Robert Kagan, a Post Opinions contributing editor, is the author of “The Ghost at the Feast: America and the Collapse of World Order, 1900-1941” as well as “Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart — Again,” which will be published by Knopf in April.

Many Americans seem shocked that Republicans would oppose helping Ukraine at this critical juncture in history. Don’t Republican members of Congress see the consequences of a Russian victory, for America’s European allies, for its Asian allies and ultimately for the United States itself? What happened to the party of Ronald Reagan? Clearly, people have not been taking Donald Trump’s resurrection of America First seriously. It’s time they did.

The original America First Committee was founded in September 1940. Consider the global circumstances at the time. Two years earlier, Hitler had annexed Austria and invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia. One year earlier, he had invaded and conquered Poland. In the first months of 1940, he invaded and occupied Norway, Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands. In early June 1940, British troops evacuated from Dunkirk, and France was overrun by the Nazi blitzkrieg. In September, the very month of the committee’s formation, German troops were in Paris and Edward R. Murrow was reporting from London under bombardment by the Luftwaffe. That was the moment the America First movement launched itself into the battle to block aid to Britain.

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Cutting off Ukraine seems like small beer by comparison, but behind it lies the same “America First” thinking. For Donald Trump and his followers, pulling the plug on Ukraine is part of a larger aim to end America’s broader commitment to European peace and security. America’s commitment to NATO, Trump believes, should be conditional, at best: Russia can do “whatever the hell they want” to allies who do not pay their fair share and meet certain defense-spending objectives.

Other Republicans don’t even mention conditions. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) has called for the immediate reduction of U.S. force levels in Europe and the abrogation of America’s common-defense Article 5 commitments. He wants the United States to declare publicly that in the event of a “direct conflict” between Russia and a NATO ally, America will “withhold forces.” The Europeans need to know they can no longer “count on us like they used to.” Elbridge Colby, a former Trump Pentagon official praised by Hawley, has written widely (and wrongly) that United States cannot defend both East Asia and Europe and that Europeans must fend for themselves because, as he put it in a recent social media post, “Asia is more important than Europe.” He said, “If we have to leave Europe more exposed, so be it.”

Can Republicans really be returning to a 1930s worldview in our 21st-century world? The answer is yes. Trump’s Republican Party wants to take the United States back to the triad of interwar conservatism: high tariffs, anti-immigrant xenophobia, isolationism. According to Russ Vought, who is often touted as Trump’s likely chief of staff in a second term, it is precisely this “older definition of conservatism,” the conservatism of the interwar years, that they hope to impose on the nation when Trump regains power.

So it’s time to take a closer look at the 1930s conservative mentality and the America First movement it spawned.

Republican anti-interventionism of those interwar years — “isolationism” as critics called it — was less a carefully considered strategic doctrine than an extension of their battles against domestic opponents. Yes, there were self-proclaimed “realists” in the late 1930s assuring everyone that the United States was invulnerable and that events in Asia, where Japan was also on the rampage, and Europe need not endanger American security. Those “realists” chided their fellow Americans for a “giddy” moralism and emotionalism in response to Nazi and Japanese aggression that prevented them from dealing “with the world as it is,” as historian Charles Beard put it. George F. Kennan, an anti-liberal conservative who served in the American Embassy in Prague, at the time applauded the Munich settlement and praised the Czechs for eschewing the “romantic” course of resistance in favor of the “humiliating but truly heroic one of realism.”

This “realism” meshed well with anti-interventionism. Americans had to respect “the right of an able and virile nation [i.e. Nazi Germany] to expand,” aviator Charles Lindbergh argued. The leading Republican of his day, Ohio Sen. Robert Taft, ridiculed those who expressed fears of advancing fascism. The United States could not be ranging “over the world like a knight errant,” protecting “democracy and ideals of good faith” and tilting, “like Don Quixote, against the windmills of fascism.” The world was “big enough to contain all kinds of different ways of life.”

It was not fascism that conservative Republicans worried about. It was communism. For them, the foreign policy battle in the interwar years was but a subset of their larger war against Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, which Republicans insisted disguised an attempt to bring communism to the United States. Conservatives in both the United States and Great Britain had long seen Hitler and Mussolini as bulwarks against the spread of communism in Germany and elsewhere.

