Introduction

America First did not emerge in a vacuum. It arose from a country stretched across two decades of war, frustrated by the growing distance between what leaders promised abroad and what citizens felt at home. Although its rise was shaped by a broad set of political, economic, and cultural frustrations, not security alone, this article focuses specifically on its security dimension: how two decades of foreign intervention reshaped the American understanding of safety and power. The aim is not to cast judgement on the doctrine but to situate it within the long arc of U.S. strategy, where periods of moralised and expansive engagement repeatedly give way to calls for restraint, reprioritisation, and a return to concrete interests.

Historical Context: From Idealism to Exhaustion

The attacks of 9/11 gave President George W. Bush an unprecedented degree of political latitude. The event was not only a national tragedy but a psychological rupture that collapsed the distance between ‘there’ and ‘here,’ exposing the homeland to the violence of global politics. In the days that followed, Americans experienced a unity rarely seen in recent memory - anger, grief, and patriotism fused into a single national purpose, enabling Bush to direct public fear outward and build support for military action in Afghanistan and later Iraq (Jacobson, 2010).

9/11 created a powerful narrative: that threats originating thousands of miles away could strike Americans at home, making intervention abroad appear not only legitimate but necessary. The U.S. had long maintained an expansive view of what affected its security, but the shock of 9/11 stretched this logic further still; if danger could emerge from seemingly marginal regions, then few areas could be dismissed as irrelevant. This perception granted Washington extraordinary freedom to act globally in the name of national protection.

One must also consider the weight of fear carried by the president himself. Bush’s remaining years in office were shadowed by the dread of another attack, one that could devastate both lives and his credibility (Lynch, 2020). History offers a useful parallel in President Truman’s experience with the ‘loss of China’: the shock prompted a reassessment of vulnerability that widened U.S. interests and commitments, as credibility came to be treated as a strategic imperative (Gaddis, 2005). Similarly, Bush could be seen to have governed under the pressure that any future attack would be judged as a failure of vigilance. Pre-emption thus became policy (Lynch, 2020), and the moral certainty of the War on Terror provided political cover for almost any action undertaken in its name.

Yet as the wars dragged on, the initial unity fractured (Jacobson, 2010). American troops continued to die in distant deserts and mountains while promised victories failed to materialise. A mission framed as justice became one of occupation and insurgency. Public sentiment shifted from vengeance to confusion: why were young Americans dying in countries most citizens could barely locate? The revelation that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction deepened the sense of betrayal (Jacobson, 2010). The fervour of 2001 faded into exhaustion and doubt.

This fatigue outlived the Bush administration. President Obama entered office and even as U.S. troops withdrew from Iraq in 2011, the deeper logic of global engagement endured. The war in Afghanistan continued throughout Obama’s presidency (2009–2017), drone campaigns expanded markedly after 2009, and new interventions appeared in Libya in 2011 and against ISIS from 2014 (Krieg, 2016). Obama changed the tone but not the premise: that America’s security required constant foreign intervention. 

Almost two decades after 9/11, the emotional arc had come full circle, from unity and defiance to fatigue and resentment. The American people, disillusioned by decades of promises that foreign wars would make them safer, began to reject the moral narratives that once justified global leadership. Against this backdrop of exhaustion, Donald Trump’s first administration’s National Security Strategy advanced what it called an America First approach: a commitment to redirect American power inward, to prioritise the homeland over distant commitments, to stop spending blood and treasure on causes that deliver no tangible security benefit (White House, 2017).

Yet the public mood that had given America First its initial traction did not fade with Trump’s departure. Instead, it deepened. By the time President Joe Biden assumed office, that fatigue had become generational. The image of the Taliban reclaiming Kabul after twenty years of U.S. occupation left many Americans questioning the point of it all. Ordinary citizens asked themselves what those twenty years had achieved, why so many young Americans had died, and where the vast financial resources committed to the mission had ultimately gone. That same year, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reignited fears of yet another open-ended conflict abroad, with billions in taxpayer money once again sent overseas. For many Americans, the details of geography or moral justification mattered little; Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine, all blurred into a single pattern: distant wars, endless spending, uncertain returns.

