Opinion Trump’s anti-Ukraine view dates to the 1930s. America rejected it then. Will we now?
The original America First Committee was founded in September 1940. Consider the global circumstances at the time. Two years earlier, Hitler had annexed Austria and invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia. One year earlier, he had invaded and conquered Poland. In the first months of 1940, he invaded and occupied Norway, Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands. In early June 1940, British troops evacuated from Dunkirk, and France was overrun by the Nazi blitzkrieg. In September, the very month of the committee’s formation, German troops were in Paris and Edward R. Murrow was reporting from London under bombardment by the Luftwaffe. That was the moment the America First movement launched itself into the battle to block aid to Britain.
Cutting off Ukraine seems like small beer by comparison, but behind it lies the same “America First” thinking. For Donald Trump and his followers, pulling the plug on Ukraine is part of a larger aim to end America’s broader commitment to European peace and security. America’s commitment to NATO, Trump believes, should be conditional, at best: Russia can do “whatever the hell they want” to allies who do not pay their fair share and meet certain defense-spending objectives.
Other Republicans don’t even mention conditions. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) has called for the immediate reduction of U.S. force levels in Europe and the abrogation of America’s common-defense Article 5 commitments. He wants the United States to declare publicly that in the event of a “direct conflict” between Russia and a NATO ally, America will “withhold forces.” The Europeans need to know they can no longer “count on us like they used to.” Elbridge Colby, a former Trump Pentagon official praised by Hawley, has written widely (and wrongly) that United States cannot defend both East Asia and Europe and that Europeans must fend for themselves because, as he put it in a recent social media post, “Asia is more important than Europe.” He said, “If we have to leave Europe more exposed, so be it.”
Can Republicans really be returning to a 1930s worldview in our 21st-century world? The answer is yes. Trump’s Republican Party wants to take the United States back to the triad of interwar conservatism: high tariffs, anti-immigrant xenophobia, isolationism. According to Russ Vought, who is often touted as Trump’s likely chief of staff in a second term, it is precisely this “older definition of conservatism,” the conservatism of the interwar years, that they hope to impose on the nation when Trump regains power.
So it’s time to take a closer look at the 1930s conservative mentality and the America First movement it spawned.
Republican anti-interventionism of those interwar years — “isolationism” as critics called it — was less a carefully considered strategic doctrine than an extension of their battles against domestic opponents. Yes, there were self-proclaimed “realists” in the late 1930s assuring everyone that the United States was invulnerable and that events in Asia, where Japan was also on the rampage, and Europe need not endanger American security. Those “realists” chided their fellow Americans for a “giddy” moralism and emotionalism in response to Nazi and Japanese aggression that prevented them from dealing “with the world as it is,” as historian Charles Beard put it. George F. Kennan, an anti-liberal conservative who served in the American Embassy in Prague, at the time applauded the Munich settlement and praised the Czechs for eschewing the “romantic” course of resistance in favor of the “humiliating but truly heroic one of realism.”
This “realism” meshed well with anti-interventionism. Americans had to respect “the right of an able and virile nation [i.e. Nazi Germany] to expand,” aviator Charles Lindbergh argued. The leading Republican of his day, Ohio Sen. Robert Taft, ridiculed those who expressed fears of advancing fascism. The United States could not be ranging “over the world like a knight errant,” protecting “democracy and ideals of good faith” and tilting, “like Don Quixote, against the windmills of fascism.” The world was “big enough to contain all kinds of different ways of life.”
It was not fascism that conservative Republicans worried about. It was communism. For them, the foreign policy battle in the interwar years was but a subset of their larger war against Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, which Republicans insisted disguised an attempt to bring communism to the United States. Conservatives in both the United States and Great Britain had long seen Hitler and Mussolini as bulwarks against the spread of communism in Germany and elsewhere.
Nor were they especially troubled by the dramatic rise of official antisemitism in Germany. In the 1920s and ’30s, influential Republicans and conservatives put Jews at the center of various conspiracies against America. Some conservatives referred to the New Deal as the “Jew Deal” (there were Jews among FDR’s “brain trust”), and they opposed intervening in a war in which Jews were among the prominent victims. Lindbergh, among the most admired men in the United States, claimed Jews were pushing the United States into war “for reasons which are not American.”
