Viscount Palmerston's View on “America First”
Originally published on Substack on January 06, 2026.
Following on from my deep dive into Pitt the Younger , I’ve been reading of Palmerston, Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister (1830-65). He was the embodiment of British self-assurance—a man who believed that a British subject should be safe anywhere in the world, protected by the watchful eye of the Royal Navy and the “Civis Romanus Sum” principle.
With the release of the US National Security Strategy (NSS) last month, it occurred that this document would not have been out of place in Palmerston’s time. It is a document of raw, unsentimental power. So, in the best tradition of Pax Britannica mercantilism, I’ve asked the old Viscount for his opinion on the geopolitics of December 2025.
Here is what he wrote.
Memorandum: On the “America First” Doctrine and the Condition of the Realm
From: The Right Honourable The Viscount Palmerston To: The UK Cabinet of 2025
My Lords,
It has long been my maxim that nations have no eternal allies, and they have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow. For too long, you have labored under the delusion that the Atlantic Alliance was an exception to this rule—a bond of sentiment rather than utility. The Americans, with their new “National Security Strategy,” have finally disabused you of this notion.
As a practitioner of foreign policy, I am compelled to admire their logic, however much it inconveniences us. They have embraced what they term “Civilizational Realism”. They have looked at their ledger, found the cost of global moral policing too high, and retreated to “Fortress America,” fortified by a “Trump Corollary” to the Mon(Don)roe Doctrine that effectively closes the Western Hemisphere to foreign intrusion. They have chosen to protect their own “Golden Dome” rather than the frontiers of Europe. This is not cruelty; it is statecraft.
But where does this leave England? You stand between a protectionist American hammer and a bureaucratic European anvil. Your negotiations for the “SAFE” defence fund have collapsed because you were too proud to pay the fee and too weak to demand better terms, leaving our industries excluded from the continent’s rearmament. Meanwhile, your economy contracted by 0.1% in October, and your car factories are idle. You cannot project power on negative growth.
The Americans seek a “swift end” to the war in Ukraine, indifferent to the territorial integrity of that land, so long as their own commerce is secure. This is a “Munich moment” dressed as realism. If you wish to survive in this chilly new world, you must abandon your sentimental attachment to a “Special Relationship” that no longer exists. You must adopt a policy of Aggressive Realism. You must become the “perfidious Albion” of old—trading your military surplus for market access, securing the North Sea with the Dutch and Norwegians, the European Airspace with the Germans and Poles and our Pacific interests with Australia. Understanding that in a world of tariffs and walls, the only freedom of trade you will have is that which you can enforce.
Civis Britannicus Sum.
The Return of History
To return to the international politics of the 19th century in the 21st is to trade values for interests. The 2025 US national security strategy and the European reaction signify the end of the “liberal international order” where rules theoretically bound everyone. We are back to an era of Great Power competition, where “spheres of influence” matter more than international law. For a mid-sized power like the UK, this is dangerous terrain; without the hard power of the 1850s Royal Navy or the economic engine of the Industrial Revolution, the risk is not just isolation, but irrelevance.
We need to be realistic in making the trade-offs necessary to rebuild our hard power, build on alliances with those who mutually require cooperation in this new world to succeed and remember in our dealings with International law that sometimes “it is to the law of self-preservation that England appeals for justification of her proceedings.“
Update: I wrote the above before the US governments latest foray into Venezuela. It reinforces that we’re once again living in a 19th Century world of ‘Great Powers’ geopolitics. The ‘police action’ would have been completely in place with the world of Palmerston; the removal of Argentina’s General Juan Rosas in 1852 particularly comes to mind with the good general living out his days in Southampton.