The Essentials of an America First Foreign Policy
by Ryan Setliff

America First!—should be the rallying cry behind an American foreign policy tailored to serve our vital national interests through strategic independence and armed neutrality. Speaking on the Old Right position on foreign affairs, Joseph Scotchie notes, "A post-Cold War foreign policy that combines a strong national defense and a nation free of such globalist organizations as the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization has been a good enough model for the Old Right." The Paleoconservatives. Joseph Scotchie, ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1999. p. 2. In relations with other nations, the Old Right is apt to question the logic of globalism and globalization, and affirms skepticism of interventionism abroad. Though, the Old Right's principled position is sometimes denigrated as isolationism by detractors, the Old Right readily concedes that "isolationism" is not the historic foreign policy of the United States. Nonetheless, a foreign policy geniunely tailored to serve the national interest eschews foreign entanglements, alliances and security commitments and reckless intervention abroad.

Patrick Buchanan warned in 1999 in his book Republic, Not An Empire that perilous consequences could follow the course of United States' interventionist foreign policy, which aggravated and kindled the flames of resentment at our nation:

The United States has unthinkingly embarked upon a neo-imperial policy that must involve us in virtually every great war of the coming century—and wars the death of republics... if we continue on this course of reflexive interventions, enemies will one day answer our power with the weapon of the weak—terror, and eventually cataclysmic terrorism on U.S. soil... then liberty, the cause of the republic, will itself be in peril.

This statement proved prescient in light of the tragic terror attacks of September 11, 2001, and while no one amongst the Old Right finds any legitimacy to the claims of those heinous terrorists; it should go without saying that their grievances point to opposition to an interventionist U.S. foreign policy, such as the U.S. stationing troops in Saudi Arabia.