khanna of California in a bid to seek the truth about the late convicted sex offender.

If, for the president, Epstein was the breaking point, Massie’s greatest political challenge was defying the traditional American foreign-policy consensus. Unlike most Republican politicians, Massie was willing to be a principled isolationist. His conservatism on domestic matters translated to a deep skepticism of foreign entanglements, and he was the rare Republican to criticize Benjamin Netanyahu. He voted against a House resolution condemning the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel and also opposed Iron Dome funding. Hence why AIPAC and Republican Jewish groups made it their priority to wipe out Massie. AIPAC gloated over his defeat: “Being pro-Israel is good policy and good politics!”

Why, exactly, were they so motivated? For Israel hawks, the Republican Party is their true last stand. The Democratic Party isn’t totally lost to them, but they can read enough polling data: in five or 10 years, there may not be any politicians like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer left: powerful Democrats who offer unstinting support for the Jewish state. Not very long ago, almost every top Democrat attended the AIPAC conference and delighted in landing a speaking slot. In 2016, when Bernie Sanders refused, his decision was considered mildly scandalous. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, had been a proud attendee.

Those days are over. Several potential presidential candidates have said already that they’d refuse AIPAC donations. Democrats have turned on the organization for its backing of Republicans and its willingness to bludgeon Democrats who deviate from the Netanyahu orthodoxy in any fashion and even to the mildest degree. Even more centrist-minded Democrats, like former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, have called for limiting military aid; California Gov. Gavin Newsom described Israel as an apartheid state before walking it back (sort of).

Many Democrats, too, see the triumph of Zohran Mamdani, a pro-Palestine mayor who supports BDS, as a watershed moment, and evidence that it’s possible to win elections while defying the Israel lobby. Mamdani won in New York, the most Jewish city in America.

With Republicans under age 50 turning against the Jewish state, the possible proliferation of Massie-esque Republicans is an existential threat to the Israel hawks, and they will continue to pummel politicians to ensure the GOP will keep sounding like Lindsey Graham, Tom Cotton, and Ted Cruz. The defeat of Massie promises, at the minimum, that Republicans will think twice before breaking with Israel in any fashion. It’s not that regular voters care all that much — it’s the money, so much of it, ready to deployed at a moment’s notice to annihilate any Republican who steps out of line.

How long that lasts is the real question. For now, Israel hawks unquestionably dominate the Republican Party. What about 2036? 2046?

The hawks have proved, in Kentucky, that they can overwhelm a House primary with unprecedented amounts of cash. But they haven’t yet shifted the attitudes of young conservatives, many of whom are either isolationist — they take the slogan “America First” seriously — or veer into anti-Semitism, like the Groypers who follow Nick Fuentes. Anti-Israel or Israel-skeptical conservative commentators including Candace Owens, Megyn Kelly, and Tucker Carlson are undoubtedly on the ascent, while traditional hawks like Ben Shapiro are seeing their enterprises shrink. The conservative grassroots, whether animated by old-fashioned hatred of Jews or straightforward opposition to foreign-policy entanglements, is not supporting the Shapiro-style Republican. If they still, largely, back Trump, they’re weary of the Iran war and don’t understand how America benefits.

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By Sohrab Ahmari

It’s not obvious, yet, what the post-Trump Republican Party looks like. Neoconservatives and hawks have had a resurgence in Trump’s second term. Led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, they’ve emerged as true power brokers, while JD Vance, who used to represent the party’s isolationist wing, has been forced to accept a war in Iran he might not have backed were he president. Massie has, for the most part, been the outlier, playing the gadfly role occupied by the likes of Ron Paul in past decades.

But it’s Massie’s vision, as marginal as it is, that may point to the future of the Republican Party — or a future, at least. Not all GOP voters are as strongly libertarian as he is, but as the current cohort of Gen-Z ages, more will probably be receptive to his message in the coming years. A recent New York Times/Siena poll found that while a vast majority of Republicans still back Trump, 37% want to see the party’s next nominee “move in a different direction.” Notably, 45% of Republicans believe “it is best for the United States to be active in world affairs to maintain security and prosperity,” while half say that “they want the country to pay less attention to problems overseas.”

When Trump exits the scene, those viewpoints will remain. Trump won his first election, after all, excoriating the Republicans who’d championed the Iraq War. If he broke his campaign promises, he still retained control of the base thanks to his magnetism. But future Republicans won’t have the same power. One day, a vacuum will open up. Unfortunately for Massie, that day isn’t here yet. It’s Trump’s Republican Party. MAGA apostates don’t have a place in it. For now.

