Marco Rubio: An Americas First Foreign Policy

January 31, 2025 Hunter Wallace Conservatism, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Politics, Populists, Progressives, World 21

Broadly speaking, the Gilded Age is back in American foreign policy.

WSJ:

“When Donald Trump won his sweeping victory in November, he received a mandate to put America first. In the realm of diplomacy, this means paying closer attention to our own neighborhood—the Western Hemisphere.

It’s no accident that my first trip abroad as secretary of state, to Central America on Friday, will keep me in the hemisphere. This is rare among secretaries of state over the past century. For many reasons, U.S. foreign policy has long focused on other regions while overlooking our own. As a result, we’ve let problems fester, missed opportunities and neglected partners. That ends now. …”

From the Civil War until World War I, the United States was the hegemon of the Western hemisphere. Americans didn’t fight in Eurasian wars until Woodrow Wilson and FDR constructed liberal internationalism and oriented our foreign policy toward Eurasia.

In this long period, America built the Panama Canal, bought Alaska and the U.S. Virgin Islands, seized control of Hawaii, nearly acquired the Dominican Republic, fought the Spanish-American War, acquired Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines and occupied Cuba. We invaded Mexico to capture the Mexican bandit Pancho Villa. We occupied Haiti.

This was the era of Smedley Butler, the United Fruit Company and the Banana Wars, gunboat diplomacy and dollar diplomacy. Liberals remember it as “isolationism” because the United States didn’t aspire to world domination and refused to join Wilson’s League of Nations. It was FDR who sold America on modern liberalism.

What would happen if the United States gave up on its “leadership role” in the so-called “rules-based international order” and ceded to other Eurasian powers their own spheres of influence? It would look pretty much like this.

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20 Comments

  1. War for Southern Independence sir. ? TGIF and cheers to the gilded age 2.0 and let’s hope it can help kickoff the balkanization of the US and a free and independent Dixie.

    • The present moment is a reversal of the mid-19th century.

      Back then, the North was the rising section in America, and the antebellum planter class was on the way down. The North was industrializing and gaining population. Southern independence was driven by the fear that Southerners were losing control of the United States.

      Today, the opposite is true. The South is the industrialized region. The South has twice the population of the Northeast. The Northeast is rapidly declining in political power due to reapportionment in Congress. Florida is today what New York was back then. Cultural power is slipping away from New York. All I can say is that I hope California secedes to survive!

    • Amen, Rusty, Amen.

      The CSA should be celebrating its 164th Independence Day this year.

      It would have been beneficial for both North and South, and the US may not have been involved in both World Wars.

      Good speed to Southern secession.

  2. “Americas first” Which is more dubious, your grammar or your latest shift? No paleocon believes in American empire. who are you really? will you ever decide? So appropriate your worst posts come this January, because you are Janus-faced.

    • I see nothing wrong with the grammar there. At all.

      “Americas first” is an allusion to the Monroe Doctrine, or more generally, the idea of the United States keeping out of the business of Europe, Asia, and Africa and them keeping out of ours. If you read anything in the post, you might have caught that. That’s hardly empire expansion.

      • Except we didn’t stay out of their business, and the world is much worse off because of that.

  3. “America built the Panama Canal,”

    France built most of the Canal, Panama company went bankrupt and the US stepped in and finished it, forcibly tearing ‘Panama ‘ off from Colombia .

  4. America First, not Americas First.

    Imperialism was a mistake in 1898, and reviving it now would also be a mistake.

    • I will take the win.

      If we are limiting our ambitions to the Western hemisphere, we are dramatically scaling down the current liberal global empire. Also, Panama doesn’t have a military, and no one even lives in Greenland. This would also rule out any “war with Iran” or World War III with Russia and China.

      • That’s an interesting theory, but there’s another take on it that’s not coming from Fuentes, et al. The alternate view is that all this talk of taking over Panama and Greenland, plus the implied takeover of Canada (whose army of 50,000 would fall in a week if that) and Mexico (with cartels – who basically own Mexico – now designated as terrorists) is a back-door way to resurrect Jorge W. Busheron’s NAU (North American Union – modeled on the EUSSR). The dollar to be replaced by the Amero, which of course would be digital crypto. I’ve not read of any EOs repealing the SPP (Security and Prosperity Partnership) with Canada and Mexico, which opened the door to complete abolition of US sovereignty. As WU noted, the 1898 version of imperialism was a mistake – one that led us to the horrible situation we’re in now.

  5. I read an article from Michele Savage, Savage Nation.com, recently about a lone Jew living in Greenland.

    The Jew complained about it and felt alienated.

    Oh Vey,
    Savage is Jewish, however level Headed on a conservative mind set similar to paleo conservatives.

  7. “What would happen if the United States gave up on its “leadership role” in the so-called “rules-based international order” and ceded to other Eurasian powers their own spheres of influence? It would look pretty much like this”

    Exorbitant privilege would end, that’s what. I’m all in favor of a scaling back of empire to the America’s (no typo), so long as there is a plan for when the Fed’s printing presses are turned off.

    Trump’s threat of 100% tariffs on BRICS nations wanting to develop an alternative reserve currency to the Dollar is interesting. Sanctions from hell on a single BRICS nation (Russia) have not worked so Trump must know that this is a hollow threat. If enacted it would effectively cause a monumental spit in the global economy into two halves. Given Exalted Cyclops’ comment above and other various clues I have to wonder if this is actually the plan. Who gets to tell the Japanese that Ameros will be cents on the Dollar?

  8. The 25% tariffs in items from Canada and Mexico are not an “America First” foreign or economic policy for working, lower middle, and poor White Americans. They are an additional tax that will cause their grocery and toiletries to become that much more expensive.

    Trump and his and his incompetent cabinet secretaries and advisors do not live in the real world that most of the MAGA cultists are but none of their donors.

    If the jewels president of Mexico refuses to take back Mexicans here illegally, use the US Navy’s troop transport ships to bring them to shore via landing crafts, and the military age males can be air dropped via static line parachutes out of C-130s.

    Mrs Adelson and her Cuban lapdog Rubioprobably agrees with pissraeli finance minister smotrich that twisting the arms of USZOG puppets to take in the Palestinians in Gaza is good “America First” policy.

    I hope Chairman Xi and president Putin expose both Trump and Rubio for the foreign policy eunuchs that they are for everyone to see.

  9. > Who gets to tell the Japanese that Ameros will be cents on the Dollar?

    If the Japanese and others dumb (or corrupt) enough to buy tons of USD bonds discover that this is in fact the plan of those with hidden hands, I expect there will be an abrupt shift to the Chinese orbit – even though the Japanese really do hate the Chinese.

  10. “ From the Civil War until World War I, the United States was the hegemon of the Western hemisphere. Americans didn’t fight in Eurasian wars until Woodrow Wilson and FDR constructed liberal internationalism and oriented our foreign policy toward Eurasia.”

    Commodore Perry forced open Japan to international trade in the 1850s, which set in motion consequential political forces that toppled the Shogunate, unleashed the Boshin War, and established the modern empire that eventually bit the USA in the @$$ at Pearl Harbor. During Reconstruction, the Yankee government tried to do the same thing to Korea while supporting the Fenian filibuster raids into Canada to expedite Irish independence from the British. In 1900, the USA played an active role in the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion in China.

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