Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., in what he billed as a “major foreign policy speech,” is calling for a fundamental transformation of American foreign policy that can be summed up in one word: peace.

In a speech in New Hampshire Tuesday night, Mr. Kennedy called for a diplomatic solution to the war in Ukraine and an end to military adventures abroad. He peppered his speech with anecdotes and quotations from his late uncle, President John F. Kennedy, to frame his calls for peace as a continuation of President Kennedy’s policies.

The speech, despite its billing as a major foreign policy speech, was light on details but big on overarching principles. He called on the American people to embrace peace and “to celebrate no longer the wartime president but a president who keeps the peace.” He warned about becoming overcommitted aboard.

“Every empire ends itself through over expansion of its military abroad,” Mr. Kennedy said. “I therefore call on our present leadership to adopt President Kennedy’s maxims and start de-escalating now.”

“We’ve become addicted to comic book good-versus-evil narratives that erase complexity and blind us to the legitimate motives and legitimate cultural and economic concerns, and the legitimate security concerns of other peoples and other nations,” Mr. Kennedy said.

“We have internalized and institutionalized the reflex of violence as a response for any and all crises. Everything becomes a war: the war on drugs, the war on terror, the war on cancer, the war on climate change. This way of thinking predisposes us to wage endless wars abroad, wars and coups and bombs and drones and regime change operations,” Mr. Kennedy said. “None of this has made us safer.”

Mr. Kennedy sounded equal parts anti-interventionist Republican, anti-war left, and libertarian — an explicit strategy to reach across party lines. He is scheduled to speak next week at a conservative Moms for Liberty event at Philadelphia. Later this week he is scheduled to speak at a libertarian festival in New Hampshire, despite calls from the chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party for him to cancel.

Mr. Kennedy has made it clear that his strategy is to reach disaffected voters of all stripes. “Both parties have lost their way,” Mr. Kennedy said recently on Joe Rogan’s podcast. “My campaign is about bringing those two groups together — the left and the right — in a populist movement.”

Dismissed early on by the mainstream press and Democratic Party leadership as an anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist embarking on a quixotic run, Mr. Kennedy refrained from speaking about vaccines or censorship in his speech Tuesday.

Mr. Kennedy is, in any event, polling surprisingly well. He earns 20 percent support in a recent CNN poll of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. President Biden earns 60 percent and Marianne Williamson eight percent in this same poll.

A majority of Americans — and Democrats — don’t want Mr. Biden to run again. The same can be said for President Trump. The line to get into Mr. Kennedy’s speech was hundreds long. The start time was delayed to accommodate the crowd in overflow rooms. 

The Sun spoke with several attendees who self-described in equal measure as Republicans, Democrats, and independents. One woman said she hadn’t voted in years but was nostalgic for a Kennedy and a “truth teller.”

While Mr. Kennedy did not go into detail about how,  beyond diplomacy, he would end the war in Ukraine, his campaign website lays out broad strokes. He characterizes the United States and the west’s expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders as a provocation, and says a Kennedy administration would “offer to withdraw our troops and nuclear-capable missiles from Russia’s border” and use UN peacekeepers to “guarantee peace to the Russian-speaking eastern regions.”

“I abhor Russia’s brutal and bloody invasion,” Mr Kennedy said. “But we must understand that our government has also contributed to its circumstances with repeated, deliberate provocations of Russia going back to the 1990s.”

Mr. Kennedy also attacked the neo-conservatives and think tanks he says pushed for and supported the Iraq War and are now agitating for conflict with China. “Their belligerent strategy of maximum confrontation extends beyond Russia to China,” he said.

Mr. Kennedy did not address domestic policy except to say that “foreign violence is inseparable from domestic violence.” He said the country’s gun violence problem flows from America’s violence abroad. He has also said that restoring the middle class is a top priority for a Kennedy administration and that excessive spending on proxy wars and military intervention is exacerbating inflation and consuming resources better spent at home.

To illustrate the Kennedy clan’s history of diplomacy, Mr. Kennedy told a story of how his uncle had a red phone installed in his Cape Cod home that was a direct line to First Secretary of the Communist Party Khrushchev. He joked that when he was a child he was warned never to touch the phone. He used this anecdote to draw a contrast to today, when he says that real diplomacy is a thing of the past and that the threat of nuclear war is pressing.

“Today, America has broken off practically all diplomatic contact with Russia,” Mr. Kennedy said. “The communication has indeed become little more than an exchange of threats and insults. FDR met with Stalin. JFK met with Khrushchev. Nixon met with Brezhnev. Reagan met with Gorbachev. Can’t Biden meet with Putin?”

Mr. Kennedy’s bid for the Democratic nomination is at best a long shot. Yet tonight’s crowd was evidence that there’s an appetite for an alternative to the status quo. Mr. Kennedy is establishing himself as the anti-interventionist candidate for peace. At least this speech won’t get taken down from YouTube.