retrenchment

noun

1. (countable, uncountable)A curtailment or reduction.

   “It agrees that redundant services should not be continued but is not unmindful of the fact that too much retrenchment of rail services now may ultimately prove detrimental to the economy of the country.”

   “Last year it was announced that electrification of L.M.R. main lines was to be speeded up and that it would be essential for the engineers to have the longest possible occupation of the lines involved; this would mean some retrenchment of passenger train services.”

   “And the retrenchment of services such as mental health and drug rehabilitation means that vulnerable people are more likely to find themselves on the street.”

2. (countable, specifically, uncountable)A curtailment or reduction.

   “Must my anxious management, my prudent retrenchments, dear Margaretta's savings, all go!”

   “From this time, the hand which had ever been ready to supply all our wants real or imaginary, opened less promptly at our demands. My father talked occasionally of retrenchment and economy when some of our extravagant bills came in; but we paid little heed to his remarks on this head. Where could we retrench? In what could we economize? The very idea was absurd.”

3. (countable, specifically, uncountable)A curtailment or reduction.
4. (broadly, countable, uncountable)Withdrawal.

   “Even then—10 long years ago—our disillusionment over past failures, our revulsion against moralistic posturing, our retrenchment from prescribing what was best for other people, our withdrawal symptoms from the exhilarations of overcommitment—all these argued for the perspective of diversity; for lowering our goals.”

   “If it is allowed, however, that the theatre of cosmic evolution is endowed with some fixed structure, even a very weak one, then there is a retrenchment from the programme of an evolutionary account of every general law.”

   “Given the current retrenchment of liberal internationalism, it is easy to forget that only three decades ago many believed that liberalism had attained a historically definitive victory over all alternatives.”

5. (dated)A defensive work constructed within a fortification to make it more defensible by allowing defenders to retreat into and fight from it even after the enemy has taken the outer work.

   “The gate-way of the north ſide, from whence the garriſon got their water, was near the n. w. angle, and about 80 yards from the river; on the ſide of which, oppoſite to the gate, they threw up a retrenchment, in which they kept a guard to protect the water-carriers.”

6. (countable, especially, uncountable)The adoption of a defensive and hostile posture; refusal to compromise, radicalization.

   “Confronted by their practices again and again, these individuals and organizations in the gay community have made token gestures to appease the demands of people of color, while in the long run these confrontations have resulted in retrenchment of attitudes and stereotypes by gay whites.”

   “Retrenchment—on the left and the right—led to exclusivist, mutually recriminating positions on the film that made reasoned debate almost impossible, as opponents drowned each other out with competing narratives of “victimization” and “pariah” status.”

   “But at the Seventeenth CCP Congress in 2008 Zeng Qinghong retired, and beginning the very next year the CCP began a deep political retrenchment, halting most of the political reforms, and reverted to old-style harsh and repressive rule.”

   “While Kim Jong-un has experimented with such reforms, the character of the young leader’s reign has been one of traditionalist retrenchment and the cult of personality.”

   “What was once a conservative retrenchment against civil litigation in the United States has now been globalized in no small part due to the proliferation of class actions as legal transplants.”