Americans Last
Americans Last
There is a divide in MAGA-world over how literally to take the phrase “America First.” When Donald Trump took office in January, he made a point of focusing on bringing home American captives. Americans were freed from Gaza, Russia, and Venezuela within the first month of Trump’s second presidency. “America First” clearly included Americans wherever they might be.
Trump’s term began with the Israel-Hamas cease-fire agreement that only recently expired. The deal set the stage for Keith Siegel to become, on Feb. 5, the first American captive of Hamas to come home during the new administration. Siegel had been held in Hamas dungeons and dark corners of Gazan homes for over 470 days, with little food. His mother died while he was in captivity.
In stark contrast to his predecessor Joe Biden, Trump refused to abide by the fiction, so cherished in the media and on college campuses, that Hamas’s barbarity was Israel’s problem, not ours.
Just a few days before Siegal’s release, White House envoy Ric Grenell boarded a plane with six Americans held by the Venezuelan regime of Nicolas Maduro. Grenell’s meeting with Maduro was ostensibly about returning Venezuelan migrants who had unlawfully entered the U.S., but Trump made the surprising announcement of the return of “six hostages” on social media, and Grenell followed with a photo of himself with the six on their way home. This was a continuation of U.S. policy—the Biden administration had also freed wrongfully detained Americans from Venezuela.
And while the Biden administration had negotiated the release of the American Brittney Griner from a Russian prison in 2023, 63-year-old U.S. schoolteacher Marc Fogel remained imprisoned a few hundred miles north of Moscow. The Trump administration arranged another prisoner swap and brought Fogel home a week after Siegel.
All this was deeply encouraging to those of us who worried that Trump’s instincts toward retrenchment would leave Americans high and dry. But we didn’t worry for nothing; it’s now clear that at least a part of the America First faction would prefer precisely the scenario that traditional foreign-policy conservatives fretted over.
While plenty of the president’s supporters on the right are more than mere isolationists, the emergence of genuine isolationists within the coalition, including politicians and pundits both, has elevated the conspiracist mindset that U.S. foreign policy is being dictated by Israel. This group has formed the literalist wing of America First: They believe that the only Americans that matter are those currently on U.S. soil. Their policy preferences treat Americans abroad no differently than citizens of any other country abroad: as irrelevant, someone else’s problem (or no one’s at all).
They ask questions like “What exactly is the U.S. national interest in striking” the Houthi terrorists in Yemen who have been firing missiles at Americans? It is easy to scoff at questions like this; it takes great patience to treat such remarks as if they aren’t ostentatiously, aggressively ignorant of world affairs. Even aside from the fact that the Iranian proxies are attempting to kill Americans, it is undeniably the case that America has an interest in the extra costs to American companies and American consumers that anti-American pirates are violently imposing.
There is also the matter of the Houthis’ professed motivation behind their decision to wage war on American security and the U.S. economy: It is retaliation for attempts to retrieve American—and other—hostages from Hamas.
What happened is this: Hamas massacred dozens of Americans and took other Americans hostage, subjecting them to torturously cruel conditions. The United States government objected to that—go figure!—and threw its support behind the efforts to bring those Americans home and to bring to justice the perpetrators of the massacre. The Houthis joined the war to stop those Americans, as well as the Israelis and other nationals, from having their lives saved. The coalition the Houthis joined has a great deal of American blood on its hands, both recent and not-so-recent.
And here’s where we get to the bizarre dividing line. That American blood all belonged to Americans who were not on U.S. soil at the time. In the eyes of the U.S. president, should they still be considered Americans? The MAGA right is split over that question. So far Trump has resisted the counsel of those who would answer “no.” Let’s hope it stays that way.
Post a Comment