Thanks to Donald Trump, Americans now know what a populist foreign policy looks like: "Not isolationist, but America First." That's how the Republican presidential front-runner defined his views to an interviewer last week. "I like the expression," Trump said, implying that he had never encountered the term "America First" before. "America First" was the slogan that defined U.S. isolationism in the 1930s. The America First Committee was a pressure group that opposed U.S. military intervention against fascism in World War II. It included a lot of Western and Midwestern isolationists, largely, but not all, conservative Republicans.
Its most prominent spokesman was Charles Lindbergh, the aviation hero, who was the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic — as well as being a well-known Nazi admirer. The committee disbanded shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on Dec. 7, 1941.
Since the terror attacks in Brussels on March 22, foreign policy has moved to the top of the U.S. presidential campaign agenda. Americans are beginning to see the basic impulses driving Trump's foreign policy views.