"America First" policy was ignorantly caricatured as isolationism, but in the end, nothing leaves the American people as isolated as globalism.
China, Russia, and the other bad actors swooping in to capitalize on Biden's hideous debacle in Afghanistan have a valid point buried in their opportunistic rhetoric: governments that claim not to act in their own national interests are irrational, and therefore undependable.
There is a remorseless logic to the arguments employed by the Chinese Communist Party to build their new worldwide Axis of Evil. They're unabashedly nationalist, China First all the way, but they present themselves as tough but honest and reliable business partners.
China tells its clients that dealing with the Western world is dealing with hysterics and schizophrenics, liable to abandon their allies at the drop of a hat, because the pursuit of goals other than national interest makes them unstable and unpredictable.
Sign on with Team China, on the other hand, and you'll never get screwed over by sudden shifts in domestic politics. Regimes that cut deals with Beijing can do whatever it takes to stay in power, without any human rights judgments. China will protect you from Western sanctions.
It's a path of darkness that we would not want to emulate in full, but we do need to understand its appeal, and see why disasters like the Afghanistan nation-building project and its clown-show grand finale help the Axis of Evil land its sales pitch.
America First is even more important because we are a representative republic. Dictatorships (and would-be dictators among the Western Left) always criticize free nations as irrational, inefficient, and hysterical compared to disciplined, centrally controlled authoritarianism.
The citizens of free nations should insist on governments that pursue their national interest with clarity to counter the authoritarian critique. Of course we should want government that puts our safety and security first for domestic reasons, but it helps us internationally too.
America First doesn't mean isolation - it means engaging rationally with national interest clearly defined and emphasized, to reach sustainable agreements which are less subject to the shifting winds of public opinion. It is the antithesis of nation-building debacles.
In the end, America Last policy is unpredictable and unsustainable. It's subjective and mercurial. It leads to the sort of murky goals and muddied reporting we got out of Afghanistan for decades - officials lying to each other AND the American people to sustain an illusion.
With an America First perspective, the importance and purpose of the military becomes clear. You don't have politicians looking at a gun and seeing a hammer, screwdriver, and spoon. Use of the military becomes rare, swift, and decisive - nothing else suits our national interest.
We are passing from an age of political illusions and ideological fantasies, which lasted much longer than it should have, into a world where clarity of purpose is vital. We cannot afford a globalist government of shrieking hysterics while our ice-cold enemies are playing chess.
And we're not doing our allies any favors with America Last, either. It's illogical and unsustainable. It's ALWAYS going to end with frantic politicians pointing fingers at everyone else for their failures, and as Biden is demonstrating, that's awful for our alliances. /end
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