Conservative Republicans also warned against the creation of an American “liberal empire” no less oppressive than the one Hitler was trying to create. The result, Taft claimed, would be the “establishment of a dictatorship in this country.” In May 1940, as the British army faced annihilation at Dunkirk, Taft insisted it was “no time for the people to be wholly absorbed in foreign battles.” It was “the New Deal which may leave us weak and unprepared for attack.”
America’s entry into World War II was, among other things, the triumph of a contrary view of the world. Even before Pearl Harbor, a majority of Americans, prodded by Roosevelt, came to view the advancing power of European fascism and Japanese authoritarian militarism as a threat not just to U.S. security but also to liberal democracy in general. While Roosevelt did warn (implausibly) of the Luftwaffe bombing the United States from bases in Latin America, his broader argument was less about immediate physical security than about the kind of world Americans wanted to live in.
Even if the United States faced no immediate threat of military attack, Roosevelt insisted, in his January 1940 State of the Union address, the world would be a “shabby and dangerous place to live in — yes, even for Americans to live in” if it were ruled “by force in the hands of a few.” To live as a lone island in such a world would be a nightmare. There were times Americans needed to defend not just their homeland, he told Congress in 1939, “but the tenets of faith and humanity on which their churches, their governments and their very civilization are founded. ... To save one we must now make up our minds to save all.”
The Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, formed in May 1940 by progressive Kansas newspaper editor William Allen White and including such prominent Democrats as Dean Acheson, declared the war in Europe was a “life and death struggle for every principle we cherish in America” and urged the United States to “throw its economic and moral weight on the side of the nations of Western Europe, great and small, that are struggling in battle for a civilized way of life.”
This was exactly what the men who formed the America First Committee opposed — and not because they spoke for some mass groundswell of working-class Americans. The poor and working class in these years were with FDR. The America First Committee was founded by a group of Yale students. (Kingman Brewster Jr., a future president of Yale, was a member, as was Potter Stewart, a future Supreme Court justice.) But it soon boasted an impressive list of wealthy and influential supporters that included textile magnate Henry Regnery; chairman of the board of Sears, retired Gen. Robert E. Wood; president of Vick Chemical Co., H. Smith Richardson; and diplomat and future governor of Connecticut Chester B. Bowles. Although they railed at “elites” and claimed to speak for real Americans, they were chiefly business executives who represented the nation’s commercial and industrial elites.
Unfortunately for the original America Firsters, most Americans rejected their arguments and embraced FDR’s liberal worldview. Especially after the fall of France, polling showed a majority of Americans wanted to send aid to Britain even at the risk of the United States being dragged into war. The America First Committee, despite its well-funded nationwide lobbying effort — it boasted 800,000 members in 400 chapters across the nation — lost the battle against Lend-Lease and all subsequent attempts to prevent the United States from becoming the world’s “arsenal of democracy.”
When the United States was finally drawn into the war, partly because of Pearl Harbor but also because of FDR’s increasingly belligerent approach to what he called the “bandit nations,” anti-interventionist Republican critics called it “the New Dealers’ War.” We like to think that great accomplishments in American history are the result of broad national consensus. More often they are the triumph of one worldview over another. American entry into World War II was the victory of a liberal worldview over an anti-interventionism rooted in a conservative anti-liberalism.
That victory remained largely intact throughout the Cold War and after. Although many conservatives eventually hopped on the internationalist bandwagon for the sake of fighting communism (and many on the left dissented from the liberal consensus), it was FDR’s worldview that guided Republican presidents from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Richard M. Nixon to Reagan to the two Bushes. It was the belief that the United States had both an interest and an obligation to support a liberal democratic, capitalist order and to do so by committing to alliances and deploying hundreds of thousands of GIs thousands of miles from American shores. Reagan’s foreign policy was in many ways simply a resumption of the muscular internationalism of FDR, his onetime hero, and the liberal anti-communism of Harry S. Truman and Acheson.
Not all Republicans have forgotten this legacy. Today, when people like Mitch McConnell, the GOP Senate leader, insist that what happens to Ukraine has “a direct and vital bearing on America’s national security and vital interests,” they are articulating this liberal worldview, the assumption that the United States has an interest in the peace and security of a predominantly liberal democratic Europe. If Americans care about what happens in Europe, then they must care about what happens in Ukraine. For should Ukraine fall to Russian control, it would move the line of confrontation between Russia and NATO hundreds of miles westward and allow Vladimir Putin to pursue his unconcealed ambition to restore Moscow’s hegemony in Eastern and Central Europe. Should Ukraine fall, the cost and risk of stopping Russia later will be much higher, including the risk of the United States having to confront Russia as it did during the Cold War. My Post colleague Marc Thiessen has thus advised Republicans to give Ukraine the weapons it needs now, lest they come to “own Ukraine’s military collapse” and leave a reelected Trump “with a weak hand.” Yet that sensible advice also rests on the assumption that at some point the United States may have to come to Europe’s defense against an aggressive Putin.
