‘America First' Does Not Mean ‘America Everywhere'

The Atlantic

7 hours ago

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 sprawling mess, seem unlikely to fix the internet's problems, and risk creating structures that can be used to suppress legitimate debate. Much as Americans too readily overlook the deep fear of political extremism in a continent drenched in blood through two world wars and disfigured by fascism and Soviet Communism in living memory, the shadows of history should not be used to curtail basic freedoms today.
There are stark differences in attitude toward markets and regulation too. Clearly America and Europe will never have the same attitude toward risk; the sink-or-swim approach to poverty in the U.S. is unimaginable to most Europeans, not least because it is historically associated with the rise of extremism that inflicted so much damage on the continent in the 20th century. Equally, the risk-averse (and in many cases self-sabotaging) approach to regulation in the EU is inexplicable to most Americans, who have seen how a swashbuckling culture of innovation has delivered unimaginable wealth and ingenuity to the U.S.
These vastly different experiences naturally shape the operating cultures of the two continents: the American, which instinctively rejects restrictions on enterprise, no matter the broader ramifications for society; the European, which reflexively recoils from rugged individualism, even at the expense of sorely needed economic dynamism. The fact remains that Europe's businesses and innovators are held back by institutions that too often seek to prevent every potential harm rather than deliver any potential benefit.
For all the desire to see 'the West' as an expression of mutual values derived from the same fundamental perspective, Europe and America are more different than our shared culture—from Henry James to Hollywood—would suggest. Our history and experiences are different; our attitudes and societies are different; and our place in the world is different too. Nothing has illustrated this more dramatically than the volte-face in U.S. government attitudes toward the Kremlin. If the aftermath of the Second World War was the foundation upon which transatlantic solidarity was established, a united stance against the authoritarian ambitions of Russia provided the brickwork for that solidarity throughout the Cold War period. Yet memories of the former have now faded, and Trump has chosen to treat Putin with more political respect than many leaders in Europe.
Conor Friedersdorf: Europe's free-speech problem
This abrupt change has shaken the tenets of Atlanticism down to its core. While Europeans have belatedly recognized the need to bear more of the costs for their own security, the realization that Europe and America see the geostrategic threats of the world from fundamentally different perspectives is taking root. America's basic message to Europe of late has been: You're on your own. From now on, don't expect too much help from us. The fact that a bus load of European leaders had to surround Trump to extract the hitherto wholly uncontroversial idea that the U.S. might play some role—with no boots on the ground—to guarantee Ukraine's future security, is a sign of how far things have changed. But this logic goes both ways. In the coming years, it will become more difficult for Washington to insist that Europe follows its lead in isolating and weakening China, especially if doing so harms European prosperity. If the U.S. is ever more ambivalent to the Russian threat on Europe's doorstep—especially if any peace deal in Ukraine gives Putin a free hand to destabilize or reinvade the country in the future—and continues to interfere in European elections while hitting Europeans with tariffs, European governments will have difficulty explaining to voters why they should go out of their way to help Uncle Sam in its rivalry with Beijing.
In all of this, the inescapable facts of geography appear to be reasserting themselves. Europe does not face Asia across the Pacific. Russian tanks will never roll onto American soil. Of the two continents, America is blessed with the most benign geographical inheritance: a young continent-size nation, shielded by two vast oceans on either side, with mostly pliant neighbors to the north and south and a national history free of external invasion (though of course not without foreign attacks), one that has skillfully ridden its natural advantage to a hegemonic position and now stands without equal. Compare that with the cluttered old patchwork of middling and small nations—with different ethnic, religious, and linguistic identities stretching back millennia—living cheek by jowl in a crowded continent in a risky neighborhood. To most Americans, conflicts in the Middle East are a distant tragedy; to Europeans, they are next door. Russia is ever menacing; a land war rages in the heart of the continent; and handling mass migration across the Mediterranean from Africa continues to divide European governments. Europe is simply more precariously located than many Americans appreciate.
Today's shift in American politics marks a new chapter in the diverging histories of our two continents. It is no passing mood, much though Trump's critics might wish otherwise. A significant portion of the American voting public supports the newly assertive 'America First' worldview. This will not disappear overnight, nor will the growing distance between Europe and America. And that is perhaps the most important lesson of all: Rather
than being mugged by the surprise discovery that we are very different, maybe a more mature transatlantic relationship going forward will acknowledge and even celebrate those differences. There is no reason why we cannot have a productive relationship—geopolitically, economically, culturally—despite them.
The answer to the ineluctable distance between the lives and perspectives of our citizens is not to throw up our hands in horror but to look for the places where our interests ought to overlap—we are both continents born of the Enlightenment, and rooted in democracy, after all—and find ways to work together toward tangible goals without the emotional baggage that accompanies a forced sense of kinship.
Finding a new equilibrium will require a measure of humility on both sides of the pond. Trump, Vance, and their colleagues should cease believing—unlikely though that currently seems—that 'America First' must be 'America Everywhere,' as if Europe should be brought to heel by emulating the one-eyed view of 'freedom' espoused by the hard right in the U.S. And Europeans should stop moping about the fact that the U.S. has chosen a very different trajectory driven by a different worldview, and work instead to strengthen their own continent. Perhaps, like a couple sustaining a marriage which has lost all its early magic, we will both emerge stronger for the realization of a fundamental truth: We're different, and there's nothing wrong in that.