
Mitch McConnell Launches Attack Against Trump’s ‘America First’ Agenda
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Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has launched an attack against the foreign policy of President Donald Trump’s incoming administration.
Despite Trump’s electoral mandate, McConnell is going on offense against the president-elect’s America First worldview.
In an essay published in Foreign Affairs on Monday, McConnell called on Trump to reject America First’s alleged “flirtation with isolation and decline.”
McConnell is also urging the administration to embrace many foreign policy positions that Trump notably rejected during the campaign.
The positions include issuing support for additional foreign aid and free trade agreements, solidarity with NATO, and more weapons transfers to Ukraine.
The former Senate Republican leader wrote:
“The [Trump] administration will face calls from within the Republican Party to give up on American primacy. It must reject them.
“To pretend that the United States can focus on just one threat at a time, that its credibility is divisible, or that it can afford to shrug off faraway chaos as irrelevant is to ignore its global interests and its adversaries’ global designs.
“America will not be made great again by those who simply want to manage its decline.”
“The response to four years of weakness must not be four years of isolation,” McConnell added.
The United States urgently needs to reach a bipartisan consensus on the centrality of hard power to U.S. foreign policy. Read my full essay in @ForeignAffairs: https://t.co/Z463yFxxPk
— Leader McConnell (@LeaderMcConnell) December 16, 2024