America First Gets an Overhaul in 2026

On January 3rd, the United States military landed in Caracas, Venezuela, and abducted President Nicolas Maduro and his wife. Maduro, his wife, son, and three others have been indicted on four counts: “ narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices.” Worldwide reaction to the military aggression was either condemnatory or supportive, depending on whether you were an ally or enemy of the United States. The same could be said of the Republican Party’s overall reaction. As someone who put his music career in jeopardy to support President Trump, rather than trusting the stenographers of power to explain the motivations behind his actions in Venezuela, I decided to do some soul-searching to bring clarity to current world events. I was shocked, but not surprised, by how many of my friends were not willing to accept that the true spirit of non-interventionist America First had, in my estimation, been blasphemed and repurposed to fit a political agenda of neoconservatism. In 2016, President Trump stated that we must “abandon the failed policy of nation building and regime change that Hillary Clinton pushed in Iraq, Libya, Egypt, and Syria,” so my displeasure is well-founded. To be clear, I felt betrayed and angry that I fell for the propaganda, and after firing off a few vitriolic emails and text messages to friends renouncing President Trump, I started to see things differently. I am not suggesting I am now supportive of President Trump’s actions; I am simply looking at things more realistically. To my friends who say President Trump is not seeking regime change, I argue that a regime-change policy is defined by intent and actions, not by whether it works or has actually occurred. When you publicly declare a president illegitimate and float names of successors, that is surely regime-change behavior, no matter how hard you try to spin it.

 The America First agenda of non-intervention and self-reliance was flawed from the outset. A pure America First foreign policy cannot exist in a globalized energy market, given America’s limited oil reserves and the green energy zealots that want the United States to move away from fossil fuels. As a result, Trump’s America First approach increasingly resembles neoconservatism in practice, even while rejecting its language. Actions such as sanctioning Iran and Venezuela, deploying naval forces to protect shipping routes, and capturing the President of a country, even though his legitimacy is debated, to control his oil, are far from isolationist. Instead, these measures represent a form of selective global management that naturally leads to neoconservative reasoning. Neoconservatism, after all, functions less as an ideology and more as a system for sustaining empire, and the United States is an empire in decline. President Trump has discarded the moral justifications of neoconservatism, yet retained its methods of imperial power, and repurposed it for his younger supporters, who have not learned the lessons of history, and his older supporters, who seem to have forgotten them. Getting Venezuela’s oil before Russia and China by any means necessary is now in the best interest of the American people. While I don’t deny that President Trump is correct, I disapprove of the way he’s gone about acquiring it. I expected much better from him. I believed in him. I am not so sure what to think anymore.

 Russia and China have their own strategies that resemble the America First approach. Although they differ in structure, motivation, and beneficiaries, each plan prioritizes national power and regime stability. Moreover, when in crisis and all else fails, imperial leaders make excuses to go to war to compensate for their inept leadership and corrupt government. Putin started the trend with his “special military operation.” President Trump continued with his “ war on drugs.” It is not a matter of if, but when Xi Jinping will invade Taiwan with his own rhetoric designed to win the support of his people, just as Putin has done and Trump is doing. How all of these catastrophes turn out is critical. If Putin prevails in Ukraine, and Trump is successful in Venezuela, the stage is set for what my libertarian friend Joe Terwilliger calls the “Trumpian version of multipolarity-regional hegemons with free rein in their backyards.” As resources needed to support the way our world is accustomed to living grow scarcer, it is not unreasonable to suggest we are on the brink of World War III.

 President Trump is not the populist/middle-class savior many voters hoped he would be. At the core, I believe there is no fundamental difference between George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, the late Vice President Dick Cheney, and Barack Obama: they all seek to control outcomes beyond the United States’ borders using necon-like elements, despite their claims otherwise. All three ex-presidents believed they were acting for U.S. security and strategic interests, and all made decisions they argued were necessary to confront perceived threats. President Trump is doing the same thing. Looking at things from this perspective, it is getting harder to distinguish our past and present United States presidents from Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, and, speaking as a longtime supporter of President Trump and an American, that is the biggest tragedy of all.