That turn inward sealed its fate. By the time of the first Opium War (1839-42), China was sinking into its “century of humiliation” just as a forward-looking America was beginning its ascent. A century later, China had been reduced to an impoverished agrarian economy. American domination had been firmly established.

But could history now be repeating itself, this time in reverse? Today, just as an ascendant China is spreading its global influence, the US seemingly repeats China’s ancient error. Is America setting itself up for a fall as spectacular as China’s back then?

China’s decline has few parallels in history. Although the global periphery fell backwards relative to the West in the 19th century, most European colonies saw their economies develop. But China suffered the ignominy of seeing its economy actually contract, until the Empire collapsed and the country suffered a decades-long civil war.

Imperial China’s isolationism had begun early: it scrapped what was then the world’s biggest navy around the turn of the 16th century. Although the Chinese governing class, having long shown interest in foreign technology, was not averse to learning from others, foreign observers frequently noted an air of superiority in official thought. As one 18th-century British observer noted, the Chinese tended to believe “everything is excellent and that proposals for improvement would be superfluous if not blameworthy”. Moreover, the regime wanted to monopolize the movement of trade and culture, bringing it into conflict with then-free trading and ravenous Westerners, while its examination system for entry to the bureaucracy tended to steer ambitious intellectuals towards mastery of the classics over the search for new ideas.

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Above all, given the sheer size of China’s internal market — comprising nearly a third of humanity — the Chinese elite felt no pressing need for foreign trade and exchange, let alone overseas colonies. When the Empire dissolved its navy, one senior official noted that overseas exploration had “wasted tens of myriads of money and grain” in a search for “wonderful things” that however brought no material benefit to the state.

This ability to tune out the world set China apart from smaller European states that were engaged in an almost permanent arms race with one another. To expand economically, European countries and their colonial offshoots needed markets abroad. China didn’t. So it could afford to turn inward.

Yet while the Empire wanted only to limit rather than eliminate access of the outside world to China, its tendency to isolation blinded it to some of the implications of Western technological innovations — particularly naval, military and bureaucratic technologies. As a result it underestimated just how these were going to transform the world, with the result being that it fell irretrievably behind the technological frontier at a time Western countries were quickly pushing it forward.

It seems implausible that the US, as globally dominant today as China was then, could retrace such an arc of absolute decline. Nevertheless, Donald Trump is arguably repeating the same mistakes that China’s emperors once did, and for much the same reasons — a conviction of natural superiority, a sense the country can stand alone and thus dictate its terms of engagement with the outside world, and an underestimation of the transformative impacts of foreign technologies.

As China’s imperial rulers did, the US is presuming a false asymmetry between it and the rest of the world, having decided it needs the world less than the world needs it — its markets, its know-how, its protection and above all its dollar. This confidence, manifest in the administration’s declarations that it “holds all the cards”, has led it to launch a trade war on all its trading partners simultaneously, apparently in the expectation of rapid surrenders. The fact that hasn’t happened reveals the flawed reasoning behind “Liberation Day”, and we’re now into a period of standoffs and stand-downs which have left a vacuum in global governance.

China is rushing to try to fill it. Beijing has begun pitching itself as the defender of the global trading system, Xi Jinping recently telling a gathering of global CEOs that “we must jointly maintain the multilateral trading system, jointly maintain the stability of the global industrial chain”. Although the US is turning inwards, the rest of the world is moving the other way, shoring up their ties in new trading blocs and agreements. China is taking advantage of this to raise food imports from Latin America and Africa, with Brazil quickly sliding in to replace American exports of soybeans.

Playing into Beijing’s hands is Trump’s tactic of accompanying tariffs with isolationist measures, such as withdrawing from multilateral institutions or shutting down USAID. While the President may feel that such measures free up resources and give him more tactical flexibility, they substantially relinquish the diplomatic battlefield to China. Dollar for dollar, China couldn’t match the previous US aid budget. But now the latter has dropped to zero, the bar is easily crossed.

Most significantly, Trump is apparently so convinced America has nothing to learn from anyone that he is overlooking how Chinese technology is already changing the world. Typical of this is his stance on “energy dominance”, the idea that the US should forgo the energy transition to exploit its abundant and cheap fossil-fuel ecosystem. Aside from doubts about the feasibility of this approach, what is inescapable is that in pursuing this policy, the US is forfeiting a rapidly emerging subsector to China.

