If we put ‘America First,’ we’d have to stop sending money, weapons overseas

The history of U.S. foreign policy is, in part, a story of the ebb and flow of isolationist sentiment, sometimes elaborated into an ideology of “America First.” History also confirms that “America First” was America at its worst: the slogan of pre-World War II isolationists who urged the Roosevelt administration to avoid Europe’s troubles. The United States’ postwar rise to global responsibility marginalized such ideology – until Donald Trump rode to the White House in 2016 decrying the allegedly unfair costs of U.S. security commitments and trade agreements, then governed accordingly.

So it is no surprise that opposition to the Biden administration’s request for $40 billion in aid to Ukraine would re-emerge, mostly in Republican circles, or that the objections would boil down to “what’s in it for us?” The Democratic-led House of Representatives approved the assistance with a large bipartisan majority on Tuesday, but all 57 votes against it came from the GOP’s ranks. The measure is expected to pass the Senate; it is backed by the bulk of the GOP, including Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who made a surprise solidarity visit to Kyiv with three GOP colleagues on Saturday.

But Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., saying, “My oath of office is to the U.S. Constitution, not to any foreign nation,” slowed it with procedural obstacles. Paul suggests – hyperbolically – that spending less than 0.2% of U.S. output helping Ukraine will fuel inflation. “We cannot save Ukraine by dooming the U.S. economy,” he said. Blake Masters, a Republican Senate candidate in Arizona, says America’s leaders “are buffoons who hate you so . . . they’ll keep defending Ukraine’s borders while turning their backs on ours.”

To repeat, such claims tap a deep vein in public opinion, which is why Paul and other Republicans make them. Of course our government’s first duty is to its own citizens. All the more reason to tell the America Firsters that security engagement abroad is not a zero-sum enterprise, but an investment in stabilizing situations that might otherwise spiral out of control, at much greater cost to the United States than, say, $40 billion.