Double our military budget

What does “America First” mean, for America and the world? Donald Trump has characteristically managed to find a phrase that is offensive and alarming without understanding its historical meaning or strategic implications. But essentially it means foolishly ignoring danger until it becomes overwhelming. So let’s try leading Washington away from it by example.

In one sense the duty of America’s chief executive to put America first is both clear and compelling. Trump is President of the United States, not of the world, not of Canada and not just of those Americans who voted for him. And national security is the first duty of government because if you cannot protect your society and political system, nothing else you want or try to do matters. As I’ve noted before, and yes it’s another reductio ad Hitler, it didn’t matter how progressive or enlightened Norway’s domestic policies were in 1940 when the Nazi paratroop/amphibious blitzkrieg swept away their unprepared military and politicians and installed the loathsome puppet Vidkun Quisling.

Advocates of limited government like myself believe that we create governments to safeguard our natural rights. The job of the state is to combat force and fraud against us, not to employ either on our behalf to enrich ourselves at the expense of our fellows. But the prohibition on force and fraud, however convincing on moral or utilitarian grounds, is not self-enforcing in practice domestically or internationally.

The government must maintain police and courts to deter and punish crime by individuals or small groups, something most libertarians readily concede. But it must also maintain armed forces to suppress insurrection and combat invasion. And while virtually nobody disputes the need for the government to be ready to repel actual invasion, the actual history of the “America First” notion confirms bloodily how imprudent it is to wait until enemy forces cross your borders or drop from the sky instead of assembling allies and fighting in the first rather than last ditch.

In Tuesday’s National Post Charles Krauthammer noted the disastrous policies and shameful end of the mostly Republican 1930s “America First” organization that insisted that the gathering storm clouds that burst over China in 1937, and Britain, France, Poland and others in 1939/40 were no concern of the United States … until they also burst over Pearl Harbor. But the phrase actually originated with Democratic president Woodrow Wilson, who insisted that Germany’s aggressive war that had already engulfed Britain, France, Russia and others was no concern of the United States. In a Washington speech in April 1915 Wilson said “Our whole duty for the present, at any rate, is summed up in the motto ‘America First: Let us think of America before we think of Europe.’” Thus when war predictably came to his nation, via submarines and German efforts to foster a Mexican invasion, plus clear recognition that if Britain, France and Russia went under North America would be next, Wilson had not prepared Americans militarily or politically for the fact that other people’s wars were their business because aggression is a universal wolf whose appetite grows with the eating.

Biblically we are our brother’s keeper. Geopolitically we are not. I can think of no conceivable global and moral structure in which we would have the duty or the power Wilson arrogantly claimed to “teach the Latin American republics to elect good men.” But we cannot be indifferent to genocide or aggression elsewhere, on moral and on practical grounds.

Trump is very wrong to unearth this conceptual zombie. And his inaugural claim that America’s wealth had been redistributed abroad was inaccurate and petulant. But America’s allies, pointedly including Canada, have rather played Uncle Sam for a chump. We have proclaimed our compassion and sophistication but spent far too little on defence in a turbulent world while shrugging off gathering threats.

In that sense we have very much adopted a “Canada First” approach, selfish, condescending and imprudent. And while we are rightly horrified to see President Trump take the same view, if we were really serious about a secure and open world we would spend at least 3 per cent of our GDP on defence and remove our more offensive trade barriers such as agricultural quotas. If we want to influence Washington, in some limited but useful way, let us first and foremost look to our own defences, immediately doubling our military budget so we can send more than sanctimonious words and a few blue berets when trouble looms abroad and pulling our heads out of the sand so we can see it when it does.

WE HAVE VERY MUCH ADOPTED A ‘CANADA FIRST’ APPROACH.