WASHINGTON IMPERIALISTS FRET OVER TRUMP'S TROOP WITHDRAWALS.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: WORLD

"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. Sure, Trump can impose reckless and unconstitutional bans on legal U.S. residents from certain majority-Muslim countries, consciously enact a family-separation policy as an immigration deterrent, and call trade wars "good and easy to win," all while averaging 10 lies a day and acting like your boorish-if-occasionally-hilarious Uncle Bob. But contemplate withdrawing a combined 9,000 troops from Syria and Afghanistan, as Trump did in December, and suddenly no one's laughing.

"We are headed towards a series of grave policy errors which will endanger our nation, damage our alliances & empower our adversaries," warned Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) at the time.

"Never been more alarmed for the nation since coming to DC over three decades ago," tweeted Bill Kristol of the recently shuttered Weekly Standard.

Mattis resigned within hours of Trump's announcement that all 2,000 U.S. troops in Syria would be withdrawn, saying in his resignation letter that the president has "the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects." Kelly, who worked both as Trump's secretary of homeland security and as his chief of staff, told the Los Angeles Times in an exit interview that his performance in the latter position should be measured by what the president didn't do--namely, withdraw troops from abroad sooner.

"When I first took over [in August 2017], he was inclined to want to withdraw from Afghanistan," Kelly told the paper. Instead of cutting and running, the president added 4,000 troops at the...