America First in Action: The Old Logic of a New Deal

The Logic

Although America First is often described as unprecedented, it in fact echoes a deeper rhythm in U.S. foreign policy. Since the Second World War, American strategy has oscillated between morally framed commitments, seen under Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, George W. Bush, and to a degree Obama, and moments of selective, interest-driven restraint under leaders like Eisenhower, Nixon, and now Trump. The latter questioned either the need for moralistically framed open-ended commitments, as under Nixon and later Trump, or the reliance on costly methods, as under Eisenhower, arguing instead that U.S. power should be used selectively, in ways that produce concrete returns for the United States at the lowest possible cost. Trump’s transactionalism therefore represents not a break with history but a revival of this alternative tradition, one that prioritises strategic returns, cost-effectiveness, and negotiating leverage.

While this underlying logic of prioritisation has recurred across different administrations, its practical expression has always varied with the president who wields it and the strategic context in which it is applied. In Trump’s case, this approach is now explicitly articulated in the recently published National Security Strategy of the second Trump administration (White House, 2025). Rather than advocating withdrawal, the strategy frames American engagement as something to be disciplined, prioritised, and recalibrated (White House, 2025). The United States is presented as the pre-eminent global power, but leadership is no longer defined by the maintenance of permanent obligations or by abstract appeals to responsibility (White House, 2025). Power is treated instrumentally, as a resource to be deployed in pursuit of clearly defined national interests, rather than as a moral symbol or an end in itself (White House, 2025). In practice, this recalibration is accompanied by a marked geographical narrowing of strategic focus, with the Western Hemisphere elevated as the primary arena of American security concern (White House, 2025). Engagement is thus not abandoned; it is re-priced. Every action abroad is assessed through a simple metric, which may be summed up as - what does this deliver for the United States?

This marks a deliberate shift from obligation-based to outcome-based security. Previous administrations justified U.S. involvement abroad as a means of sustaining the ‘rules-based order,’ projecting stability as a public good. The Trump administration reverses that equation. It treats the international system not as a community of shared responsibility but as a marketplace of interests where alliances, institutions, and interventions are instruments of leverage. Leadership, in this sense, is not a moral duty but a negotiation, one in which America expects returns commensurate with its contributions.

The Deal in Practice

The practical expression of America First is best understood by returning to an earlier moment when the United States confronted similar dilemmas of cost, fatigue, and overstretch. Richard Nixon entered office in 1969 facing a long, unpopular war in Vietnam, much as Trump’s first administration began in 2017 with U.S. forces still engaged in a long war in Afghanistan that had been ongoing since 2001, and his second in 2025 with two active crises, Ukraine (since 2022) and Gaza (since 2023), demanding sustained American attention. In all three cases, the public was weary of distant commitments and sceptical that such obligations served U.S. interests.

While operating in different geopolitical contexts and executing their strategies in distinct ways, both presidents responded with a comparable logic: reduce exposure, rebalance burdens, and use diplomacy to lower strategic costs. Nixon turned to détente to reduce the temperature of confrontation with the Soviet Union (Gaddis, 2005); Trump likewise pursued negotiated channels with the Taliban to enable an eventual U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan (Muzaffar, Shah and Karamat, 2020) and opened talks with Russia to create diplomatic space for ending the war in Ukraine (Roth, Sabbagh and Sauer, 2025). Nixon shifted burdens through Vietnamisation (Gaddis, 2005); Trump pressed European allies to assume a greater share of responsibility for Ukraine (Dunn and Webber, 2025). Nixon used economic coercion through the Nixon Shock (Gaddis, 2005), Trump deployed tariffs (Kim, 2025) as his preferred instruments of leverage. In both cases, the strategy married reassurance with pressure, engaging adversaries where useful while compelling partners to shoulder more of the bill, even if the balance between coercion, reassurance, and institutional discipline varied significantly between administrations.

This emphasis on aligning commitments with capabilities also shapes how America First employs force. The 2025 bombing of Iranian nuclear-enrichment facilities under Operation Midnight Hammer (Rodgers, 2025) illustrates this logic: a limited, high-precision strike designed to neutralise a specific threat without triggering a broader conflict or long-term deployment. Rather than launching a prolonged campaign, the United States executed a rapid operation, and withdrew. Critics feared escalation, but the mission ended as quickly as it began. It was America First in practice: force used not to remake regions but to solve discrete problems with maximum effect and minimal burden.

