It seemed at the time like a Freudian slip.
A few years ago, when Tucker Carlson still had his prime-time show on Fox News, he asked: “Why do I care what’s going on in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia? And I’m serious. Why do I care? And why shouldn’t I root for Russia? Which I am.”
Putting to the side the glaring internal contradiction — If you really don’t care what happens in Ukraine, then why are you rooting for Russia? — Carlson’s utterance speaks to a pervasive tendency to conflate two very distinct (indeed incompatible) foreign policy outlooks. This slippage, which has a long history, has had a confusing and mystifying effect on the debate about U.S. foreign policy in the Trump era.
The first half — “Why do I care what’s going on in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia?” — expresses an outlook that is typically characterized as “America First” nationalism or foreign policy realism, while the second half — “Why shouldn’t I root for Russia? Which I am.” — conveys something much darker and much closer to the views of Vice President JD Vance, who shares deep ideological affinities with Carlson.
Realizing that his comments had raised some hackles, Carlson attempted to walk them back. “Earlier in the show, I noted I was rooting for Russia in the contest between Russia and Ukraine,” Carlson said. “Of course, I’m joking. I’m only rooting for America.” But this was far from an isolated remark. On another occasion, Carlson grumbled: “Why would we take Ukraine’s side? Why aren’t we on Russia’s side? I’m totally confused.” And on another broadcast, he made it even more explicit: “I think we should probably take the side of Russia if we have to choose between Russia and Ukraine. That is my view.”
And Carlson is hardly alone in this regard. In certain quarters of the American right — the ones Carlson and Vance represent — sympathy with Vladimir Putin abounds. Christopher Caldwell, a senior fellow at the conservative Claremont Institute, has called Putin “the preeminent statesman of our time.” “On the world stage,” Caldwell asked, “who can vie with him?”
Pat Buchanan, a veteran of the Nixon and Reagan White Houses and a founding editor of The American Conservative magazine, went further, arguing in 2013 that in “the culture war for mankind’s future,” Putin is “one of us” — meaning a so-called paleoconservative. (Unlike libertarians and free-market Republicans, “paleocons” oppose free-trade deals, favor strict controls on immigration and support policies that benefit the working class; unlike neoconservatives, they generally oppose military interventions and are deeply skeptical of schemes for democratization.)
Putin’s appeal “as a defender of traditional values” is especially strong, Buchanan wrote, “when we reflect on America’s embrace of abortion on demand, homosexual marriage, pornography, promiscuity, and the whole panoply of Hollywood values.”
Although Buchanan, now 86, no longer enjoys the prominence he once had on the national stage (he was for many years a regular on cable news and ran for president three times — in 1992, 1996 and 2000), it’s important to underscore how important he was in laying the groundwork for Trump’s rise. “America First!” (with an exclamation mark) was the slogan of Buchanan’s presidential campaign in 2000. He staked out the ideological ground that Trump would make his calling card many years earlier. The veteran journalist Jeff Greenfield has called Trump “Pat Buchanan with better timing.”
Vance is more careful in the way he frames his position. Unlike Buchanan, he doesn’t wax enthusiastic about Putin — at least not explicitly. “Get America out of Ukraine!” he exclaimed in 2023 at a confab celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington. MAGA fixture Kari Lake, who ran unsuccessfully for governor of Arizona in 2022 and for the U.S. Senate in 2024, and is currently a senior adviser to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, expressed the America First position succinctly when she declared at the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Budapest, “I say we should invest in protecting our borders, not Ukraine’s.”
America First nationalism and foreign policy realism are not identical, but the two outlooks converge on the belief, expressed in Lake’s remark, that U.S. interests should take precedence over those of other countries, that we should prioritize our problems at home above those in foreign lands. This view has deep roots in U.S. history. In his 1796 farewell address, George Washington warned against foreign entanglements and argued that “inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded.” In 1821, Secretary of State (and future president) John Quincy Adams famously admonished against venturing “abroad in search of monsters to destroy” — a reference point to this day for advocates of “restraint” in foreign policy. In 1992, at the onset of the war in Bosnia, Secretary of State James Baker is reported to have remarked, “We don’t have a dog in this fight.”
