I have a file that looks like this:
AE United Arab Emirates AG Antigua & Barbuda AN Netherlands Antilles AS American Samoa BA Bosnia and Herzegovina
awk '{ saved = $1; $1 = ""; print substr($0, 2), saved }'
Setting the first field to "" leaves a single copy of OFS at the start of $0. Assuming that OFS is only a single character (by default, it's a single space), we can remove it with substr($0, 2). Then we append the saved copy of $1.
""
OFS
$0
substr($0, 2)
$1