There are foreign policy questions at stake in this election that run so deep and touch on such fundamental assumptions about America’s proper place in the world that it is nearly impossible for any one question posed to the candidates not to miss the forest for the trees. That is because Donald Trump’s “America First” movement self-consciously departs from the beliefs, traditions, and practices that have defined American foreign policy since a time before nearly every living American can remember: since the administrations of Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower cemented them as the bipartisan consensus in the aftermath of World War II. Indeed, “America First” borrows its very name from the movement that opposed every tenet of that consensus before the war’s start.
Daniel Krauthammer is an author and consultant based in Washington, D.C.