These views are often characterized as “isolationist,” but I prefer to avoid that loaded term, which is mainly used as a form of disparagement. (In 1952, the American political writer Walter Lippmann argued that the term isolationist “must be handled with the greatest care, or it can do nothing but confuse and mislead.”) Very few people actually call themselves isolationists. In contrast, Trump enthusiastically embraces the America First label. “America First will be the major and overriding theme of my administration,” he declared in a foreign policy speech in 2016. And virtually everyone likes to be thought of as a realist.
But a truly consistent America First-er wouldn’t take sides in wars between other countries, let alone in their internal politics. In the language of international relations theory, realists see other states like billiard balls: It doesn’t matter what’s inside them, just how they bounce off each other, and the point is to pursue the strategic interests of your state on the global pool table. The domestic affairs of other states are not our business, only what they do on the international stage.
But that is decidedly not the approach of the Trump administration. The president and vice president in particular are partial to Russia and actively hostile to Ukraine. They are not neutral on the war. Indeed, they sympathize with Putin, albeit in slightly different ways: Trump identifies with the Russian leader on a mainly psychological and aesthetic level, as a strongman who projects power and doesn’t let anything stand in his way, whereas Vance sympathizes with Putin’s ideological project and sees him as a fellow culture warrior against liberalism and “globalism.” Vance and others in his intellectual orbit don’t merely side with Russia against Ukraine, but side with Putin against his domestic enemies — opposition leaders like the late Alexei Navalny, members of the feminist rock band Pussy Riot, critics of his invasion of Ukraine, dissident intellectuals and writers (most of whom have fled the country) and others.
It goes well beyond Russia. Vance was far from neutral about Germany’s recent elections. Breaking a taboo, he met with the leader of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), Alice Weidel, and made it perfectly clear that he feels an affinity with the far-right party. In his much-discussed speech at the Munich Security Conference during the same trip, the vice president lambasted European leaders not for their foreign but rather their domestic policies, taking them to task for marginalizing far-right movements and squelching free expression. “[T]he threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within,” Vance inveighed.
The Bulgarian writer Ivan Krastev has noted that Trump and Vance routinely chastise democracies over their internal affairs but rarely (if ever) apply the same standards to authoritarian regimes guilty of far more severe repression. Incidentally, it’s hardly surprising that Putin’s longtime right-hand man Dmitry Medvedev gloated over Vance’s address, which he summarized as saying to the Europeans, in effect: “Your democracy is weak, your elections are garbage, and your rules, which violate basic human morality, are crap. And you don’t even have freedom of speech!”
And let’s not forget the American right’s “special relationship” with Viktor Orban. CPAC held its 2023 conference in Budapest, at which the Hungarian prime minister delivered the keynote address. At the U.S. edition of the event, Orban said that Hungary must resist becoming a “mixed-race” country like various European states that have opened their doors to large immigrant populations. (One of Orban’s top aides resigned over the comments, saying his speech sounded as if it were given by a “Nazi.”) Trump has similarly warned that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of America.
The term “America First” is just as confusing and misleading as Lippmann argued “isolationism” had become. Its advocates would have us believe that they are merely pursuing a realist foreign policy, one of neutrality and restraint, while in actuality they have dogs in various fights, both between warring countries and inside them. In one breath, they profess indifference about “what’s going on” in faraway lands, and in the next breath, they let slip their fondness for dictators and war criminals. Or, in a sleight of hand, they disavow it. Carlson is more loose-lipped than JD Vance but they are kindred ideological spirits to the core. Vance has said that he is “plugged into a lot of weird, right-wing subcultures.” Affinities for Putin, the AfD and other far-right parties and leaders are pervasive in those subcultures.
