As I was sitting in the audience at the Council on Foreign Relations the other day, listening to Gov. Tim Pawlenty check off the boxes of right-wing internationalism, I kept waiting for the personal payoff moment, where the candidate says, "As a boy growing up in the depths of the Cold War," or even, "I saw the miracle of free markets on a trip to Singapore." But the moment never came, and Pawlenty marched blandly forward with his agenda: apply more pressure on Iran and less on Israel; watch out for the Muslim Brotherhood; assassinate Muammar al-Qaddafi.

I imagine that if the former Minnesota governor had a stock of foundational experiences or even intuitions about the world, he would have drawn on them. Perhaps he hadn't paid much attention to the world beyond our borders prior to deciding to run for president. That's a problem, though hardly an unfamiliar one among governors; both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton learned on the job, with more or less damage along the way. But the problem, in this case, is endemic: The current generation of Republicans seems unable to mount a convincing and coherent case for engaging the world.

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I first need to amend something I wrote a few weeks ago. After the first Republican presidential debate in New Hampshire, I concluded that the "neo-Reaganite" ethos in foreign policy -- uncompromising rhetoric, intervention in the name of "values," democracy promotion -- had no followers among the GOP candidates. I should have said that the candidates have calculated that Republican primary voters don't have much of an appetite for that language (nor do many Democrats). In fact, three of the more likely candidates for the nomination -- Mitt Romney, Jon Huntsman, and Pawlenty -- all offer some variant of conservative internationalism.

Among them, Pawlenty is most ardently channeling the neo-Reaganite vision. "When you're flying in the clouds," he said in his speech to the council, "you want to make sure your compass is set to true north." Pawlenty's true north is "moral clarity." He used this Reaganesque expression as often as possible. He contrasted the clarion call of his own press releases on events in the Arab Spring with President Barack Obama's "murky policy" of engagement. He criticized Obama for being too slow to demand that Hosni Mubarak step down in Egypt, too hesitant to use force in Libya, too equivocal about Bashar al-Assad's brutality in Syria. And -- this was the less predictable and more striking part -- he took on those in his own party (no names mentioned) who "shrink from the challenges of America's leadership in the world." The very fact that Pawlenty chose to deliver the speech in the sanctum sanctorum of the foreign policy establishment rather than at, say, the Heritage Foundation, constituted a rebuke to the yahoos in the party -- though also, of course, a message to moderate Republican donors looking for an alternative to Obama.

"Moral clarity," then, is the alternative both to the heartless realism of engagement and to the short-sightedness and penny-pinching of isolationism. But Pawlenty's moral clarity didn't feel as clear as Reagan's or Sen. John McCain's. Theirs' was rooted in life experience and was consistent with a broader worldview, just as "engagement" is rooted in Obama's own experience and his intuitions about the world. Pawlenty's views sounded as borrowed as T-Paw, his NBA-style nickname. It felt like he had rummaged in the closet of Republican policy options and come out with whatever seemed to fit. (Of course Mitt Romney seems to do this with almost everything.) And the hat turns out to be a little too big for his head.

It may be that at this moment in Republican history, isolationism is going to sound more persuasive than muscular internationalism, both because that's where the party's base is at and because it fits so comfortably with the GOP's obsession with the evils of government and with the imperative to cut spending. It was telling that during the New Hampshire debate, Mitt Romney answered a question on Afghanistan by saying, "It is time to bring our troops home as soon as we can," and that Newt Gingrich took Michele Bachmann's side in opposition to the military deployment in Libya.

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