Governor Romney’s speech today at Virginia Military Institute is important because it begins to sketch the Romney doctrine — and will vanquish any doubts on where he stands in respect of foreign policy. It was both an eloquent and substantive statement, delivered at an inspiring institution. In tone and substance it was strong but not swaggering. It reminded us of Reagan’s foreign policy vision, which the man who became the 40th president articulated against, in Jimmy Carter, a faltering president who reminds us increasingly of Barack Obama. Both Messrs. Carter and Obama reached out solicitously to our adversaries while running a weak-dollar policy and viewing a military buildup on our side as a threat to the peace rather than as a deterrent to war.

In respect of the immediate problem, Mr. Romney made it clear that he understands we haven’t won this war yet and, in recent years, have lost ground. That is the meaning of the coordinated attacks in Libya, Egypt, and across the Muslim world. It is the meaning of the deterioration at Iraq and Afghanistan. Mr. Romney opened at VMI what will no doubt be a broad attack on Mr. Obama’s foreign policy failures. He marked Mr. Obama’s failure to act in Syria and his failure to secure a status of forces agreement in Iraq. He marked the point that Mr. Obama promised hope and change and delivered retreat and chaos, a foreign policy in shambles.

Mr. Romney’s reprise at VMI was not comprehensive. He did not deliver a line on Europe of the kind that Prime Minister Thatcher, say, drew at Bruges, Belgium, where she declared, “We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels.” Mr. Romney did not speak of the special relationship between America and Britain and the tradition whence sprang our structure of liberty. He did not offer a program of monetary reform or marks the error of a weak dollar strategy in international relations, though he spoke of conditionality on our foreign aid, one of the weak elements of our policy during the Obama-Clinton failure.

The governor did leave plenty of room, as the Republican platform has left plenty of room, to fill the doctrine he began to sketch at VMI. He vowed to halt the gutting of our military budget in the midst of a war, a gutting that was forced by the Democrats in the Congress and agreed to by Mr. Obama and is one of the most dangerous elements of the budget sequestration process. His vow to, as he put it, “restore our Navy to the size needed to fulfill our missions by building 15 ships per year, including three submarines,” this is an important precondition of the peace he envisages. As is the missile defense he vowed to put up.

What marks the Romney doctrine is a policy of strength and confidence, one that sees our strength rather than our apologies as the road to peace. We haven’t heard enough of it in the campaign so far. All the greater the impact of Mr. Romney’s remarks at VMI. The governor’s performance in the first debate made it clear that this election is winnable. His remarks at Lexington make it clear that he has much more to say. It is a moment to be seized by those who are working for a change in direction at home and abroad and who remember, from the early 1980s, how fast America moved off the defensive and onto the road to victory once it had the right leadership in the White House.