This ambiguity goes back to the America First Committee in 1940, which was formed to oppose U.S. entry into World War II. In principle, the argument was for neutrality: Let the Europeans fight it out. It doesn’t concern us. And the committee appealed to people across the ideological spectrum. Its adherents included pacifists and socialists. But the body’s most visible member, the aviator Charles Lindbergh, openly sympathized with the Nazis and promoted the regime’s propaganda, as did other prominent spokespeople for the cause. Eventually, this drove away the committee’s progressive and centrist supporters and damaged its reputation nationally. The body collapsed under the weight of these contradictions, dissolving in 1941.
These contradictions have bedeviled “America First” nationalism from its inception and remain present to this day. In his recent book “America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance With Foreign Dictators,” the political writer Jacob Heilbrunn examines conservative enthusiasm for the German emperor Wilhelm II during World War I, for Mussolini in the 1920s and Hitler in the 1930s, for Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and Chilean General Augusto Pinochet, and for apartheid South Africa in the 1980s.
Heilbrunn emphasizes that while conservatives often frame their position on issues like Ukraine in realist terms, the actual motivation goes unacknowledged. They often blame NATO expansion for pushing Putin into a corner, but such complaints are “not about foreign policy realism,” Heilbrunn argues. Rather, they are rooted in real admiration for Putin — for his disdain for LGBTQ rights, for his support for the Russian Orthodox church, and for his cult of masculinity.”
In the worldview of Buchanan and Vance, the realms of foreign and domestic policy are impossible to disentangle. Buchanan makes this explicit in his paean to Putin. “As the decisive struggle in the second half of the 20th century was vertical, East vs. West, the 21st century struggle may be horizontal, with conservatives and traditionalists in every country arrayed against the militant secularism of a multicultural and transnational elite.”
Putin, according to Buchanan, “is seeking to redefine the ‘Us vs. Them’ world conflict of the future as one in which conservatives, traditionalists and nationalists of all continents and countries stand up against the cultural and ideological imperialism of what he sees as a decadent West.”
It’s revealing that in his ambush on Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office on Feb. 28, Vance made a point of complaining that the Ukrainian president “went to Pennsylvania and campaigned for the opposition in October.” Thus, from Vance’s perspective, “Putin is not so much a potential foreign policy partner as an ideological ally in the common struggle against ‘global liberal elites,’” the Russian political theorist Ilya Budraitskis, author of “Dissidents Among Dissidents: Ideology, Politics and the Left in Post-Soviet Russia” (2022), told New Lines. (As it happens, Vance’s claim was false. As PolitiFact pointed out, Zelenskyy met with Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor Josh Shapiro, but it was not a campaign event. The meeting took place at an ammunition plant, where the Ukrainian leader thanked the workers producing munitions for Ukraine.)
The historians Matthew Specter and Varsha Venkatasubramanian also underscore this point in their recent essay “‘America First’: Nationalism, Nativism, and the Fascism Question, 1880–2020.” The slogan “America First” has always operated on two discrete levels, they argue. It is both “an answer to a question about national identity: ‘Who are we?’” and “the answer to a question about action: ‘How should we act in international affairs?’ — thus serving to “condense the realms of immigration policy and foreign policy into a single symbol.” Indeed, they note, Trump originally deployed the slogan “to promote the fear of migrant ‘hordes’ coming in from the southern border and endangering the safety of (white) American citizens.”
It is this overriding preoccupation with domestic issues — particularly identitarian and racial ones like immigration and demographic change — that makes America First nationalism ultimately incompatible with foreign policy realism. While the administration and its supporters present the foreign policy orientation of Trump and Vance in a realist guise, they then smuggle in a very different agenda.
They can’t have it both ways. Either they don’t care who wins, or they’re rooting for a side — it’s one or the other.
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