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Against this background, Secretary Pompeo delivered his most comprehensive attempt yet to expound the core themes informing the Trump administration’s foreign policy. His speech—delivered Saturday to the Claremont Institute in Southern California—deserves careful study. Whether or not President Trump’s foreign policy is successful, the ideas laid out by Mr. Pompeo are likely to shape the Republican Party’s approach to statecraft for years to come.

From the end of the Cold War through the 2016 election, U.S. foreign policy oscillated between the liberal internationalism of the Clinton and Obama presidencies and the neoconservatism ascendant under George W. Bush. It was clear during his campaign for the Republican nomination that Mr. Trump (along with much of the Republican base) rejected key tenets of Bush-era foreign policy, but it was not clear what approach he would implement instead. He was against Mr. Bush’s approach to trade, against the war in Iraq, doubtful of the value of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and deeply skeptical of democracy promotion in the Middle East. But what was he for?

The Trump policy as Mr. Pompeo presents it is close to what some commentators have called “conservative internationalism.” Where liberal internationalists believe the goal of American global engagement should be to promote the emergence of a world order in which international institutions increasingly supplant nation-states as the chief actors in global politics, conservative internationalists believe American engagement should be guided by a narrower focus on specific U.S. interests.

International institutions have a role to play, but the nation-state is and will remain the basic unit of international affairs. The resurgence of nationalist movements from Britain to Brazil, Mr. Pompeo argues, demonstrates the inevitability of a nation-based approach to foreign policy. Voters in the U.S. and elsewhere simply won’t support politicians who let the national interest take a back seat to international institutions and universalist ideals.

Mr. Pompeo may oppose activist liberal internationalism, but he is also arguing against those who want an isolationist foreign policy. American interests, Mr. Pompeo claims, whether in Asia or the Arctic, require engagement and the cultivation of allies. He notes that while George Washington warned against “permanent alliances,” in his farewell address, he also praised alliances based on “policy, humanity, and interest.” The American alliance with Israel, Mr. Pompeo suggests, is an example of what the first president had in mind.

Mr. Pompeo says the Trump administration has “no aspiration to use force to spread the American model.” Yet he still invokes America’s liberal values to indict authoritarian adversaries. “The Putin regime slays dissidents in cold blood and invades its neighbors,” Mr. Pompeo charges. “The Chinese Communist Party has detained more than one million Chinese Muslims in labor camps” and “uses coercion and corruption as its primary tools of statecraft.”

“America First” in Mr. Pompeo’s reading, is not the slogan of an isolationist president or a crudely Machiavellian foreign policy untethered to moral values. By frankly pursuing American interests, he believes, the U.S. can build coalitions of nations with similar values and strategic goals, and their coordinated actions can create a more orderly and secure world.

This is all very well, critics will say, but does Mr. Pompeo speak for his chief? Isn’t Mr. Trump visibly driven more by impulse and emotion than by any coherent vision? And doesn’t the eruption of so many foreign-policy challenges on multiple continents demonstrate an absence of coordination and planning?

Mr. Pompeo suggests that the failure of Mr. Trump’s predecessors to solve pressing issues in Europe, the Pacific, the Middle East and Latin America left Mr. Trump no choice but to press for dramatic change across the board. This is a reasonable defense, but in the end Mr. Trump’s critics can only be refuted by the kind of policy successes that, so far, are in short supply.

It remains to be seen how much the Trump vision as channeled by Mr. Pompeo can inform a consistent foreign policy. But those looking to understand the evolution of the Republican Party’s approach to the world should pay close attention to Mr. Pompeo’s Claremont address. At least right now, it’s hard to see any plausible competing vision on the horizon.