Since its inception, even though the America First ideology often advocates for fewer foreign entanglements, it favors a stronger presence in the Western Hemisphere. Image: Guacamaya.
Guacamaya, August 20, 2026. Imagine a classroom at Yale Law School with dark wooden furniture and tall windows, where a group of students in ties is debating whether the United States should engage in the trenches of Europe again. The date is September 4, 1940.
Robert Douglas Stuart Jr., heir to the Quaker Oats fortune, along with classmates, including Kingman Brewster Jr. — who was then the editor of the Yale Daily News — founded the America First Committee. The committee would eventually gather 800,000 members and 450 delegations before disbanding right after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
Fast forward eighty-four years, another Yale Law School graduate — J. D. Vance from the class of 2013 — would go on to hold the vice presidency of the United States under the banner of “America First.”
This geographical coincidence doesn’t imply a direct association, but it highlights a deeper truth: Yale, the birthplace of the internationalist elite that created the postwar liberal order in the 1940s, was also the starting point of its counter-movement. American isolationism didn’t originate in the rural Midwest, as is often portrayed, but within the Ivy League classrooms, among young men who were suspicious of the imperial commitments enforced by two world wars.
The Voice of the Lone Eagle
The public figurehead of the committee was Charles Lindbergh, the aviator who, in 1927, crossed the Atlantic solo and became the greatest cultural icon of his time — an astronaut before the space race, the man who conquered distance. This symbolic capital made him an ideal spokesperson for a cause that needed to appear patriotic rather than cowardly.
In April 1941, during a speech to the committee, Lindbergh articulated an idea that would come to define 20th-century isolationism: The United States should refrain from foreign wars in the Old World but must firmly defend its own hemisphere against any external threats. It wasn’t pure pacifism — the committee reiterated this point repeatedly — but rather a prioritization of geographical concerns, where America’s own backyard took precedence over issues abroad, seeing the American continent as a natural sphere of authority and leaving the rest of the world’s problems for Europe to resolve without U.S. involvement.
This same rhetorical rhythm—rejecting “forever wars” and affirming that the Western Hemisphere is a vital interest area—resurfaces almost verbatim in Donald Trump’s campaign and administration speeches. There’s no need to stretch the comparison, as Trump’s remarks on Greenland, the Panama Canal, or the Caribbean basin echo Lindbergh’s argument that America’s true security frontier does not lie on the Rhine or the Dnieper, but in its own neighborhood.
The Eagle and the Women Who Sustained It
The America First Committee was, from the beginning, significantly influenced by women. Figures like Alice Roosevelt Longworth, daughter of Theodore Roosevelt, were part of its board — a historical irony given that her father was the architect of the hemispheric interventionism that the committee partially supported. However, it would take several decades until a woman would finalize the link between pre-war isolationism and contemporary Trumpism: Phyllis Schlafly.
A lawyer, mother of six, and relentless activist, Schlafly constructed her political legacy on two pillars that are now indistinguishable from the ideologies of Trump and Vance: the rejection of economic and military globalism, and the assertion of the traditional family as the moral foundation of the nation against the feminist agenda of the Equal Rights Amendment, a clash she championed and won in the 1970s and 1980s.
Schlafly was more than an ideological precursor; she became a direct political ally. She endorsed Trump in March 2016, co-authored the book The Conservative Case for Trump — published on the day of her passing — and Trump attended her funeral in St. Louis, where he honored her as a warrior dedicated to putting the needs of the American people first.
This amalgamation of economic nationalism, skepticism toward global institutions, and a conservative perspective on women’s roles at home largely constitutes the ideological DNA that Vance now inherits and adapts. His book Hillbilly Elegy and his speeches on family, birth rates, and community represent a generational translation of the Schlafly project, now equipped with the language of “national sovereignty” in its foreign policies.
William McKinley: The Ghost of Ohio in Trump’s Mind
If Lindbergh and Schlafly provide the cultural lineage of “America First,” then William McKinley offers its historical grounding in hard power. Trump himself articulated this in his inaugural address in 2025, wherein he promised to restore the name of McKinley—removed from Denali by Barack Obama in 2015—to North America’s highest peak, asserting that McKinley had enriched the country through tariffs and talent and had financed many of Teddy Roosevelt’s significant achievements, including the Panama Canal.
McKinley served from 1897 to 1901, during a crucial transition between the 19th-century continental Manifest Destiny and 20th-century overseas imperialism. Under his leadership, the 1898 war against Spain yielded Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines for the U.S. and strengthened the notion that tariff protectionism and territorial expansion were not only compatible but necessary: first safeguard domestic industries, then force open foreign markets if needed. This same conceptual pairing has been revived by Trump—viewing tariffs as a means for geopolitical negotiation, not purely commercial—and his critics, like economist Douglas Irwin, contend Trump misinterprets this history by attributing prosperity to tariffs rather than to factors like electrification or improvements in railroads.
What matters in the Venezuelan context is a nearly anecdotal yet crucial fact. After McKinley was assassinated in 1901, and his vice president, Theodore Roosevelt, took over the presidency along with the expansionist ethos, he particularly intensified this approach toward the Caribbean and the northern coast of South America.
1902: When the Gunboats Arrived at La Guaira
In late 1902, Great Britain, Germany, and Italy blockaded Venezuelan ports in an effort to compel the payment of debts owed by Cipriano Castro’s government, even bombarding Puerto Cabello and sinking a portion of the small Venezuelan navy. Roosevelt, who had just ascended to the presidency post-McKinley’s assassination, was alarmed by the prospect of European powers establishing a permanent military presence in the hemisphere that had been considered America’s backyard since the Monroe Doctrine in 1823.
