Matthew Continetti

June 12, 2020 5:00 AM

America is contracting. It pulls back from the world, its people pull away from each other. Last week’s Wall Street Journal report that President Trump ordered the withdrawal of slightly more than a quarter of our troops in Germany went unnoticed amid the domestic unrest following the police killing of George Floyd. The truth is that the two stories, foreign and domestic, are related. They are dual aspects of a loss of national self-confidence, an outbreak of intellectual and moral uncertainty, and an unpredictable, erratic, and easily piqued chief executive. Violence—here, there, and everywhere—is the result.