Israel is proving to be Trump’s ideal ‘America First’ ally

President Donald Trump’s posture on the Israel-Iran war is perplexing analysts accustomed to the United States as guarantor of peace and fighter of wars worldwide.

In their traditional view, allowing Israel to launch an attack implicates the United States and leaves us responsible for ensuring its success and addressing any fallout.

Trump’s coalition, divided between supporters of Israel’s action and opponents of any US entanglement in foreign conflicts, must be facing a serious fissure, they imagine.

But the days of the United States presiding over a “liberal world order” are over.

What we are seeing now is the rhetoric — and the wisdom — of “America First” become reality in the skies over Tehran.

Promoters of the liberal world order believed that the United States could and should control events around the world. They were enthusiastic about assuming the burden of security for our allies, because with that responsibility came the right to dictate the allies’ foreign policy.

Other countries, accepting their status as client states in return for the promise of US defense, could be blocked from taking any action that would necessitate US defense.

And, as client states with no independent capacity of their own, they’d have no ability to act independently — and thus no choice but to defer to US demands.

An America First foreign policy scales back simultaneously the rights and the responsibilities that the United States asserts.

Both must happen together: It would make no sense to declare that the US will no longer ride to everyone’s defense, but then still demand that everyone must do what the US wants.

We would have no moral claim to such a position (why should countries listen to us if we are not shouldering their security burdens?) nor any way of enforcing it (or else what?).

But the key is that the demand is no longer necessary. If the US is not on the hook for the fallout from the action another country takes, it need not worry so much about the action.

The “liberal world order” thesis has always struggled to cope with Israel. Yes, the Jewish state benefits significantly from US military assistance — but it has never demanded that we take primary responsibility for its security, or relied upon us to do so.

To the contrary, Israel has always insisted on retaining the independent capacity to protect and advance its own interests, and generally rejected deployment of US military personnel into its conflicts.

A rational observer might look at this situation and think, now there’s a real ally.

But if your conception of “alliance” means other nations handing their rights and responsibilities over to the United States, this drives you nuts. An ally, by that thinking, is someone who does what we tell them.

The Israelis never got this memo. Their freedom of action — in a Middle East that the United States felt obligated to secure, as it was obligated to secure the whole world — was a constant headache.

But from the America First perspective, with US rights and responsibilities reduced, there is no problem: Both neoconservatives eager to see Israel take the fight to Iran, and restrainers eager to see the US step back from foreign conflicts, can cheer the current developments.

As a corollary of this new and different framework, the US has a much better chance of staying out of conflicts where it does not want to engage.

The idea that Iran could or should respond to an Israeli attack by attacking US bases fits comfortably into the internal logic of American hegemony, but makes no sense when Israel is launching its own attack.

And it can ultimately be in our best interest to foster a world where countries whose values are generally aligned with ours have greater capability to act more decisively with less involvement from us.

Certainly this appears to be the case here, just as it would if Germany could help Ukraine drive back the Russians or if Japan could credibly defend Taiwan.

The America First pivot is borne partly of necessity — US power is no longer sufficient to preserve global hegemony, even if that were desirable.

But it is also borne of a different, and perhaps healthier, understanding of what American interests truly are and how best to advance them.

America First does not require that the US pursue its own interests and press the rest of the world into pursuing those same interests.

Rather, it recognizes that the US will pursue its own interests — and that it can best do this by leaving its allies to pursue their own interests as well.

Admittedly, this might be less fun for the grandmasters who so enjoyed moving their chess pieces around the board. Forgive the chess pieces for liking it better.

Oren Cass is the chief economist at American Compass. Adapted from the Understanding America Substack.