What Trump Doesn’t Understand About ‘America First’
In the summer of 1930, the U.S. secretaries of war and the Navy developed War Plan Red, a 94-page document laying out detailed plans to strangle the naval and trade capabilities of the United Kingdom in a hypothetical future that involved the U.S. and U.K. at war with each other. The centerpiece was a full-scale land invasion of Canada, a seaborne attack on Halifax, a blockade of the Panama Canal, the capture of British possessions throughout the Caribbean and the Bahamas and Bermuda, and a direct challenge of the Royal Navy by U.S. naval forces in the Atlantic.
Far from the sepia-tinted account of transatlantic relations that is so often evoked today, the union between the English-speaking nations that emerged after the First World War was neither fulsome nor uncritical. Rather, the experiences of the war provoked deep antipathy and suspicion among American decision makers toward the British empire. And the plans, though never approved by Congress or the president, were not merely theoretical—the U.S. built air bases, camouflaged as civilian airfields, along the Canadian border. Only after the threat of Nazism emerged in the mid-1930s was War Plan Red quietly shelved. It was not declassified until the 1970s.
War Plan Red’s existence is a useful reminder that so much of what people assume to be the granite-like permanence of the postwar transatlantic community—forged by the horrors of the Second World War and the exigencies of the Cold War—is in fact more recent and, as we are now discovering, more fragile. The misty-eyed nostalgia for a yesteryear of American and European unity has always been based on sentiment as much as reality. From President Dwight Eisenhower’s threat to crash the British pound during the Suez Crisis of 1956 to America’s opposition to French attempts to maintain control in Vietnam and Algeria, the decline of European power while the U.S. emerged as the undisputed hegemon was marked by naked rivalry as much as it was by the amity of “the West.”
So Donald Trump is drawing, however unwittingly, on historical precedent when he brandishes his own imperial designs on Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal. When he expresses his suspicions about Europe—the European Union, according to Trump, “was formed in order to screw the United States”—he does so too. The NATO Summit earlier this summer—an “orchestrated grovel at the feet of Donald Trump,” as the British journalist Martin Kettle put it—demonstrated how unbalanced the relationship has become. More recently, the Alaska summit at which Trump gave Russian President Vladimir Putin the red-carpet treatment only underscored the point. They discussed Putin’s invasion in the heart of Europe without a single European leader present. European leaders got what looked instead like a school photo in the White House alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—a row of school pupils holding hands to confront an overbearing headmaster. Perhaps the past 80 years of American transatlantic leadership—which established one of the greatest security alliances in history and built a democratic bulwark against the threat of Soviet Communism—will turn out to be the exception, not the rule.
Anyone listening attentively to J. D. Vance’s broadsides earlier this year at the Munich Security Conference and the AI Action Summit in Paris will have noticed a new mix of menace and petulance from the U.S. government. In addition to delivering a familiar critique of Europe’s sluggish and overregulated economy, the speeches signaled a willingness to use American power—and European dependency on that power—to interfere in Europe’s internal democratic politics: “The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia; it’s not China; it’s not any other external actor,” Vance said in Munich. “What I worry about is the threat from within.”
After Vance endorsed Germany’s far-right AfD party and met its leader in the run-up to the German election, Chancellor Friedrich Merz did not mince his words: “The interventions from Washington were no less dramatic and drastic and ultimately outrageous than the interventions we have seen from Moscow.”
From the July 2025 Issue: The talented Mr. Vance
At a rally in Poland days before the presidential election there, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem seemed to suggest that the U.S. would continue to support Poland only if Trump’s preferred candidate—the conservative historian Karol Nawrocki—were to win: “He needs to be the next president of Poland. Do you understand me?” Noem said, adding that if Nawrocki was elected, Poland “will continue to have a U.S. presence here, a military presence.” (Nawrocki did win, and was inaugurated earlier this month.)