Nor were they especially troubled by the dramatic rise of official antisemitism in Germany. In the 1920s and ’30s, influential Republicans and conservatives put Jews at the center of various conspiracies against America. Some conservatives referred to the New Deal as the “Jew Deal” (there were Jews among FDR’s “brain trust”), and they opposed intervening in a war in which Jews were among the prominent victims. Lindbergh, among the most admired men in the United States, claimed Jews were pushing the United States into war “for reasons which are not American.”

Conservative Republicans also warned against the creation of an American “liberal empire” no less oppressive than the one Hitler was trying to create. The result, Taft claimed, would be the “establishment of a dictatorship in this country.” In May 1940, as the British army faced annihilation at Dunkirk, Taft insisted it was “no time for the people to be wholly absorbed in foreign battles.” It was “the New Deal which may leave us weak and unprepared for attack.”

America’s entry into World War II was, among other things, the triumph of a contrary view of the world. Even before Pearl Harbor, a majority of Americans, prodded by Roosevelt, came to view the advancing power of European fascism and Japanese authoritarian militarism as a threat not just to U.S. security but also to liberal democracy in general. While Roosevelt did warn (implausibly) of the Luftwaffe bombing the United States from bases in Latin America, his broader argument was less about immediate physical security than about the kind of world Americans wanted to live in.

Even if the United States faced no immediate threat of military attack, Roosevelt insisted, in his January 1940 State of the Union address, the world would be a “shabby and dangerous place to live in — yes, even for Americans to live in” if it were ruled “by force in the hands of a few.” To live as a lone island in such a world would be a nightmare. There were times Americans needed to defend not just their homeland, he told Congress in 1939, “but the tenets of faith and humanity on which their churches, their governments and their very civilization are founded. ... To save one we must now make up our minds to save all.”

The Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, formed in May 1940 by progressive Kansas newspaper editor William Allen White and including such prominent Democrats as Dean Acheson, declared the war in Europe was a “life and death struggle for every principle we cherish in America” and urged the United States to “throw its economic and moral weight on the side of the nations of Western Europe, great and small, that are struggling in battle for a civilized way of life.”

This was exactly what the men who formed the America First Committee opposed — and not because they spoke for some mass groundswell of working-class Americans. The poor and working class in these years were with FDR. The America First Committee was founded by a group of Yale students. (Kingman Brewster Jr., a future president of Yale, was a member, as was Potter Stewart, a future Supreme Court justice.) But it soon boasted an impressive list of wealthy and influential supporters that included textile magnate Henry Regnery; chairman of the board of Sears, retired Gen. Robert E. Wood; president of Vick Chemical Co., H. Smith Richardson; and diplomat and future governor of Connecticut Chester B. Bowles. Although they railed at “elites” and claimed to speak for real Americans, they were chiefly business executives who represented the nation’s commercial and industrial elites.

Unfortunately for the original America Firsters, most Americans rejected their arguments and embraced FDR’s liberal worldview. Especially after the fall of France, polling showed a majority of Americans wanted to send aid to Britain even at the risk of the United States being dragged into war. The America First Committee, despite its well-funded nationwide lobbying effort — it boasted 800,000 members in 400 chapters across the nation — lost the battle against Lend-Lease and all subsequent attempts to prevent the United States from becoming the world’s “arsenal of democracy.”

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When the United States was finally drawn into the war, partly because of Pearl Harbor but also because of FDR’s increasingly belligerent approach to what he called the “bandit nations,” anti-interventionist Republican critics called it “the New Dealers’ War.” We like to think that great accomplishments in American history are the result of broad national consensus. More often they are the triumph of one worldview over another. American entry into World War II was the victory of a liberal worldview over an anti-interventionism rooted in a conservative anti-liberalism.

That victory remained largely intact throughout the Cold War and after. Although many conservatives eventually hopped on the internationalist bandwagon for the sake of fighting communism (and many on the left dissented from the liberal consensus), it was FDR’s worldview that guided Republican presidents from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Richard M. Nixon to Reagan to the two Bushes. It was the belief that the United States had both an interest and an obligation to support a liberal democratic, capitalist order and to do so by committing to alliances and deploying hundreds of thousands of GIs thousands of miles from American shores. Reagan’s foreign policy was in many ways simply a resumption of the muscular internationalism of FDR, his onetime hero, and the liberal anti-communism of Harry S. Truman and Acheson.

Not all Republicans have forgotten this legacy. Today, when people like Mitch McConnell, the GOP Senate leader, insist that what happens to Ukraine has “a direct and vital bearing on America’s........

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