President Donald Trump sounded ready to make a clean break with his party’s most reflexive hawks in the first big speech he has delivered overseas during his second term.

“The so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built, and the interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves,” he said in Riyadh on Tuesday.

Trump’s actions may be lining up with his words. He has recently announced a halt to the bombing of the Houthis in Yemen, the end of sanctions on Syria, the removal of a national security advisor seen as less than fully on board with his talks with Iran, and is otherwise trying to prevent another regional war in the Middle East.

“The gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called ‘nation builders,’ neocons, or liberal nonprofits like those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop Baghdad, so many other cities,” Trump continued.