All of this makes the Trump-Vance agenda very clear. Far from espousing an isolationist “America First” doctrine, when it comes to Europe, the Trump administration is seeking to enforce a doctrine of “America Everywhere,” in which political parties that share the same nativist outlook are actively supported by Washington, and those who do not are ceaselessly criticized.
Like so many Europeans of my generation, I am a product of transatlanticism. My father was one of the lucky few children to be moved to safety in the United States during the height of the Nazi bombardment of London; my Dutch mother was released from a Japanese-run prisoner-of-war camp in Indonesia following the U.S. victory over Japan. I studied as a post graduate at the University of Minnesota, and did a stint as a fact-checker at The Nation magazine in the early 1990s. Later, as an EU trade negotiator and member of the European Parliament, I was part of an effort, working with successive U.S. administrations, to build a rules-based global trading system. As Britain’s deputy prime minister from 2010 to 2015, I worked with the Obama administration on an array of shared endeavors, including counterterrorist operations and commercial agreements. And recently I spent seven years as a senior executive at Meta, on the front line of the technological revolution—and blazing controversies—emanating from Silicon Valley.
In short, a world in which Europe and America don’t walk tall and in tandem with each other, even when they disagree, is hard for me to contemplate. I fervently believe that the world is safer, stronger, and wealthier because of this unique relationship. But now is the time to imagine the previously unimaginable: a world in which deep-rooted transatlanticism gives way to shallow transactionalism.
Part of what is pulling the relationship apart is, ironically, the demonstrable nature of America’s supremacy over Europe, a supremacy delivered in no small part by the statecraft of previous U.S. administrations: an open trading system built on the undisputed role of the dollar as a global reserve currency; the deployment of overwhelming defense and security capabilities; the gravitational pull of a world-leading university system (despite, for now at least, the current administration’s attack on American academe); and economic prowess built on American domination of both international finance and technology. The U.S. has, on all of these benchmarks, comprehensively pulled ahead of Europe. When I served as deputy prime minister, the GDPs of Europe and the U.S. were roughly the same; today, the U.S. GDP is almost one and a half times larger.
No wonder some Silicon Valley investors now talk of Europe as a “dead” place—an adjective I’ve heard in various conversations—as if a continent of 500 million people and centuries of scientific and cultural discovery can be dismissed as little more than a hemispheric museum. In many ways, the tech elite is merely repeating the mockery directed at supposed European decadence by generations of American commentators (H. L. Mencken’s caustic assertion that “there are two kinds of Europeans: the smart ones, and those who stayed behind” comes to mind). Of course, their scorn has been fully matched by a long tradition of European snobbery toward supposedly uncouth Americans.
Michael Scherer: Trump says he decides what ‘America first’ means
Yet the divisions seem starker now. Rather than gentle ribbing between Old World and new, or specific disagreements between otherwise aligned allies, they are increasingly framed in zero-sum terms. A new class of American nationalists frets about the end of Western civilization, advancing a blood-and-soil ideology that elevates faith, family, and fealty to the nation over democratic ideals. Rather than seeking cooperation between political systems regardless of who is in power, they seek to elevate their ideological bedfellows at the expense of everyone else. It is the subjugation of diplomacy to virulent partisanship, egged on by outriders in business and politics who smell opportunity and personal advancement in populism.
A persistent theme in the U.S.’s critique of Europe has to do with America’s culture of free speech, derived from the First Amendment. A standard trope among the MAGA faithful is that Europe is a continent cowed by censorship. But this argument reeks of double standards: In Trump’s America, saying the wrong thing can get you defunded—or deported. Everyday travelers to America now nervously expunge anything from their social-media feeds that could be interpreted as criticism of the Trump administration for fear of being arraigned at the border. So much for free speech.
For all the flaws in Europe’s approach to free expression, European universities do not typically advise American and other foreign students to delete private messages for fear of attracting the attention of the authorities. Yet Europeans would be well advised to recognize that there is a significant kernel of truth in some of the critiques. Recent EU laws governing online content are a s
