How President Trump is Redefining What it Means to Put America First
President Trump is giving the world a lesson in what it means to be in charge, teaching that the best leaders do not abide by conventions. They smash them and create new paradigms of action, proving that at the end of the day, leadership, like making deals, is not a science but an art.
Case in point: President Trump’s decision to send weapons to Ukraine via NATO and increase the pressure on Russia through the announcement of 100% tariffs
It was remarkable in two ways: firstly, it obviously reverses the previous policy of ending the weapons flow to Kyiv. Secondly, it shows that President Trump is more than happy to adapt his own policy if he thinks it's in America’s best interest to do so. Unlike other world leaders, he is not an ideological zealot unable to rethink his position, but, if anything, a man, who genuinely seems to care about lives lost on both sides.
At the same time, President Trump has ended Biden-era freeloading of Europe and has instead made crystal clear that NATO countries will have to pay for American weapons bound to Ukraine, creating jobs and filling US coffers. This is smart politics and another win for the American tax payer, who will finally be paid back for the assistance provided to Ukraine since the war began in 2022. No US troops will step foot on Ukrainian soil, but American-made weapons will be used to prevent the loss of human lives and hopefully shorten a war that Trump has rightly called “a loser”. The funds generated through the sales of US weapons to NATO allies can be reinvested into countering China’s influence at home and abroad, or into further shoring up border defenses and bolstering ICE capabilities.
This is true leadership and the art of the deal in action.
Critics on the right are the very same people who opposed President Trump’s historic decision to obliterate Iran’s nuclear capabilities and who feel uneasy about providing weapons to Taiwan, even though it is in the clear US national security interest to do so. They fail to recognize that Trump’s policies have never been purely isolationist, or interventionist. Rather, he seeks to establish an equilibrium of peace by being willing to act forcefully when necessary and redirecting the resolution of conflict from the battlefield to trade negotiations, as he did most recently in the case of Pakistan and India.
President Trump’s foreign policy ultimately preserves human lives, bolsters US allies, creates jobs and prosperity at home, and benefits American strategic interests. This, as even critics of the President will have to admit, is the quintessential essence of what good statecraft and protecting US interests looks like. This is what it means to put America First.