Addressing the U.N. in 2018, Trump startled delegates by declaring, “We reject the ideology of globalism.” As President he showed disdain not only for the U.N. but also for NATO and U.S. security guarantees for South Korea and Japan. “Why would we defend somebody?” Trump asked TIME’s Eric Cortellessa during an interview on foreign policy in April 2024. U.S. global commitments, Trump argues, have not benefited the American people.
If Trump’s move away from globalism breaks with recent foreign policy, it reconnects with a powerful earlier current in American history. Before 1944, a majority of Americans held views much closer to those of Trump than to the liberal internationalists who built the “American Century,” a term famously coined by publisher Henry Luce during World War II to mark the dawning era of U.S. global dominance.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the U.S. tried to influence world events without making commitments to other nations. That meant pushing preferred policies through private, informal, unilateral diplomacy. This policy of “noncommitment” failed spectacularly in the 1930s. Yet the very same idea is at the core of today’s America First movement.
Exactly 100 years ago—in the summer of 1924—the U.S. took a major step toward world leadership by framing a solution to the gnarliest problem left by World War I: German reparations.
The issue had disrupted Europe’s recovery since 1918. After its loss, Germany had dragged its feet on making the payments demanded under the Versailles Treaty. France responded by sending troops into its industrial heartland along the Ruhr River. That led to passive resistance by Germans that tanked the country’s economy and helped trigger hyperinflation in 1923. The paralysis of Germany’s economy—the largest and most industrialized in Europe—upset production and trade across the continent.
By early 1924, Europe’s economic and political debacle seemed impossible to solve.
Enter the Americans. Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes proposed that Europeans empower a new committee to devise an apolitical, “businesslike” remedy to reparations. In early 1924 such a committee was formed, headed by Chicago banker Charles Dawes and Owen D. Young, a whiz-kid lawyer from upstate New York and president of General Electric.
After months of work, the Dawes committee, as it was known, went public with its plan. The proposal not only set up a workable timetable for Germany to pay reparations—it also promised to break an icy deadlock between the allies and Germany.