But what of those Republicans who don’t share that basic assumption? When Sen. J.D. Vance (Ohio) tells Stephen K. Bannon that “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” that statement rests on a different assumption, namely, that a liberal democratic Europe is of no value to the United States and that Americans should not be willing to fight for Germany and France any more than they should fight for Ukraine. It is the original America First position.
Like those of their 1930s forbears, today’s Republicans’ views of foreign policy are heavily shaped by what they consider the more important domestic battle against liberalism. Foreign policy issues are primarily weapons to be wielded against domestic enemies. Today’s Republicans depict their domestic opponents as, among other things, “communists” who are taking their orders from communist China. Republicans insist that Biden is a communist, that his election was a “communist takeover,” that his administration is a “communist regime.” It follows, then, that Biden must have a “pro-Chinese Communist Party (CCP) agenda,” as the powerful Republican chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Cathy McMorris Rodgers , has put it. “Communist China has their President ... China Joe,” Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted on Biden’s Inauguration Day in 2021. Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) has called the President “Beijing Biden.”
And just as World War II was the “New Dealers’ War,” so Ukraine is the war of “globalists.” Hawley, killing many birds with one stone, warns, like his America First forebears, that a cabal of “liberal globalists on the left” and “neoconservatives on the right”is trying to impose a “liberal empire” on the world to make “the world over in the image of New York and Silicon Valley.” What makes these “liberal globalists” and “neoconservatives” dangerous, Hawley insists, is that they are not pursuing a “truly nationalist foreign policy” because they themselves are not true Americans.
The GOP devotion to America First is merely the flip side of Trump’s “poison the blood” campaign. It is about the ascendancy of White Christian America and the various un-American ethnic and racial groups allegedly conspiring against it.
This has long been evident in Republican veneration of anti-liberal dictators such as Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orban. Conservatives applauded when Putin warned in 2013 that the “Euro-Atlantic countries” were “rejecting” the “Christian values” that were the “basis of Western civilization,” “denying moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious, and even sexual.” Patrick J. Buchanan put it best when he called Putin “one of us,” the voice of “conservatives, traditionalists and nationalists of all continents and countries,” and praised him for standing up against “the cultural and ideological imperialism of ... a decadent west.” The New York Times’ Christopher Caldwell has called Putin a “hero to populist conservatives around the world” because he refuses to submit to the U.S.-dominated liberal world order: “Vladimir Vladimirovich is not the president of a feminist NGO. He is not a transgender-rights activist.” He is “the pre-eminent statesman of our time.”
And what about Trump himself? Does Trump have such a fully formed ideological and strategic agenda? The answer may well be no. As his own former attorney general pointed out, Trump “is a consummate narcissist … who will always put his interests ahead of the country’s.” But Trump’s narcissism meshes well with the aims of those yearning to extricate the United States from its commitments in Europe. In his personal life, as people who know him tend to agree, Trump has no allies. As one Republican told the Wall Street Journal, “All relationships with Trump are one-way transactional and the day he decides that it’s no longer beneficial to him, folks are out the door.” It is hardly surprising that he takes the same approach in foreign policy. Trump does not value America’s allies any more than he values any other relationship, including his relationships with Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un. Trump does not see the world as divided between America’s friends and enemies but only between those who can help him, or hurt him, and those who can’t.
Trump has none of the reverence for America’s commitments overseas that Republican political leaders have shared since the 1940s, when even Michigan Republican Sen. Arthur Vandenberg, a true isolationist before Pearl Harbor, threw his support behind NATO. Ronald Reagan was famous for his close relationships with Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, Germany’s Helmut Kohl, Japan’s Yasuhiro Nakasone and even France’s François Mitterrand, a socialist.
