‘America First’ Is More Christian Than a Global Jihad for ‘Democracy’
This is a tale of two speeches, each by a U.S. president, each one laying out his administration’s stance toward the rest of the world. They stand in stark contrast, and the shift from one to the other marks an epochal sea change in American politics with profound implications for the rest of the world.
The first speech is President George W. Bush’s famous second inaugural address, delivered January 20, 2005. The second is President Donald Trump’s talk in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, delivered yesterday. One of them is much more profoundly compatible with the Christian worldview than the other.
But it takes some genuine critical thinking to decide which that is. Appearances deceive, and Satan prefers to come cloaked as an angel of light. Remember how he tempted Jesus by quoting Scripture and promising vast worldly power, which Jesus could have wielded to end injustice and suffering if only He’d get down and kneel.
A Fire in the Mind
Bush’s speech is grand, high-minded, full of glittering promises and idealistic assertions. It’s a feel-good address that helped every American who heard it get a surge of noble, heroic sentiment, a spike of adrenaline, and a little spring in his step. Let’s see a few sample passages:
[A]s long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny — prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder — violence will gather, and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat. There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom.
We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.
America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one. From the day of our Founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and earth. Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave. Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our Nation. It is the honorable achievement of our fathers. Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation’s security, and the calling of our time.
So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world. …
From all of you, I have asked patience in the hard task of securing America, which you have granted in good measure. Our country has accepted obligations that are difficult to fulfill and would be dishonorable to abandon. Yet because we have acted in the great liberating tradition of this nation, tens of millions have achieved their freedom. And as hope kindles hope, millions more will find it. By our efforts, we have lit a fire as well — a fire in the minds of men. It warms those who feel its power, it burns those who fight its progress, and one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world. [emphasis added]
It’s heady stuff, the kind of thing you’d expect to hear from the valedictorian at a West Point commencement. The people hearing it back in 2005 must have experienced a surge of patriotic pride. And “fire in the mind” … that’s a powerfully resonant phrase, with a literary ring to it. (More on that later.) No wonder the globalist faction won over the GOP and much of the Democratic Party. They had the best wordsmiths around. You can watch the whole speech here to recapture the flavor of the time:
An Unlovely, Boastful Catalog
There’s nothing particularly uplifting in Donald Trump’s recent speech to a business summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia: no soaring, resonant slogans, categorical claims about universal human nature, or brave promises to transform the world in America’s image. Trump boasts about his own successes, trashes Joe Biden, and struts a bit about how he strong-armed foreign countries into granting America more advantageous trade deals. He praises the Gulf countries for building enormous skyscrapers to match those he built in New York City, and issues some tough-minded threats to the government of Iran — the sworn enemy of the Gulf nations whose representatives he’s addressing.
Furthermore, Trump explicitly repudiates the foreign policy vision Bush laid out 20 years ago. Trump says:
In other cities throughout the peninsula, places like Dubai and Abu Dhabi, Doha, Muscat, the transformations have been unbelievably remarkable. Before our eyes a new generation of leaders is transcending the ancient conflicts of tired divisions of the past and forging a future where the Middle East is defined by commerce, not chaos; where it exports technology, not terrorism; and where people of different nations, religions, and creeds are building cities together, not bombing each other out of existence.
We don’t want that. And it’s crucial for the wider world to note, this great transformation has not come from Western intervention noise or flying people in beautiful planes giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs. No, the gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation builders, neocons or liberal nonprofits like those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop Kabul, Baghdad, so many other cities.
Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought by the people of the region themselves. The people that are right here, the people that have lived here all their lives, developing your own sovereign countries, pursuing your own unique visions and charting your own destinies in your own way. It’s really incredible what you’ve done.
In the end, the so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built and the interventionalists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves. They told you how to do it, but they had no idea how to do it themselves. Peace, prosperity and progress ultimately came not from a radical rejection of your heritage but rather from embracing your national traditions and embracing that same heritage that you love so dearly And it’s something only you could do. You achieved a modern miracle the Arabian way, that’s a good way. …
As I said in my inaugural address, my greatest hope is to be a peacemaker and to be a unifier. I don’t like war. We have the greatest military, by the way, in the history of the world.
Keep in mind that most of the national leaders to whom Trump is speaking are unelected monarchs — not democratically elected leaders, of the kind the Bush administration promised to help install across the world. Chasing that fantasy, Bush launched failed wars and occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq, which caused hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and led to the ethnic cleansing of virtually all Christians from those countries. Trump remembers the high price millions of innocents paid for Bush’s grandiose aspirations, and he’s determined not to leave a similar poisoned legacy.
Watch Trump’s full speech here:
A Fireman in the Mind
Trump isn’t citing a “fire in the mind” that burns in every human brain until American-style liberal, secular democracy prevails from pole to pole. He’s talking turkey, in fact, about the peace and prosperity that really are universal human aspirations.
And maybe that’s a good thing. Because the phrase “fire in the mind” wasn’t original to George W. Bush’s speechwriter. It comes from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed. In context, the “fire” referred to isn’t wholesome or uplifting. It’s the flame of radical revolutionary ideology that drives men to think that they can fundamentally transform human existence by earthly, military means. As the late, great antiwar activist Justin Raimondo wrote back in 2005:
In Dostoevsky’s novel, that fire in the minds of men is not a yearning for liberty, but a nihilistic will to power that can only end in destruction. Put in George W. Bush’s mouth, those words are not a paean to freedom, but a manifesto of pure destructionism….
The revolutionary nihilists in Dostoevsky’s novel, and those real-life nihilists in pre-revolutionary Russia on whom the characters were based, believed themselves to be agents of progress, destined by History to sweep away the old in the purifying flames of a great uprising that would be the prelude to a new world. A similar messianic sense of being on the right side of history pervades Bush’s polemic: ‘History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visible direction set by liberty and the author of liberty.’
This is quite possibly the most worrisome and even frightening speech ever delivered by an American president. Its imagery of a fire burning up the world, coupled with the incendiary promise to aid “democratic reformers” against “outlaw regimes” worldwide, evokes the spirit of another murderous “idealism” – one that made the 20th century the age of mass murder. As he ranted on and on – “the expansion of freedom in all the world”; “Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our nation”; “When you stand for your liberty we will stand with you.” – Bushed sounded more like Trotsky addressing the Red Army than an American president addressing his people.
America First: Not Selfishness But Humility
There’s something refreshingly human and humble about a president admitting that he’s looking out for his country’s citizens, trying to secure their borders, help them pay their bills, and keep them out of ruinous stupid wars. He’s not convinced (as Woodrow Wilson was) that the United States is the instrument of the Holy Spirit in history or that the U.S. Army is the earthly equivalent of legions of angels. Trump isn’t fantasizing about himself or the soldiers he commands as crusaders for global transformation. He’s trying to govern sanely, reimpose common sense in the face of crackpot, woke ideology, and maybe ensure a happy future for his children and grandchildren.
That’s a wholesome, human, almost hobbit-like view of the world. Can’t you imagine Samwise Gamgee saying something like “The Shire First”? And in retrospect and by contrast, George W. Bush seems more like Saruman, the golden-tongued white wizard full of high-minded promises whose only heritage was ruin.
John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.