Yesterday, in Part One, I went back over a short post of mine about Europe and did the work it should have done the first time: what happened in France, Italy, and Spain in October, what “collapse” would really mean, and whether America is on the same road. My answer was that we are on the road — and that the question worth asking is what we protect, and how.

This post is the answer. It comes from another short post of mine, “Making America First,” from October 13th — the follow-up that original owed its readers too.

The subject the original left unfinished

“Making America First” actually contained two subjects. One was finished in the post itself: “Nazi” and “racist” are now thrown at ordinary opponents so carelessly that they’ve lost their force — when everything is Nazism, nothing is. I stand on what I said then.

The second subject sat in the original’s last paragraph, unfinished, and it’s the one that matters more: a proposal about what American citizenship should mean. Here it is, as plainly as I can state it:

You can only hold one citizenship. You’re either an American or you’re a citizen of another country — Canada, Great Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Mexico, China, Japan, whatever — you choose; you cannot hold American citizenship and another citizenship at the same time. And if you’re an American citizen, you may not ever serve in a foreign military in any capacity. If you do, you lose your citizenship automatically, right then — as soon as you sign those papers and sign up, you are no longer an American citizen.

That’s the whole rule: every American, not just officials; any foreign military, any capacity. And it rests on one idea — it’s about your actions, not the status some government believes. It’s the individual’s actions.

What the law says now

I want to be honest about the present before arguing for the replacement, because it isn’t what most people think it is.

Dual citizenship, as a legal status, doesn’t exist in American law — and never has. The Constitution defines who is a citizen and says not one word about holding another nationality at the same time. The State Department’s own line is that U.S. law “does not mention dual nationality” and does not require anyone to choose. What we have isn’t a status Congress created; it’s a tolerance. Other countries claim people — including people born here — under their laws, and Washington looks the other way.

That matters: it means the first half of my rule lives mostly in Congress’s territory — statute and practice, not constitutional bedrock. With one honest limit I’ll come back to: no law passed in Washington can repeal a law passed in Rome. What America controls is what America recognizes — and what Americans do.

The second half of the rule is where the wall stands. Foreign military service has actually been on the books as a potentially expatriating act for a long time — the Immigration and Nationality Act lists it, where the service is in forces hostile to the United States or as an officer. But the Supreme Court fenced it in. In Afroyim v. Rusk (1967), the Court held the government generally can’t take your citizenship away against your will. In Vance v. Terrazas (1980), it said a listed act costs you your citizenship only if you performed it intending to give the citizenship up — and since 1986, the government has had to prove that intent, not presume it.

So today, an American can put on a foreign uniform, and unless the government can prove what was in his head, he keeps his passport.

My answer to the Court is the rule itself: signing the enlistment papers is the intent. A man who voluntarily signs up to serve under another country’s flag has made his choice in the most public, documented way a choice can be made. The law wouldn’t go hunting for his private thoughts; it would take his act as his answer. Could that be done by statute alone, or would it take a court fight, or an amendment? Honest answer: probably a fight, possibly an amendment. I’m arguing for where the law should go, not pretending it’s already there.

The hard cases — and why there are no exceptions

Test the rule against the two armies Americans actually go off and join, because they pull in opposite directions.

There are Americans serving in the Israeli military — an ally, a country under attack, a cause many Americans feel in their bones. And there are Americans who went to fight for Ukraine — volunteers who watched an invasion on television and got on a plane. If any foreign service ever deserved a sympathetic exception, it’s the second one. My rule gives neither one, and I won’t pretend that isn’t its hard edge. The moment the rule bends for causes I admire, it isn’t about loyalty anymore — it’s about which loyalties I happen to like.

The older pattern cuts the same way: Americans flew for France before America entered the First World War, and volunteers have stood under other flags ever since, usually for causes history treats kindly. Kindly or not: under whose flag did you choose to stand?

Then there’s the case that isn’t a choice at all: the child born in Italy to parents who could claim two countries for him. That child has done nothing disloyal — he’s an infant; of course he hasn’t. But my answer is the part of this people find hardest, so I’ll say it straight: there is no such thing as dual citizenship. That child is Italian, or he is American. He can’t be both. The only difference from the adult case is who chooses — his parents choose at his birth instead of him choosing later. Somebody always has to.

And the Rome problem — Italy may go on claiming him no matter what Washington says? That’s Rome’s paperwork, and Rome’s business. My rule doesn’t police foreign paperwork; it polices conduct. A man claimed by Italy may not act as an Italian: live in Italy as its citizen, exercise that citizenship’s rights and benefits, or travel on its passport. If he does, he has made his choice the same way the enlistee made his — by acting on it — and his American citizenship is finished. And if that’s genuinely the life he wants, Tuscany as an Italian, then fine: be an Italian. His American passport is invalid. Let him get an Italian one, and God bless him.

The strongest objection is that this punishes status instead of conduct — that it could strip a person who never did a disloyal thing and leave him stateless. I take that seriously, and answer it with the rule’s own center: nothing in it touches anybody for what they are. It answers only what they do — sign foreign enlistment papers, live as another country’s citizen, travel on its passport. What you can’t do is hold the benefits of two countries while your life is lived in one of them.

The melting pot is the point

Which brings me to why any of this matters — and it isn’t ultimately about paperwork.

To stay the country we are, we cannot be run loose, with people living here while their loyalty and their lives are somewhere else. It isn’t only about securing the borders. It’s about securing the culture — because America has one, and it’s worth saying out loud.

That culture was built mostly by immigrants — from Europe, from Africa, from Central and South America, from Asia — but it is not a copy of any of them. It’s what happened when all of that went into one pot and came out something new: the melting pot I learned about in school as a kid. A little of each, none of them unchanged, all of it American. And achievements can be lost by people who stop tending them.

So the invitation and the rule are the same policy from two sides. Come here legally, want to be here, and you should be made part of the American experience — not a permanent guest, but a participant: what you bring goes into the pot and becomes something new inside it, as it has for two hundred years. The rule guards the pot; the invitation is why there’s a pot worth guarding.

Yesterday I said America is on the road Europe is traveling, and that we’ll survive the trip — what gets decided along the way is who we are when we arrive. My answer: we arrive as one country, with one citizenship, and one culture that anyone can join and no one gets to hold at arm’s length. That’s what making America first means, defined at last: not first against the world — first in the lives of the people who claim it.