The biggest story in America is, and should remain, the Trump administration’s accidental inclusion of Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg on a Signal group chat about planning airstrikes in Yemen.

This is not only colossally incompetent, but a scandal of the first proportion: Top officials, including the vice president and secretary of defense, discussing the most sensitive information on a commercially available app that is both easy for foreign adversaries to penetrate and seemingly designed to circumvent the public records laws that allow for scrutiny of their policy communications.

But this is more than just incompetent and scandalous: it’s revelatory. The chat logs give us an unusually unvarnished look into key players’ worldview, the kind of thing historians usually have to wait decades to access.

And what was said points to the incoherence of the Trump foreign policy project: a worldview that cannot decide on what it means to put “America first.” The Trump team, taking its cue from the president, is trying to pursue two contradictory visions at the same time — to maintain America’s status as the world’s leading power while also trying to scale down its international commitments. They want to simultaneously dominate the world and withdraw from it.

These contradicting views of what “America First” means — America as first among nations, or America scaling back to put its internal affairs first — were visible even before the new administration took office. The text logs confirm, in dramatic fashion,........

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