Economic statecraft follows the same pattern. Trump’s pressure on NATO allies to increase defence spending, his use of tariffs as bargaining tools, and his readiness to turn economic interdependence into political leverage reflect a consistent principle: U.S. foreign policy should deliver tangible returns. While the tools differ from Nixon’s era, the structural logic is strikingly similar. Just as Nixon used the 1971 suspension of the dollar’s convertibility into gold and a temporary import surcharge to force economic adjustments from Europe and Japan (Gaddis, 2005), Trump employed tariffs and trade threats to extract concessions from partners dependent on the U.S. market (Kim, 2025). 

Future Trajectories

How this strategic logic will evolve remains uncertain. The long history of American strategy suggests that two types of forces can redirect even the most deliberate presidential course. The first is external shocks. Some may remember how George W. Bush campaigned on becoming the ‘education president,’ focused primarily on domestic affairs. Few could have imagined that 9/11 would transform him into the defining foreign-policy president of his era. America First, too, could be shaped not only by the logic that animates it but by the crises and contingencies the United States has yet to encounter.

The second is self-inflicted misjudgements: leaders may overestimate their leverage, misread public tolerance for foreign engagement, or be pulled by ideological impulses that diverge from their domestic base’s preference for ‘butter over guns.’ In such cases, the danger lies in a president miscalculating where the public’s appetite for foreign involvement truly ends. Trump’s recent abduction of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro illustrates both the appeal and the potential limits of this logic. Executed as a covert, time-bound operation involving a small special-forces footprint (Sabbagh, 2026), the mission reflected America First’s preference for decisive action at minimal visible cost. Yet the administration’s subsequent rhetoric about shaping Venezuela’s political future (Faguy, 2026) highlights the potential tension within this approach: while possibly avoiding the costs of occupation, it nevertheless entails an ongoing exercise of influence that may test public tolerance for sustained, if indirect, foreign entanglement.

Such miscalculations are not confined to the methods of intervention alone, but extend to the ambitions that animate them. Past U.S. presidents have indeed harboured, and at times pursued, expansionist ambitions (Zakaria, 1998). Theodore Roosevelt stands as a revealing precedent, not for the scale of his ambitions but for the discipline with which he exercised them: he expanded in the Caribbean where the costs were low and the strategic returns clear, yet exercised caution in Asia where expansion risked great-power confrontation (Zakaria, 1998). Trump’s handling of Greenland may prove the decisive test of whether a similar restraint endures. Pursued cautiously, it would reinforce America First’s logic of calibrated leverage and could result in the largest territorial acquisition since U.S. Secretary of State (1861-1869) William Henry Seward’s successful negotiation of the Alaska purchase.

Pursued coercively, however, it risks misreading domestic tolerance for foreign entanglement and, more consequentially, awakening a long-dormant force in international politics. By openly threatening to annex the territory of a dependent European ally, the United States risks transforming Europe from a divided and dependent continent, long kept under Washington’s strategic wing, into a unified actor compelled to stand on its own. As Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever recently articulated, Europe now confronts the distinction between partnership and subordination, between dignity and dependency (Euractiv, 2026). A sleeping giant, once roused by the realisation that reliance has shaded into vassalage, may not easily be lulled back, and its awakening would mark not an extension of American power, but the moment when leverage gives way to liability.

Conclusion 

Seen together, these patterns clarify why America First resonates today. Like Nixon’s adjustment after Vietnam, it emerges from a period in which the United States fought prolonged wars, expanded commitments, and justified costly missions through increasingly abstract appeals to global responsibility. America First responded by seeking to re-anchor U.S. foreign policy in concrete interests, measurable returns, and clearer priorities. It is not a rupture but a revival of an older strategic instinct: to match commitments with capabilities, to use power selectively, and to treat influence as leverage rather than obligation. In this sense, Trump’s approach reflects another swing of a familiar pendulum in the long American experiment between moralised engagement and transactional power.