Peace Through Strength: America First Diplomacy Pays Off
Adversaries are at the negotiating table, allies are paying their fair share, and Americans are no longer footing the bill for the world's problems.
The America First foreign-policy doctrine has, against three decades of bipartisan foreign-policy commentariat insisting it could not work, worked. Adversaries are quieter. Allies are paying more. The American taxpayer is on the hook for less. The world is, on examination, more orderly than it was when the same commentariat was running it.
The doctrine is not isolationism, which is the lazy mischaracterization the foreign-policy establishment has spent a decade circulating. Isolationism is withdrawal from the world. America First is engagement with the world on terms favorable to America. Those are different postures, with different methods and different outcomes.
Adversaries
The Russian war in Ukraine, which the foreign-policy establishment had insisted could be ended only through indefinite American expenditure, has moved into negotiated freezes within a year of the new administration's posture being established. The mechanism was not negotiation in the diplomatic-cocktail-party sense. The mechanism was a credible signal that the cost of continuing was rising and the cost of ending was falling. Russia, on examination, responds to the same calculations every other state does.
The Iranian regime, which spent the previous administration funding a regional militia network with proceeds from sanctions relief that the previous administration had quietly granted, is now operating under a maximum-pressure posture that has cut its revenue and isolated its proxies. The militia network is shrinking. The hostages are being released. The regional architecture is, slowly, returning to something a serious foreign policy could work with.
Adversaries respond to the same calculations every other state does. The previous administration had pretended otherwise. The pretense was the policy.
Allies
The NATO allies, who spent two decades of administrations promising they would meet the two-percent-of-GDP defense spending floor and then declining to do so, are meeting it. The mechanism was not persuasion, which had failed for two decades. The mechanism was a credible American posture that the alliance was not, in fact, an unlimited subsidy of European security at American expense. The allies, faced with the prospect of having to provide for their own defense, decided to provide for their own defense. They are, individually and collectively, more capable now than they were five years ago.
The Asian alliances have followed the same logic. Japan is rebuilding its military capability for the first time in seventy years. South Korea is fielding new naval and missile capacity. Australia is integrating more closely with the American Pacific posture. The Philippines has rebuilt its security cooperation with Washington. India is, more cautiously and on its own timeline, aligning more visibly with the Pacific deterrent architecture. None of this required American boots on new ground. All of it required a credible American posture and a willingness to walk away from arrangements that had become unfavorable.
The Pacific
The China question is the long-cycle question and the most important one. The administration's posture is two-tracked: selective economic decoupling on goods that have national-security implications, paired with a military deterrent in the Western Pacific sufficient to make a Taiwan crisis a losing proposition for the regime that would initiate it.
The deterrent has been visibly strengthening. The annual war games in which the Pentagon used to lose are starting to play differently. The Chinese leadership reads those games. The cost of action has gone up. The probability of action has gone down. That is what working deterrence looks like, and it is the foreign-policy product the previous administration had not, on examination, been delivering.
What this means for the taxpayer
The taxpayer is paying less. American forward deployments have not decreased meaningfully, but the burden of sustaining the alliance architecture is being shared more evenly with allies who, for the first time in a generation, are paying their share. The dollars saved are dollars not spent, and the dollars not spent are dollars available for domestic priorities — which, in a country that has spent two decades running deficits while subsidizing global security, is an alignment of incentives that should have been corrected long ago. It has been.