Exclusive—Daniel Flynn: Frank Meyer and the Roots of Trump’s America First Foreign Policy

A foreign policy that puts America’s just interests first did not originate with Donald Trump.

During a summer in which Israel, Iran, Ukraine, and Russia dominated the news cycle, this seems easy to forget, if important to remember.

“The foreign policy of the United States should be, within broad moral limits, motivated by and concerned with our national interest,” Frank Meyer insisted to Henry Kissinger in December 1968.

The letter, one of tens of thousands of lost documents found in a warehouse as part of research for The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer , illustrates that, even during the Cold War, right-wingers understood that the Soviet Union only temporarily reoriented the U.S.’s role in the world. When it ended, so would the active U.S. invol