America First Hijacked: How Empire Subverts Restraint
Behind the façade of America First, Trump's foreign policy drifts into interventionist revival—engineered by elites, driven by ego, and doomed by design.
The current geopolitical trajectory of the United States under Donald Trump’s resumed presidency illustrates with stark clarity the fundamental thesis of political realism:
The behavior of states, and the leaders who govern them, is determined by the ceaseless pursuit of power and relative advantage in an anarchic international system.
Trump's rhetorical posture of “America First,” introduced during his 2016 campaign, once gestured toward disengagement from costly foreign entanglements and a strategic pivot to peer competition with China. This approach emphasized prioritizing core national interests, reducing military interventions abroad, and questioning the utility and cost of traditional alliances such as NATO, which he frequently criticized as obsolete and exploutative of American resources.
However, that posture now stands precariously exposed to subversion—not through an orchestrated conspiracy, but through the relentless pressures exerted by the structural imperatives of American hegemony and the strategic cunning of entrenched foreign policy elites.
These actors, colloquially referred to as the “blob,” represent the permanent national security and foreign policy establishment that transcends political parties and administrations. They do not require Trump to renounce his worldview; they merely need to manipulate its inconsistencies: his erratic temperment, his insatiable desire for displays of personal strength, and his superficial grasp of long-term strategy.
The outcome is a presidency that outwardly mimics realist restraint but inwardly reverts to the failed interventionism of previous decades: a politics of spectacle, where visible displays of aggression replace coherent grand strategy, where fleeting victories are mistaken for durable advantage, and where impulsive emotionalism eclipses the sober logic of statecraft.
Trump’s outburst against Vladimir Putin, far from representing a deliberate or calculated departure from policy, is merely the latest iteration of a deeper dysfunction—wherein emotion is rapidly transmuted into geopolitical behavior without regard for consequence or strategic alignment.
Putin’s rejection of a U.S.-backed ceasefire plan—despite Ukraine’s public willingness to consider it—and his refusal to negotiate on terms set by the West have been weaponized by the neoconservative and hawkish elite.
These figures—including members of Congress such as Senator Lindsey Graham, as well as long-standing advocates of American interventionism within institutions like the Hudson Institute and the American Enterprise Institute—have championed the near-indiscriminate projection of American military power for decades.
Their post-9/11 survival has depended on laundering discredited strategies through renewed crises, always repackaged under the pretext of defending democracy or punishing aggression. They understand that power often lies in the ability to frame events. By casting Putin’s conduct as an insult to Trump’s authority and by extension to American strength, they convert mundane diplomatic impasses into existential contests of will.
In doing so, they expose Trump’s greatest vulnerability: his inability to distinguish between a personal affront and actions of little strategic significance or consequence for U.S. power.
Realpolitik does not concern itself with the emotional interpretation of slights; it concerns itself with outcomes. And in this case, those manipulating Trump are not breaking with realpolitik—they are executing it.
Given Russia’s recent battlefield momentum—including territorial gains in the Donbas and the seizure of strategic assets like lithium mines—and the West’s reluctance to address the war’s “root causes,” Putin has likely concluded that continued military operations are more likely to achieve his objectives than negotiations.
These objectives are not vague ideological ambitions, but rather clearly defined strategic imperatives:
Formalizing control over southern and eastern Ukraine, potentially cutting off Ukraine’s access to the Black Sea;
Ensuring Kyiv’s permanent exclusion from NATO;
Structurally weakening Ukraine’s ability to serve as a Western forward base on Russia’s doorstep by constraining Kyiv’s military mobilization capacity.
The intensification of missile strikes on infrastructure and supply lines is not a sign of irrational brutality, but a calculated strategy of attrition designed to increase Kyiv’s dependence on the West while raising the long-term costs of resistance.
In the realist view, diplomacy is viable only when the balance of power renders it the most efficient path to securing national interests. For Moscow, that balance has not yet been achieved.
The American interpretation of these developments—couched in terms of defiance, disrespect, or affront to presidential authority—is a symptom of the dysfunctional personalization of foreign policy.
Trump, who operates as much on image as on insight, interprets strategic calculus as a referendum on his leadership. This makes him uniquely susceptible to elite manipulation. The interventionist camp exploits this vulnerability with precision: by framing Russia’s actions as a deliberate humiliation, they force Trump into a corner where anything short of escalation becomes indistinguishable from surrender.
They do not need to persuade Trump intellectually; they need only provoke his instinctual fear of appearing weak. In so doing, they transform the terms of engagement from rational cost-benefit analysis to emotional compulsion. The war in Ukraine, initially dismissed by Trump as “Biden’s war,” now reemerges as the theater in which his own mettle is to be tested.
This manipulation does not lead to clarity but to policy drift—an accumulation of reactive decisions untethered from any coherent doctrine, propelled by vanity and managed by bureaucracy.
The United States, rather than pursuing a defined strategic objective, becomes
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Post-Liberal Dispatch to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.