In this opinion, Wesley Wark reviews the events of an “extraordinary week” in mid-February, which “will go down in history as the first shot in the new Trump administration’s design to revolutionize its relations with the world.” Wark discusses Pete Hegseth’s address to the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in Brussels, Donald Trump’s 90-minute phone chat with Vladimir Putin, J. D. Vance’s keynote at the Munich Security Conference and, also in Munich, “the week’s finale”: remarks by retired General Keith Kellogg in round-table discussions that spurred “a growing sense of unease.” As Wark concludes, “America First, after this dramatic week in February, looks like a doctrine that abandons allies, abandons democracy, abandons principles, abandons its historic global leadership, and lectures and threatens while it does so.”
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