If anything, it has been Democratic presidents who have raised the most concern about American commitments. In the late 1970s, Jimmy Carter openly toyed with pulling U.S. troops out of South Korea, and, more recently, Barack Obama’s feelings for the European allies were noticeably cooler than his predecessors’ — and he was very clear in his view that Ukraine was not a “vital” interest of the United States. But none has gone as far as Trump, Vance, Hawley and Colby in insisting that America should no longer be bound by its European alliance.
It doesn’t really matter what Trump believes, therefore. More important is what he doesn’t believe. Nor does he need to withdraw formally from NATO to introduce massive instability. It will be enough that he and his advisers cast significant doubt on the reliability of America’s Article 5 obligations. There is no such thing as a conditional guarantee. Once other nations realize that America’s commitment to defend treaty allies can no longer be relied upon, the whole configuration of power in the international system will change. All powers, whether friendly or hostile to the United States, will adjust accordingly.
In this respect, those Trump Republicans who wish to sever American commitments to allies are not only bringing back a 1930s worldview. If they take power, they will bring us back to a 1930s world.
Imagine that Kyiv falls a year or two into a second Trump presidency and that instead of responding by rushing to bolster the alliance’s defenses with a more substantial American commitment, Trump expresses relative indifference. How will the nations of Europe respond? Russian troops will be hundreds of miles closer to NATO countries and will share a nearly 700-mile border with Poland, but if Republicans have their way, the United States will do nothing. It will be a historic geopolitical revolution.
Under those circumstances, Europeans will have to make a choice. They must either adjust to the expanding hegemony of a militarized Russia led by a proven aggressor — accepting the world “as it is” in prescribed “realist” fashion. Or they must prepare themselves to stand up to it — without the United States.
The stakes will be highest and most immediate for the Baltic nations, which in the eyes of traditional Russian nationalists such as Putin are mere appendages of Russia, with significant Russian-speaking populations that may at any time demand “protection” from Moscow, as the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia demanded protection from Berlin in the 1930s. The Baltic states have never enjoyed sovereign independence in periods of Russian hegemony and owe their independence today entirely to American and NATO guarantees.
Then there is Poland, which during the Cold War and repeatedly in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries was either subjugated or partitioned by Moscow. Will the Poles again go quietly into that good Russian night once they have been left deliberately “exposed,” as Colby put it, to the full weight of Russian power without the United States or NATO to back them up?
The most important nation in this transformed Europe will be Germany. Germans will quickly find themselves faced with a terrible choice. Either they try to remain in a fundamentally pacifist mode, as they have been since 1945, or they once again become a great military power. To defend themselves in the absence of an American guarantee, Germans will face a staggering uphill climb to match Russia’s conventional-weapons capabilities. But they will also have to address Russia’s overwhelming nuclear superiority, which Putin has not been shy about threatening to use even against the nuclear-armed United States. Will the Germans rely on British and French nuclear capacities to deter Russia, since they can no longer count on the American nuclear umbrella? Or will they choose to become a nuclear power themselves?
Indeed, should the United States make clear that it is no longer bound by its security guarantees, the likelihood is that other industrialized nations will quickly turn to nuclear weapons to try to make up for the sudden gap in their defenses. Japan could build hundreds of nuclear weapons in a very short time if it chose — or do the new America Firsters believe that the Japanese will find reassuring America’s abandonment of the similar treaty commitments in Europe? We will be living in a world of many heavily armed powers engaged in a multipolar arms race, ever poised for conflict — in short, the world that existed in the 1930s, only this time with nuclear weapons. But yes, they will be spending more than 2 percent of their GDP on defense.
Who can say when all this will come a cropper for the United States? Putin’s first act of aggression was in Georgia in 2008; his second was in 2014, when he invaded Crimea and eastern Ukraine; his third was in 2022 when, contrary to almost everyone’s expectations, he invaded all of Ukraine. But his cautious probing, if you can call it that, was in the context of a continuing American commitment to European security.
And how long before China, watching America abandon its allies in Europe, asks whether Americans still plan to live up to any of their commitments anywhere? Even if one believes that “Asia is more important than Europe,” does it strengthen the Asian allies to abandon the European allies? Hitler also hoped the United States would focus exclusively on Asia and leave Europe to him. It is no surprise that among those most frightened by Trump’s talk of abandoning NATO is Taiwan.
An older generation of Americans, many of whom may vote for Trump this year, may not live to see the consequences — those crises will fall on their children and grandchildren. But they can be sure of this: If they vote for a return to the 1930s, posterity is not going to mistake them for America’s “greatest generation.”
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