‘America First’ Nationalism Isn’t Leaving the White House

Foreign policy was for years the great point of agreement between the paleo Right and the radical Left, with the familiar polemicists from those respective camps insisting that the United States acts as an “empire.” Patrick Buchanan wrote a big foreign-policy book called A Republic, Not an Empire, with the romantic subtitle Reclaiming America’s Destiny. Noam Chomsky published angry essays with titles such as “Modern-Day American Imperialism: Middle East and Beyond,” in which he observed that, “Talking about American imperialism is rather like talking about triangular triangles.”