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The primary slogan of the Trump movement is the simple, now-iconic appeal to "Make America Great Again." Indeed, "MAGA" is so ubiquitous that it is now a metonym for the movement itself. But if the Trump movement has a second catchphrase after "MAGA," it would be "America First." Donald Trump himself routinely vows that he is an "America First" politician. Myriad Republican congressional candidates now tout themselves as "America First," typically with an eye toward securing a coveted Trump endorsement. And many prominent conservative commentators, often with close ties to Trump's orbit, frequently beat the drums of "America First."
But what exactly is meant by "America First"?
In a literal sense, "America First" is one of the most anodyne, uncontroversial political slogans in decades. It is, or at least should be, axiomatic that the United States ought to place its own interests first in "everything" it does: from its trade deals to its immigration policy to its diplomacy and foreign policy to its membership in international institutions, and so on. To pursue an "America First" foreign policy, then, is to make decisions through the singular lens of what is best for the U.S. national interest. Such a foreign policy approach is often dubbed "realist," but it is also just commonsense.
Indeed, because it is such a basic analytical prism, "America First" does not necessarily get us very far when it comes to making actual foreign policy decisions. Any sober, national interest-centered foreign policy should look skeptically at ideological interventionism, whether it takes the form of dogged neoconservatism or starry-eyed liberal humanitarianism. Crucially, however, "America First" should look just as skeptically at ideologically driven foreign policy from the other end of the spectrum -- meaning, doctrinaire isolationism.
The Trump administration intuited this, and the 45th president implemented this understanding in practice quite well. The "Trump Doctrine" was neither neoconservative nor isolationist; it rejected such an absurd false choice, opting instead for a narrower, national interest-centric foreign policy that eschewed ideological excess from "any" direction. Sometimes, that pragmatic calculus militated in favor of American restraint on the world stage. But sometimes, it militated in favor of decisive American action -- just ask Qasem Soleimani.