Donald Trump is building a “new liberal order” under US leadership, based on the principle of putting national sovereignty before multilateralism for its own sake, his secretary of state has claimed.

In a speech in Brussels before a Nato ministers meeting, Mike Pompeo sought to frame Trump’s foreign policy decisions as a coherent doctrine to a European audience that is increasingly anxious about US withdrawal from a string of treaties and Trump’s antipathy towards the European Union.

He listed a series of current international institutions, including the EU, UN, World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, that he said were no longer serving their mission they were created.

He argued that Trump’s reassertion of national sovereignty through his “America First” policy would make those institutions function better. “In the finest traditions of our great democracy, we are rallying the noble nations of the world to build a new liberal order that prevents war and achieves greater prosperity for all,” Pompeo said at a speech at the German Marshall Fund thinktank. “We’re supporting institutions that we believe can be improved; institutions that work in American interests – and yours – in service of our shared values.”

The remarks were frequently punctuated with praise for Trump, who is referred to 13 times in the text. Pompeo portrayed his president as restoring an era of triumphal US leadership in the world, for the first time since the end of the cold war.

“This American leadership allowed us to enjoy the greatest human flourishing in modern history,” the secretary of state said. “We won the cold war. We won the peace. With no small measure of George HW Bush’s effort, we reunited Germany. This is the type of leadership that President Trump is boldly reasserting.

“After the cold war ended, we allowed this liberal order to begin to corrode. Multilateralism has too often become viewed as an end unto itself. The more treaties we sign, the safer we supposedly are. The more bureaucrats we have, the better the job gets done.”

The Trump administration has alarmed European governments with making a bonfire of treaties, walking out of the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, withdrawing from talks with Europe on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, pulling out of the Paris climate agreement and the UN global compact on migration. At last week’s G20 summit, European officials pushed back against their US counterparts who were under instructions to eliminate references to multilateralism and a rules-based international order.

Trump has also declared he wants to abandon the intermediate-range nuclear forces treaty with Russia, because of violations by Moscow. European capitals are seeking to broker a solution that would salvage the treaty, which kept nuclear missiles out of Europe for more than 25 years.

They feared that Pompeo would come to this week’s Nato meeting with a formal notice of withdrawal that would start a six-month clock ticking for its dissolution, but formal withdrawal is now not expected until the new year, leaving a small window open for last-minute efforts to save the treaty through a joint Nato effort to confront Russia over its suspected violation: the development of a ground-launched cruise missile.

Pompeo’s speech received polite applause, but Julianne Smith, a senior foreign policy official during Barack Obama’s time at the White House, said it had shocked US allies across Europe.

“The first words that come to mind are tone deaf,” said Smith, now a senior fellow at the Bosch Academy in Berlin. “It’s as if they have no appreciation of how Europeans are trying to figure out how to cope with an administration that they see as abdicating American leadership.

“The speech just gives Europe a long to-do list – just do this, do that, with no vision to go with it. No one I talk to here believes this administration is committed to a rules-based order.”