Washington Imperialists Fret Over Trump’s Troop Withdrawals: New at Reason

“The Trump presidency made a deep descent in December,” Sen. Mitt Romney (R–Utah) announced in a wave-making Washington Post column in January, just prior to being sworn in. Why that particular month out of the president’s tumultuous first 24?

“The departures of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly,” Romney wrote, “the abandonment of allies who fight beside us, and the president’s thoughtless claim that America has long been a ‘sucker’ in world affairs all defined his presidency down.” In other words, it’s the foreign policy, stupid. When the White House takes minor steps to ratchet back Washington’s default posture of global interventionism, it’s greeted as a catastrophe.

It is amazing what Washington’s proverbial “adults in the room”—as both Mattis and Kelly were frequently characterized as during their Trump tenure—consider to be a red line of presidential comportment, writes Matt Welch.

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