Ideas

What Trump Doesn’t Understand About ‘America First’

It’s time for Europe and the United States to accept how different they actually are.

First published in The Atlantic on August 21, 2025

by Nick Clegg, The Atlantic
August 28, 2025 | reading time: 11 Min.

In the summer of 1930, the U.S. secretaries of war and the Navy developed War Plan Red, a 94-page document laying out detailed plans to strangle the naval and trade capabilities of the United Kingdom in a hypothetical future that involved the U.S. and U.K. at war with each other. The centerpiece was a full-scale land invasion of Canada, a seaborne attack on Halifax, a blockade of the Panama Canal, the capture of British possessions throughout the Caribbean and the Bahamas and Bermuda, and a direct challenge of the Royal Navy by U.S. naval forces in the Atlantic.

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