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Since returning to office in January, President Donald Trump has pursued a series of head-spinning moves to reorient U.S. foreign policy, from initiating a global trade war to threatening long-standing NATO allies to teasing a takeover of Canada. Political analysts like to say these shifts reflect Trump’s transactional, zero-sum worldview—an “America First” approach that prioritizes a narrow conception of national interest and deprioritizes moral concerns.

This approach seems a far cry from previous U.S. administrations, which espoused, to varying degrees, a commitment to values such as freedom, democracy, and human rights. While often criticized for hypocrisy or a failure to live up to such ideals, a “values-based” foreign policy remained a core component of U.S. policymaking in the decades after the Cold War.

Since returning to office in January, President Donald Trump has pursued a series of head-spinning moves to reorient U.S. foreign policy, from initiating a global trade war to threatening long-standing NATO allies to teasing a takeover of Canada. Political analysts like to say these shifts reflect Trump’s transactional, zero-sum worldview—an “America First” approach that prioritizes a narrow conception of national interest and deprioritizes moral concerns.

This approach seems a far cry from previous U.S. administrations, which espoused, to varying degrees, a commitment to values such as freedom, democracy, and human rights. While often criticized for hypocrisy or a failure to live up to such ideals, a “values-based” foreign policy remained a core component of U.S. policymaking in the decades after the Cold War.

Yet beneath the surface, the reality is murkier. Since taking office, key members of the Trump administration have, in fact, begun to pursue a values-based foreign policy of their own—albeit a very different one than before.

Vice President J.D. Vance’s remarks at the Munich Security Conference in February formed the blueprint for this new values-based foreign policy, which is now embraced, to varying degrees, by other Trump officials and allies. In his speech, Vance stunned European attendees by taking them to task for what he described as “the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values.” Vance argued that Europeans were failing to live up to shared........

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