Earlier presidents would recognise—and even approve of—“America First”

Read the document and it is easy to see why. It accuses the European Union of undermining free speech and political liberty, demands that European nations “take primary responsibility” for their own defence and, reaching for the dog whistle, claims that, because of mass migration, Europe faces “civilisational erasure”. The European response was similarly sharp-edged. One prominent British commentator thundered that the NSS “repudiates seven decades of American foreign policy and amounts to a declaration of political war against liberal democracies in Europe”.

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Their anger is understandable: the NSS looks in parts like a “shock jock” text intended to offend. But while the language is unprecedentedly wounding, it has mostly been said before, though more gently: generations of American presidents have called for Europe to get its act together on defence spending. Arguably, the more interesting question is about quite where this document positions the foreign policy of this administration. Where is President Donald Trump on the spectrum between isolationism and internationalism? And is Mr Trump’s world view really so different and distinct from those of his predecessors in the Oval Office?

So let’s go back in time, not a mere seven decades, but 250 years to the foundation of the American Republic in 1776. America’s first president, George Washington, stated in his farewell address that the new republic should extend commercial relations with foreign nations while having “as little political connection with them as possible”. He also warned against “permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world” and urged that America avoid being dragged into the “frequent” and “remote” controversies of Europe. Mr Trump could certainly claim that his suspicion—if not his outspoken degradation—of NATO fits this mould.

This policy of non-interventionism and avoidance of permanent alliances largely prevailed through the whole of the 19th century and into the early years of the 20th. Even as Europe descended into the first world war, President Woodrow Wilson maintained American neutrality throughout his first term and won re-election in 1916 on the back of a promise to stay out of the war. But American deaths on the Lusitania, sunk by a German submarine, together with the interception of the Zimmermann telegram, a massively misconceived German attempt to encourage Mexico to attack America, shifted American public opinion and opened the way to Wilson declaring war on Germany in April 1917. So America, after 140 years of non-interventionism, finally became entangled in a European war.

Despite achieving a quick victory in that war, the American public were not converted to the merits of getting involved in Europe. On the contrary: public and government alike were appalled by the high cost of the war, in terms of both human losses and the financial hit. The Senate, reflecting this prevailing sentiment, rejected the Treaty of Versailles, which included the League of Nations covenant. And the Great Depression inevitably deepened the isolationist mood and fuelled a series of Neutrality Acts in the 1930s, intended to bar America from providing personnel, weapons, loans or credit to countries at war. America then stayed out of the early years of the second world war until the Japanese attack on its naval base at Pearl Harbour.

Thereafter came the so-called Golden Age. American statesmen, with the help of one or two Brits like John Maynard Keynes, led the creation of the rules-based international order and the great post-war multilateral institutions: the United Nations, the World Bank, the IMF and NATO. And over the following 75 years, more people across the globe were lifted out of poverty than in any period in human history.

But this is only part of the story. Non-interventionism and neutrality were primarily about avoiding involvement in Europe. Nearer home, America has often been opportunist, interventionist and expansionist. The 19th century was the age of land grabs driven by the concept of Manifest Destiny, the belief that America was divinely ordained to expand its territory from the Atlantic to the Pacific, spreading democracy, Protestantism and American civilisation. With the Louisiana Purchase from France of 1803, the country doubled its size. The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 declared that the western hemisphere—the “backyard”—was an American sphere of influence and warned the Europeans against colonisation. The Mexican–American war in the 1840s ended with substantial American territorial gains. The Spanish-American war of 1898 resulted in America gaining Puerto Rico, Guam and, temporarily, the Philippines. And in the early 20th century President Theodore Roosevelt sanctioned several military interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean in pursuit of political stability and American commercial interests.

If one adds up all the years when America hovered between non-interventionism and isolationism, they amount to roughly two-thirds of the time that America has actually existed. American internationalism has been, across the breadth of the country’s history, the exception rather than the norm.

But equally, for most of its history, America has behaved in its neighbourhood like an imperial power, intervening politically, economically and at times militarily while seeking commercial and security gains. In the same vein, Mr Trump has openly spoken of his ambitions to acquire Greenland, for no reason other than to further American interests.

An insistence that Europe should sort out its own problems combined with an aggressive pursuit of America First in Latin America: does that sound familiar? Recent events in Venezuela perhaps spring to mind. It appears Mr Trump’s return to the White House marks less a new direction for American foreign policy, more a resurrection of America’s past. If American presidents of the 19th century, gathered in that Oval Office in the heavens, were able to browse the latest NSS, they might recognise what they were reading and say “That looks about right”.

Kim Darroch, Baron Darroch of Kew, was Britain’s ambassador to America from 2016 to 2019.