America's role in the world appears to be going through a large adjustment. The President, one not to fear treading where others haven't gone, provoked strong feelings - in vastly different directions - during two recent visits to Europe.

His speech in Poland was viewed as a brilliant defense of Western Civilization and also as too narrow a projection of the future in a more pluralistic world. A week later his return to France to honor the 100th Anniversary of America's entry into World War I is viewed as celebrating a long friendship, but also as questioning the architecture in place since American isolation ended following World War I.

Order of some kind is vital for the world. Both the country and the world are in a period of re-assimilation none of us can fully grasp, but nearly everyone feels is taking place. We know the need for order is an essential property. First, it is an attribute of the universe. As Alexander Pope once said, "Order is the first law of heaven."

We also know order is central to people's lives. Maturity in adults comes from a world of both surrounding and underlying instruction. All people must individually glean, grow, strive, and rise to new understandings in life to build frames of reference, or order, for themselves. One cannot leave faith out of the realm. Faith helps subdue distractions, overcome willful parochialisms, and move thought beyond the self without any middleman. Order gives individuals everywhere a calm reserve, a sense of stationary power.

America has also been notable as mainly a land of order during its history. Even our large contentions as a society have been cradled inside the bright candle of evolving order. Our founders carefully built a spacious and expansive foundation for us. The rule of law beneath this edifice created the fabric of trust, which by nature puts all our citizens in the same civic tradition.

There are also generous informal support networks people require. Beyond government welfare, these include housing, education, social, financial, employer, family, friends, charitable organizations, and faith. So it has been in the world at large, all the way back to the tribe, for a long time. But increasingly, nations in a complex world need something more.

Many take solace in our "rules-based" international order today. Yet in the United States where the rule of law comes from within and ties across the body politic, a rules-based international order has been built mostly top down. This progressive hegemony has come to mirror over time its own governing precepts. Our modern foreign affairs outlook is not therefore a fair or full extrapolation of American ideals, and many across the world continue as well to chafe at a "report card" approach to international relations.

We know doctrines and systems of belief can only carry us so far. They rise, succeed, and fade over time. Some larger, elemental truths are needed to stabilize the future relations of our globe. As Shakespeare noted of Caesar, historical figures "bestride the narrow world like a Colossus." They are here, however, for only a moment in time.

Our power must be in our example, not its imposition.

We seem to have shed some first understandings for a creeping web of behaviors acting like a "colossus" of their own today. It seems the cultural and economic openness and centrism after 1945, for example, reigns more by its harder, residual effects than any original impetus. Implicitly, world arrangements incarnate the past.

Trump's visits were surely timely. He spoke movingly of the August 1-October 2, 1944 Warsaw Uprising and Jerusalem Street struggle for freedom (fought five years after Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939) - and virtually 12 years following the July 7, 2005 terrorist attack in London.

Whether he is puncturing an expiring set of arrangements that some now call a "gauzy globalism," or renewing our need to focus on the prevailing of the West at a difficult time - or both - remains to be seen. He does seem to be making us more aware that the world needs a stronger base than policy preferences to guide the ship of state, and that more than map-makers have to be in charge.

George Washington in his Farewell Address counseled us to avoid isolation over independence in the dealings of nations while staying clear also of "passionate attachment" and "permanent, inveterate antipathies." Both, he warned, impede good judgment in different directions. The Public Square supports Washington's probity and balance.

Order to be beneficial for our world must be greater than events swinging through a pendulum or deeper than guideposts that are selective brands of reality. The Public Square holds a fresh American independence needs to be found and asserted for our time.