‘America First’ recalls global power rise

▶ Experts discuss link of Trump’s credo to WWI isolationists

World War I sparked America’s emergence as a global power, when it flexed its muscles to end the bloody stalemate in the trenches in Europe.

A century after the November 11, 1918 armistice, debate still rages over the US role in the world and the country is led by a president whose credo – “America First” – harkens back to that of postWorld War I isolationists.

“The debate that comes at the end of the First World War is ‘Are America’s interests best served by joining international organizations like the League of Nations?’” said Michael Neiberg, a professor at the US Army War College.

“Or is America best served by staying away from these organizations and pursuing its interests alone?” added Neiberg, author of The Path to War: How the First World War Created Modern America.

For Geoffrey Wawro, professor of military history at the University of North Texas, “World War I puts the United States into the mainstream of world affairs in a leadership position.”

In the conflict’s immediate aftermath, President Woodrow Wilson championed the League of Nations designed to keep the peace.

But Henry Cabot Lodge, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, saw the world body as a threat to US sovereignty and engineered a rejection of US membership by the Senate.

“Even though we retreated into isolationism, the lingering impact of US intervention is never erased because we’re just such a strong power,” said Wawro, author of The Mad Catastrophe, a book about the outbreak of World War I.

Echoes of that Wilson-Lodge dispute can still be heard today as Trump steers a foreign policy course unlike those followed by recent occupants of the Oval Office.

Trump has made his disdain for global institutions clear along with his antipathy to multilateral trade agreements such as NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Trump has withdrawn or announced plans to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, Iran nuclear deal, UN Human Rights Council and the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

“We will never surrender America’s sovereignty to an unelected, unaccountable global bureaucracy,” he told the UN General Assembly last month.