History Shows How Dangerous ‘America First’ Really Is

At the Republican National Convention, Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene called former president Donald Trump “the founding father” of the America First movement. Greene’s timeline is wrong—the original movement actually dates from 1940—but it’s true that Trump’s foreign policy is a sharp U-turn from the global leadership upheld by both Republican and Democratic Presidents since 1945.

Addressing the U.N. in 2018, Trump startled delegates by declaring, “We reject the ideology of globalism.” As President he showed disdain not only for the U.N. but also for NATO and U.S. security guarantees for South Korea and Japan. “Why would we defend somebody?” Trump asked TIME’s Eric Cortellessa during an interview on foreign policy in April 2024. U.S. global commitments, Trump argues, have not benefited the American people.

If Trump’s move away from globalism breaks with recent foreign policy, it reconnects with a powerful earlier current in American history. Before 1944, a majority of Americans held views much closer to those of Trump than to the liberal internationalists who built the “American Century,” a term famously coined by publisher Henry Luce during World War II to mark the dawning era of U.S. global dominance.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the U.S. tried to influence world events without making commitments to other nations. That meant pushing preferred policies through private, informal, unilateral diplomacy. This policy of “noncommitment” failed spectacularly in the 1930s. Yet the very same idea is at the core of today’s America First movement.

Exactly 100 years ago—in the summer of 1924—the U.S. took a major step toward world leadership by framing a solution to the gnarliest problem left by World War I: German reparations.  

The issue had disrupted Europe’s recovery since 1918. After its loss, Germany had dragged its feet on making the payments demanded under the Versailles Treaty. France responded by sending troops into its industrial heartland along the Ruhr River. That led to passive resistance by Germans that tanked the country’s economy and helped trigger hyperinflation in 1923. The paralysis of Germany’s economy—the largest and most industrialized in Europe—upset production and trade across the continent.

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By early 1924, Europe’s economic and political debacle seemed impossible to solve. 

Enter the Americans. Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes proposed that Europeans empower a new committee to devise an apolitical, “businesslike” remedy to reparations. In early 1924 such a committee was formed, headed by Chicago banker Charles Dawes and Owen D. Young, a whiz-kid lawyer from upstate New York and president of General Electric.    

After months of work, the Dawes committee, as it was known, went public with its plan. The proposal not only set up a workable timetable for Germany to pay reparations—it also promised to break an icy deadlock between the allies and Germany. 

The committee first determined what Germans could actually pay. Then, with the help of a huge loan, the plan called for stabilizing the mark and balancing the budget. Money for reparations would come from taxes no higher than those in Allied nations, as well as the sale of bonds backed by Germany’s railroads and industries. To avoid the problem of exchange rates, the payments would be made with German money, starting small and growing slowly over five years. If Germany prospered, payments would rise, giving the Allies a vested interest in building up the country’s economy.

The plan implied but did not order the removal of French troops from the Ruhr, and the committee did not even address the thorny issue of the total owed by Germany, leaving that to future discussion. 

Yet, while previous efforts to get Germany on track had triggered bitter political conflicts, this time, both the allies and their former enemy gave a thumbs up. Europeans saw in the plan not just a way out of the reparations trap, but also a ray of hope for reviving the entire continent. Even the world’s best-known critic of reparations, British economist John Maynard Keynes, praised the plan for rescuing Germans from “oppression and ruin.” 

Within weeks the Dawes plan faced a test by fire as Germany and France held national elections. German officials had accepted the proposal, but it came under fierce attack from both right-wing and left-wing parties, making the early May elections a referendum.

The pragmatic American plan helped make the German far right’s call for a “war to the knife” against the Allies sound “crazier than ever,” and the moderates won a majority in the Reichstag. The plan had a similar impact on French elections a week later, with voters choosing a new prime minister willing to work with Germany. Meanwhile, in London, British leaders also agreed to go all in to support the Dawes settlement. 

Europe’s embrace of the Dawes plan seemed to herald a new global role for the U.S. There was just one problem. The Senate had twice voted down the Versailles Treaty, so the U.S. government played no formal role in putting Europe back on track. If American “brains and business experience” helped to end Europe’s paralysis, U.S. involvement remained private and unofficial. Even the $200 million loan needed to stabilize Germany and launch the plan came primarily from private New York banks, led by J.P. Morgan.

European leaders hoped that the Dawes plan would mark Washington moving from unofficial help toward a new global role. German foreign minister Gustav Stresemann boasted that after years of effort Germany had at last persuaded Americans to take part in European affairs. When Republicans chose Dawes to be Calvin Coolidge’s running mate in June 1924, some Europeans hoped that it meant Republicans were embracing internationalism, something previously identified with Democrat Woodrow Wilson. 

But Europeans misjudged the mood across the Atlantic. Most Americans agreed with Coolidge that they should “avoid involving ourselves in the political controversies of Europe.” 

On the surface, the Dawes plan worked: Germany began to pay reparations, and France withdrew its troops from the Ruhr. Its success pleased Americans because it promised global influence without commitment, economic revival without public investment. Yet, Dawes’s victory created an ideal of global leadership without responsibility that was doomed to fail.

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Although the Dawes Plan ended as the Great Depression began, the dream of U.S. foreign policy succeeding without commitments lived on into the 1930s. Absent from the League of Nations, the U.S. had no forum in which to work toward a world response to growing global problems: the Depression and the rise of militaristic fascism. 

Japan’s invasion of Manchuria and the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany made a second world war likely. Americans responded with the Neutrality Acts, passed between 1935 and 1939. The laws embargoed trade with any nation at war and did not distinguish between democracies and dictatorships, aggressors and victims. Rather than work with other democracies to curb the growth of fascist power, the U.S tried to continue the policies of the 1920s and go it alone. This strategy failed. The legislation did nothing to prevent the outbreak of war, nor did it insulate the U.S. from the conflict.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Americans lived in a nation with no formal allies and no mutual defense pacts. It was a dangerous world, and the twin catastrophes of global depression and global war convinced them to build a new world order founded on multilateral institutions like the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The disasters that gave rise to that order are today fading from memory.

Trump’s vision of America First repeats the errors of U.S. foreign policy before World War II. Trump tells an American public tired of foreign wars that the price of globalism is too high and takes aim at the sinews that bind the U.S. to its allies. As President, Trump pushed away allies, like Justin Trudeau and Angela Merkel, and praised rivals—enemies even—like Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin.

Trump’s hostility to NATO embodies his commitment problem. In 2017, he famously questioned Article 5 of the treaty, which states that an attack on one member is an attack on all. At a campaign rally earlier this year, he went further, claiming that he told the leader of a major NATO ally that unless that country spent more on its own defense, “he would tell Russia ‘to do whatever they hell they want.’”

Perhaps, like the businessmen who created the Dawes Plan, Trump is impatient with the nuances of diplomacy. His revival of America’s legacy of noncommitment, however, is misguided. Looking back at the 1920s should remind us that globalism is not the default position of the American people, but also warn us against stepping away from our global allies. If, in a second Trump term, America First crashes the American Century, it will likely beget a world that is, in the words of historian Hal Brands, more “vicious and chaotic.”

Cyrus Veeser, author of A World Safe for Capitalism and Great Leaps Forward, is professor of history at Bentley University in Waltham, Mass.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.