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No countries feel the need for a strong international order and an acceleration of the energy transition more than developing ones. This is where China has advanced furthest in recent years. Chinese FDI has been expanding aggressively in the developing world, whose share of total Chinese trade is consequently rising. In Africa, for instance, Chinese firms are creating power plants that then reduce electricity costs for, among other things, their mining operations.

Strategically, this advance into the soft underbelly of the world economy matters. While the world’s biggest markets are still in the developed world, the fastest-growing ones are in the developing world. Notwithstanding the claim of Trump’s energy secretary that “there is no climate crisis and we are not in the midst of an energy transition”, EV sales in developing countries are exploding, especially in some of the fastest-growing economies — up 70% last year in India, 200% in Malaysia, and over 300% in Thailand and Vietnam. So too is renewable energy, not only because it has become so inexpensive, but because it reduces the exposure of hitherto energy-importing countries to the vagaries of world markets, since no outsider can control their supply of renewable-energy inputs. Even petrostates like Saudi Arabia are moving aggressively towards decarbonization, which is drawing them ever further out of the American and into the Chinese orbit.

When a state finds itself the center of the world, as China once did and the US has more recently, it’s tempting for it to see its place as natural and eternal. But such hubris often amounts to pride before the fall. The relative decline of the American-led empire has been underway for some time, but Trump’s erratic and idiosyncratic policymaking may usher in a period of absolute decline, starting with a recession.

Given its democratic system, America’s governing class will probably respond and change course more quickly than the Chinese imperial elite did, making a full century of humiliation unlikely. Still, by the time the US does change course, China may have moved closer to its long-standing goal of retaking its place at the center of the world. That alone will feel to America like humiliation.

It is admittedly hard not to enjoy the spectacle. Whether Trump is humiliating the Canadian or Danish governments, the EU or Lord Peter Mandelson, he is forcing through the end of global technocracy. Yet while there are plenty of Western leaders cheering this, as evident in the delight of Right-wingers such as Nigel Farage and Giorgia Meloni in being invited to Trump’s inauguration, the fact that they’re happy to be pulled along by Trump’s coattails suggests that they, too, are still thinking in globalist rather than national terms.

The fact, moreover, that these populists assume Trump’s victory is their victory too tells us that their political calculations are cast in terms of the ebb and flow of global culture wars, rather than the progress of their own countries. The national interest is, by definition, a national affair, not a matter of narrowly partisan politics. That so many on the Right are thrilled by the new President reveals a mentality still trapped in the bygone era of the first Cold War, in which the success of one’s politics was measured in terms of the strength of one’s international alliances and ideological devotion to a foreign superpower.

This struggle to articulate or defend national interests is not just a matter of the age of the populist leaders, or folk memories of global ideological rivalries. It also reflects the political structure of populism, and how much it remains defined by its opponent: globalist liberalism. Ultimately, both sides represent two sides of the same coin: the absence of institutionalized representation and legitimate mass parties that once comprised the substance of national political life.

The populist shuns representative institutions because it undercuts his efforts to rule directly through personal charisma and connection with the people; the technocrat, for his part, despises representation because it gets in the way of rule by experts. Both share hostility to party-political representation. Yet without it, there can be no means for the nation to imprint its demands on the state. The national interest remains to be served.

Britain, at least, should be in a better position to carve out its own position in this new world order. This is not only because, by Trump’s reckoning, the UK has a trade deficit with the US and is thus less likely to be subject to tariffs — for now. More important is the fact that Britain is in a stronger position because it was among the first to make a lasting break with globalism with the Brexit in 2016. It also has a long, if buried, history of non-alignment and independence as seen in the era of “splendid isolation” that ruled British foreign policy across most of the 19th century. These are deep resources to draw on in a new era of national interest politics.

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Belatedly, even some mainstream politicians are now realizing this. In a sharp denunciation of wars of intervention and neo-conservative regime change, shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick concluded that Britain should adopt a Palmerstonian foreign policy, ruthlessly focused on self-interest. Jenrick was name-checking Henry John Temple (1784-1865), the Viscount Palmerston, the Victorian-era statesman most widely remembered for his famous dictum that Britain has no eternal allies or enemies, only eternal interests. In his study of dissent over British foreign policy, AJP Taylor recounts that the famous phrase was delivered “to a thin house” in 1848 and deployed to defend Palmerston’s record against one of his most determined and maniacal opponents, the cranky Tory aristocrat David Urquhart, who was convinced Palmerston was a Russian agent.