The crisis eventually subsided, but it imparted a lesson that Roosevelt formalized into doctrine in 1904: the Roosevelt Corollary, which reinterpreted the Monroe Doctrine not simply as a caution against European colonization but as a mandate for the U.S. to exert “international police power” in any American nation that, whether through misconduct or incapacity, provided a pretext for foreign intervention. This argument laid the groundwork for U.S. actions in Latin America and the Caribbean under the guise of combating the influence of extra-regional powers like China — during that period, it was German imperial interests in Venezuela and other nations that concerned them.
Venezuela essentially served as the testing ground for this doctrine, which would later be applied in countries like Santo Domingo, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Cuba. The nation that once again commands Washington’s attention today was, over a century ago, the conceptual birthplace of the rationale that justified U.S. interventionism throughout the 20th century.
The narrative connects back to the present. On January 3, 2026, Trump declared from Mar-a-Lago that U.S. forces had conducted a military operation in Caracas to capture Nicolás Maduro, who was charged with narco-terrorism by New York authorities alongside his wife, Cilia Flores. Trump proclaimed that the operation was executed under his direct command, utilizing overwhelming air, land, and naval forces against what he called a heavily fortified military base in the midst of Caracas. He announced that the U.S. would “administer” Venezuela until a “safe, appropriate, and prudent” transition occurred — a phrasing that, mutatis mutandis, echoes the old custodial language of the Roosevelt Corollary, framed as intervention not as conquest, but rather as a necessary correction of another’s disorder.
Months later, in August 2026, Trump was still leveraging the incident politically, describing it to supporters in Las Vegas as a “48-minute war” whose outcomes had far outweighed the initial investment, boasting that Washington had acquired billions of barrels of Venezuelan oil following Maduro’s downfall. The reasoning follows the McKinleyan strategy: wield force first, then dominate the market; using tariffs and military might as tools from the same toolbox.
J.D. Vance: The Heir
Vance’s involvement in this narrative reinforces, rather than contradicts, his Lindberghian legacy. Unlike traditional neoconservatives, Vance has shown hesitance toward intervention in conflicts outside the hemisphere — reportedly opposing U.S. strikes against the Houthis in Yemen — while robustly supporting the doctrine that the Western Hemisphere is indeed a valid arena for direct U.S. action. This mirrors the distinction Lindbergh made in 1941: not all global conflicts are America’s concern, but our own backyard certainly is. In this context, Venezuela represents not a global war front but an extension of home.
Returning to that Yale classroom, the students in 1940 who drafted pamphlets against European intervention could hardly have imagined that their ideological descendants would be governing from the White House eighty-five years later, nor that the very hemisphere they defended abstractly as a limit to American involvement would become the actual stage for a military action against Caracas. Lindbergh advocated non-intervention in foreign wars while promoting involvement in continental conflicts; Schlafly dressed that concept in a familial and anti-globalist context; McKinley established the precedent for tariff-imperialism; and Theodore Roosevelt unintentionally made Venezuela the original framework for the doctrine now being revived.
What was once a speech by an aviator before a war-skeptical audience in 1941 has transformed into a military fleet positioned off the Venezuelan coast and a former president extradited to New York in 2026. The independent destiny claimed by Lindbergh for the United States was never truly about detachment from the world; it was an affirmation of one’s own hemisphere, protected with as much fervor as Roosevelt defended the customs houses of La Guaira back in 1902. This thread — extending from New Haven to Caracas, and from Quaker Oats to Venezuela’s oil fields — is not a contrived metaphor. It fundamentally represents the political genealogy shaping Washington’s current perspective.
Charles Lindbergh’s speech in Des Moines, September 1941, presents a troubling precedent of political rhetoric based on distinguishing “war agitators”: both domestic and foreign entities that, according to him, were leading the United States toward conflicts contrary to its interests. Lindbergh pointed fingers at the British, the Jews, and the Roosevelt administration, as well as capitalists, intellectuals, and communists. His argument was steeped in a conspiratorial anti-Semitism that remains entwined with his legacy today.
The Trump administration has revived, albeit with different language and without strictly reproducing Lindbergh’s anti-Semitic categorizations, a similar rhetorical framework that asserts the establishment, globalists, communists, foreign allies, and interventionists are dragging the United States into wars that do not truly align with its national interests. Trump, Vance, and segments of the America First movement have utilized this narrative to challenge the foreign policy establishment.
A historical tension thus emerges. The contemporary America First juxtaposes with the neoconservative and interventionist tradition that has long advocated an active U.S. military presence worldwide, a sentiment currently personified by Marco Rubio.
This tension is crucial for understanding the ongoing conflict within the White House regarding the Venezuelan issue. It’s not just a foreign policy debate but a clash of fundamental beliefs about what role the United States should play globally and how far it should go to defend its interests. How this battle between the America First faction, generally more reluctant towards interventionism, and the neoconservatives, who advocate for a more aggressive U.S. role, is resolved could largely shape Washington’s actions concerning Venezuela.
Furthermore, this resolution may also dictate how the United States plans to engage with a nation that possesses some of the largest oil reserves worldwide, alongside significant mineral resources and other strategic advantages. In that regard, the internal strife within Washington might unveil keys to deciphering what the U.S. genuinely seeks in Venezuela and how far it is willing to go to achieve its objectives in the short and medium term.