Toma - America first: understanding the Trump Doctrine

Praise for AMERICA FIRST

America First is a clear-eyed, realistic assessment of the implications of Trumpian foreign policy across the globe. It amounts to, in short...WINNING.

LARRY SCHWEIKART , author of A Patriots History of the United States and co-author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to the American Revolution and How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution

Danny Toma, a widely traveled member of the U.S. Foreign Service, brings tremendous insight to the Trump administrations America First foreign policy. Drawing on history and personal experience and breaking down the issues on a nation-by-nation basis, Toma shows that realistic pragmatism in foreign diplomacy has a long and successful history in this nation. I highly recommend the book to all who are interested in world affairs.

RONALD J. RYCHLAK , Jamie L. Whitten Chair of Law and Government Professor at the University of Mississippi School of Law and co-author of Disinformation and Looming Disaster

President Trump said that the fight for the West does not begin on the battlefield but in our minds, our wills, and our souls. In America First , Danny Toma details how this belief is being translated into a comprehensive foreign policy strategy designed to restore and sustain our national greatness.

JAMES S. ROBBINS , author of Erasing America: Losing Our Future by Destroying Our Past

If youve ever wondered what an America First foreign policy would look like, this is the book for you. In this richly detailed tour de force, Danny Toma convincingly argues that America would be safer, and Americans far securer, if we only intervened in the affairs of other countries if our vital national interests are at stake. Drawing upon his decades of experience in the U.S. Foreign Service, he argues that America First does not mean America alone, but it does mean that we stop trying to impose the values of Hollywood and Manhattan on countries and peoples who have no interest in following the West into demographic and sexual suicide.

STEVEN W. MOSHER , founding president of Population Research Institute and author of Bully of Asia: Why Chinas Dream Is the New Threat to World Order

Copyright 2018 by Raymond Daniel Toma Jr.

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To Dana, Nicolae, Mimmo, Patrick, and Emily, who have traveled the world with me.

W ith all the focus on how divided we are as a nation, the casual observer could be forgiven for thinking that there has been no consensus on policy in the United States. While that may be the case in many areas of our politics, foreign policy has been a notable exception. The Obama administration did push the envelope. But even when he took it to the point of having our embassies fly rainbow flags, Obama was simply expanding a precedent established by his immediate predecessors. While there may be disagreement over what exactly American values are , there has been a remarkable consensus in recent years that it is Americas role to impose those values on the worldto dictate to other countries what is right and what is wrong, and woe be unto any nation that seeks to defy our will. Although it was a Democrat, Madeleine Albright, who famously said, We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, that sentiment could have been expressed by most recent Republican candidates for president, up to the 2016 election cycle.

With Donald Trumps election to the presidency, that consensus appears to have come apart. The media would have us believe that President Trumps call for a more restrained America First foreign policy is unprecedented and unworthy of our nations chief executive. They have highlighted discontent among our foreign affairs professionals to argue that Trump is somehow outside the mainstream of American thinking. But is that actually the case? As Queen Gertrude said in Hamlet , The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

The supposedly traditional view of Americas role in the world is anything but traditional. And it has been used by our secularist elites on the Left to help uproot traditional values. Whats more, their useful idiots on the Right, enamored with any display of American might, have gone along even when the results have been destructive of core conservative values. As noted atheist Christopher Hitchens crowed about foreign policy under our last Republican president, George Bush may subjectively be a Christian, but heand the U.S. armed forceshave objectively done more for secularism than the whole of the American agnostic community combined and doubled.

In early 2016 the media and the rest of the bicoastal elites were convinced that the quiet revolution they had launched to transform our world into a leftist utopia was destined to prevail. The self-appointed, self-righteous, self-congratulatory cabal of progressives were finally on the very cusp of dismantling the foundations upon which our Republic was founded and establishing themselves as the arbiters of the new morality. That new moralitywhich is not really that new, but as old as the Serpent in the Gardenconfuses liberty with libertinism and is far more concerned with Man (or should we say Person?) in the abstract than with living breathing human beings.

They were struggling against the weight of more than two hundred years of American history and values. But they controlled the major media outlets, and they believed the inalterable course of history had foreordained the victory; they did not see any other outcome. Twenty sixteen was to be Year One of their revolution. The shackles of common sense and traditional moralitythey were devoted secularists, all of them; for even the supposedly religious among them, human progress was the only transcendent thing beyond their own urges that they really believed inwere to be thrown off, and those who cling to guns or religion forever sidelined.

A funny thing happened on the way to utopia. One candidate began talking more like an American than a globalist, and for the first time in a generation, millions of citizens who had been told that their values were somehow unworthy finally had a champion. They turned out in droves and elected a man who was anathema to the elites and the Leftnot because he advocated something new and sinister, as the bicoastal elites would have us believe, but rather because he sought to steer the country back to its roots, back to those values that made our country the greatest one on the face of the Earth, a country where hard work and honest living could bring rewards, and where we can once again hope that our children would have an even better life than their parents. The government of that country would not put up unnecessary barriers to her citizens success, but step aside and concentrate on keeping those citizens safe and securefrom foreign foes, and also from foes within our society who envy those who create wealth and well-being, who would rather destroy than to create.