While the same smears of being in the pay of Moscow still meet any criticisms of intervention or British expression of national interest today, our circumstances are otherwise greatly changed. The policy of splendid isolation — itself a retrospective label — was improvised after Britain’s withdrawal in 1822 from the Congress system, the global policing regime established in 1815 by the victors of the Napoleonic Wars. Following this early Brexit from a precocious effort at global governance, Britain sought to avoid entangling alliances with continental powers while maintaining her international naval supremacy.

Today, however, Britain’s policy is almost exactly the reverse across every register. That’s clear from our obsession with strengthening global governance, to our hopeless preoccupation with the so-called Special Relationship. Both Tory and Labour governments have pursued the redoubling of commitments to the UN and NATO as a means to mitigate the risks to national independence that came with the Brexit vote.

We seem, in short, to have plenty of permanent friends — yet no permanent interests. Our naval power, it goes without saying, is not only reduced in material terms, but also built around our allies rather than British strength. We rename attack submarines to avoid offending our allies, while the nuclear warheads carried by our ballistic missile submarines are dependent on US technology and support to function.

What would a Palmerstonian foreign policy mean in such a context? In the first place, it would require a lucid reckoning with change. Rather than serving the national interest, the cost of protecting global sea lanes by maintaining British naval power on a world scale today would be an act of national self-sacrifice, or even self-annihilation. Whatever we might seek to achieve with naval power today would necessarily have to be in coalition. In light of even America’s inability to stamp out threats to global trade such as the Houthi chokehold on the Red Sea, the diminished utility of global naval power combined with the fact Britain is an island would have to be offset by greater economic self-sufficiency as opposed to free trade liberalism.

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Although Britain will always be a trading nation — not least by virtue of being an island — plenty could be done to enhance our self-sufficiency. Restoring control over Britain’s borders would be a vital step not only in strengthening security but also forcing business to cultivate a skilled national labor force. Rebuilding industry, reshoring critical supply chains, building new nuclear power stations and expanding fossil fuel production in the North Sea would all be good starts. With this groundwork in place, Britain could then start reestablishing permanent interests — rather than cultivating reliance on permanent friends. As these interests will be dictated in part both by geography and history, they will be significant continuities in British foreign policy. But maintaining friendly relations with our neighbors need not mean tying ourselves up in the entangling alliances that Palmerston sought to avoid.

None of this will be easy. Time and again, British leaders have shown themselves unable to think independently. Battered by catastrophic unpopularity so early in his premiership, many in Keir Starmer’s Labour Party clearly hope that crawling back to Brussels will make up for his domestic weakness. At the same time, Starmer is under fire from Trump, who has said the UK is “out of line” but can be managed without the need for punitive tariffs. At any rate, Starmer’s opponents should resist the urge to cheer Trump on: to do so would be to accept Trump’s humiliating designation of the UK as a vassal state that can be easily wrangled. There would be little point in ending a permanent friendship with Brussels, only to cling more tightly to another with Washington.

Britain’s post-war policy of seeking to be the trans-Atlantic bridge between Europe and the US has unsurprisingly resulted only in Europe and the US trampling all over British interests as they cross the bridge. Britain should be thinking more in terms of balancing between the two, carefully maintaining ties with both while seizing advantage wherever it presents itself, whether in trade or security – including pursuing connections with more distant powers such as China if need be.

It goes without saying, of course, that if there is to be a new age of Palmerstonian foreign policy, it will require more than simply repeating the cliches of a dead prime minister’s speeches, owning the libs and hoping foreign leaders will humiliate your domestic opponents. It will require brave and vigorous national leadership, willing to pursue the kind of disruption that Trump is enacting in US foreign policy. For 30 years, if not longer, our foreign policy has been dedicated to globalist ends — solving climate change, global poverty, human rights. It is time to make foreign policy serve national needs, and in the context of Britain today this would mean in service of the pursuit of national renewal.

For now, however, Britain’s permanent interests are buried beneath the rubble of our permanent friendships. If we are to excavate those interests, it will require a willingness to cast aside the debris of Cold War-era alliances and membership of crumbling 20^th-century organizations. If we are to have a new Palmerstonian foreign policy, we must be willing to endure the risks that will come with an exhilarating new era of splendid isolation.

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.