On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Stephen Wertheim on how America First went from rhetoric to policy.
Donald Trump during a news conference with Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, not pictured, in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on Monday, February 24. (Al Drago / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
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On this episode of the Time of Monsters, Jeet Heer is joined by Stephen Wertheim to discuss how 'America First' went from rhetoric to policy.
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During his first term in office, Donald Trump often talked about his radical America First agenda but in practice his foreign policy was that of a conventional Republican hawk. Just five weeks into his second term, there has been a marked shift. As Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, recently noted in The Guardian, Trump 2.0 is marked by a turn toward a foreign policy that is much more focused on the Western Hemisphere and away from Europe and more geared toward tariffs as a weapon of economic warfare. In other words, Trump has now found advisers who are willing to implement the core strategy of America First in a real way.
This shift has frightened many American allies, particularly the NATO countries and Mexico. Yet mixed with Trump’s advocacy of a new Manifest Destiny have been welcome indications that his administration will be more open to negotiating with Russia, Iran and perhaps even China.
To make sense Trump’s conflicting foreign policy messages and actions, I was happy to talk to Stephen Wertheim, who shares my belief that we need to distinguish between Trump’s rhetoric and his actions.
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During his first term in office, Donald Trump often talked about his radical America First agenda, but in practice his foreign policy was that of a conventional Republican hawk. Just five weeks into his second term, there has been a marked shift. As Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, recently noted in The Guardian, Trump 2.0 is marked by a turn toward a foreign policy that is much more focused on the Western Hemisphere and away from Europe and more geared toward tariffs as a weapon of economic warfare. In other words, Trump has now found advisers who are willing to implement the core strategy of America First in a real way.
This shift has frightened many American allies, particularly the NATO countries and Mexico. Yet mixed with Trump’s advocacy of a new Manifest Destiny have been welcome indications that his administration will be more open to negotiating with Russia, Iran and perhaps even China.
To make sense Trump’s conflicting foreign policy messages and actions, I was happy to talk to Stephen Wertheim, who shares my belief that we need to distinguish between Trump’s rhetoric and his actions.
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Here's where to find podcasts from The Nation. Political talk without the boring parts, featuring the writers, activists and artists who shape the news, from a progressive perspective.
Bari Weiss has become a flashpoint of controversy in her position running CBS News. She’s fired half a dozen senior producers and correspondents at 60 Minutes, the network’s flagship news program. With tumbling ratings and staff revolts, she’s been accused of ruining CBS. But perhaps this accusation doesn’t quite describe her actual goals, which is not running a successful network news operation but rather promoting a right-wing ideology that pleases Donald Trump and her employer, the Ellison family. I take up the controversies surrounding Weiss with David Klion, frequent guest of the program and writer for The Nation and other publications.
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Jeet HeerTwitterJeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.