WASHINGTON — Reading from a teleprompter, Republican presidential front-runner Donald J. Trump addressed the Washington foreign policy establishment at a speech at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel on April 27, calling for a less interventionist US foreign policy that values stability over democracy, and which would put America first.

“In the Middle East, our goals must be to defeat terrorists and promote regional stability, not radical change,” Trump said in the rare foreign policy address, hosted by the Center for the National Interest, a Washington think tank associated with the Nixon administration, and its journal, The National Interest.

Restating his opposition to President George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, Trump said President Barack Obama and his first-term secretary of state — and Trump’s presumed 2016 Democratic presidential rival, Hillary Clinton — had pursued reckless military interventions against tyrants in the Middle East that had opened up a vacuum into which had flowed the so-called Islamic State (IS) and chaos.

“It all began with the dangerous idea that we could make Western democracies out of countries that had no experience or interest in becoming a Western democracy,” Trump told the Washington audience that included a few rows of supporters and advisers, the board members of the host think tank and several dozen journalists.