In fact, isolationist has never been a good description of America First foreign policy, whether in the 1930s, the ’40s, or the 21st century. As Hirsh acknowledges in citing scholar Stephen Wertheim’s work, isolationism was “a pejorative invented by internationalists to shame the America Firsters into silence.… the United States has always sought some engagement abroad, at least through trade.” It should also be noted that isolationist is often a pejorative used by centrists and establishment liberals to discredit anti-war left-wing voices like George McGovern, Jesse Jackson, and Bernie Sanders. The term is so loaded with false assumptions that it should be discarded.

Rather than being isolationist, the Republican formula is disengagement from Europe and focusing on dominating Latin America and Asia.

As it happens, this foreign policy profile is very similar to the geopolitics of the America First Republicans of the 1930s and ‘19’40s such as Herbert Hoover, Douglas MacArthur, Charles Lindbergh and Robert Taft.

In their 1951 book The General and the President, about the struggles between Douglas MacArthur and Harry Truman, journalist Richard Rovere and historian Arthur Schlesinger noted:

The Pacific Ocean has become in this century the Republican ocean; the Atlantic, the Democratic ocean. When the Republicans have had a foreign policy at all, it has generally been something to do with Japan and China; they are the party of the eastward orientation. The Democratic presidents in the twentieth century, on the other hand, have stood for an affirmative policy toward Europe (as they have also stood—from the Republican viewpoint—for the application of subversive European theories to the American economy).

In the 21st century as well, this division of the parties along oceanic lines has returned, with Republicans looking toward Asia, and Democrats oriented toward Europe.

The Republican lean towards Asia has many roots: the evangelical missionary zeal for new converts, the business class’s desire for new markets, the racist view that the supposed Yellow Peril needs to be subdued, and long-held geopolitical theories about the need to dominate the Pacific.

Elizabeth N. Saunders, an international relations scholar at Georgetown University, takes up the continuity of America First from the 1930s to the present in her forthcoming book The Insiders’ Game: How Elites Make War and Peace. In a recent interview with me, she brought up an arcane word from the 1950s: asialationist. As Saunders told me, it’s a word that is “very hard to say.” An editor at Princeton University press even asked Saunders if that was a real word.

But strange as it sounds, asialationist describes the actual politics of Robert Taft and his cohort. They were wary of European wars and were even willing to let Hitler rule as overlord of Europe. But they wanted the United States to dominate the Western Hemisphere and expand its sphere of power into Asia. According to Saunders, some asialationists, notably Taft, had a sincere ideology. Others, like Louis Johnson, Harry Truman’s secretary of defense from 1949 to ’50, were “cost cutters” who opportunistically used the Korean war as a “cudgel” to push for their real policy goal, less spending on European defense. Another subset of America Firsters was hybrid figures like Joseph McCarthy who had some sincere convictions but also used the alleged failures of Truman in Asia as a way to outflank the Democrats on anti-communism.

Saunders believes the same mixture of true believers and opportunists can be seen today. Trump does seem genuinely committed to some form of America First, going back in decades. Once Trump won the GOP nomination and election in 2016, he was able to remake the party in his image because countless opportunists wanted to emulate him. Saunders observes, “Trump showed what power the presidency has to completely change the direction of a party.” Prior to Trump, America First was a minority tradition that showed up in the odd protest candidate, notably Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan. Now, it’s the dominant strand of the GOP, although a position often only cynically held.

The America First tradition has often been treated with scorn by establishment critics. Much in this tradition, notably the unwillingness to fight fascism in the 1930s and early ’40s, is indefensible. Like many other traditions, however, it has gradations and unexpected pertinence.

Robert Taft was, to put it as mildly as possible, a far more serious thinker and political actor than Donald Trump.

In 1949, Taft warned that the formation of NATO violated the principles of the United Nations Charter. According to Taft:

An undertaking by the most powerful nation in the world to arm half the world against the other half goes far beyond any “right of collective defense if an armed attacked occurs.” It violates the whole spirit of the United Nation’s Charter.… The Atlantic Pact moves in exactly the opposite direction from the purposes of the charter and makes a farce of further efforts to secure international justice through law and justice. It necessarily divides the world into two armed camps.… This treaty, therefore, means inevitably an armament race, and armament races in the past have led to war.

These words are remarkable prescient and apply with force to the NATO expansion undertaken after the end of the Cold War by both Democrats and Republicans.

An America First politics that was as thoughtful as Taft’s would be welcome—particularly when centrists Democrats like Joe Biden are supporting conflicts around the world. But a Taftian America First policy is not in the cards for many reasons. The 21st-century Republican Party has no figures who possesses anything comparable to the intellectual rigor of Taft. In his writing on foreign policy, Taft displayed an instinctive distrust of militarism, a respect for global public opinion, and a desire for the United States to live by the rules of prudence and moderation. Trumpian America First—seen in not just the former president but also figures like Mike Pompeo, Ron DeSantis, and Vivek Ramaswamy—offers jingoism, a disdain for diplomacy, a contempt for the concept of international law, and openly unabashed militarism.

What Trump offers is the worst side of America First—a politics of xenophobia underwritten by settler colonialist assumptions. Trumpian America First believes it’s wrong for white nations to fight each other when the goal should be to dominate other races.

But even if the Taftian America First could somehow be revived, it still wouldn’t be a good fit for the 21st century. We live in a much more interdependent world than the early 20th century. The problems that we face in this century —climate change most of all, but also global pandemics, mass migration of refugees, and the need to maintain international supply chains—require international cooperation on a scale we’ve never seen before.

We desperately need an alternative to the militaristic centrism of Joe Biden. But Trump’s America First is just a recipe for more wars. Whatever wisdom we can glean from the writings of Robert Taft have to be offset by the realization that even the best version of America First has little to say about our most crucial problems. The only real alternative is left-wing internationalism.