President Trump usually makes no effort to disguise how little he cares about human rights. In May, during his first overseas trip after his inauguration, he assured Arab despots and Muslim leaders in Riyadh, “We are not here to lecture.” He called President Xi Jinping of China “a very special man,” praised Egypt’s military strongman Abdel Fattah el-Sisi for doing “a fantastic job” and hailed the bloodstained President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, with whom he boasted of having a “great relationship.”

Yet as bad as Mr. Trump is when he ignores human rights, he is also corrosive when he speaks up. Perhaps the most disingenuous moment in his State of the Union address last month came when he condemned North Korea’s dictatorship and saluted Ji Seong-ho, a brave man who escaped famine and persecution there. Put aside the most obvious hypocrisy: Refugees like Mr. Ji are imperiled by Mr. Trump’s contempt for immigrants and slashing of refugee quotas. Rather, the deeper problem is how Mr. Trump sporadically invokes the suffering of foreigners when he thinks it promotes United States strategic priorities — in this case, the nuclear crisis with North Korea.

Mr. Trump rarely condemns repression overseas, except when Christians are being persecuted by Muslim extremists, or when human rights are abused by longtime foes of the United States — particularly Iran, Syria, Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea. Addressing the United Nations General Assembly in September, he denounced “the depraved regime in North Korea,” “the corrupt, destabilizing regime in Cuba” and the “socialist dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro” in Venezuela, while also calling Iran “a corrupt dictatorship behind the false guise of a democracy.”

Instead of viewing human rights as a universal ideal, Mr. Trump invokes them only strategically, when they are useful as a geopolitical cudgel.