In his first four months in office, President Donald Trump has shaken America’s democratic foundations at home and abandoned a powerful bipartisan commitment to human rights. Seemingly forgotten is the legacy of Ronald Reagan, who, in his first Inaugural Address, pledged that America would “be the exemplar of freedom and a beacon of hope” for oppressed populations around the world.

Trump seems indifferent to, and at times disdainful of, this deeply rooted global commitment. He begs off mentioning human rights publicly, as he did on Sunday, in Riyadh, where he spoke to Arab and Muslim leaders from around the world. “We are not here to lecture,” he said. “We are not here to tell other people how to live, what to do, who to be, or how to worship. Instead, we are here to offer partnership—based on shared interests and values—to pursue a better future for us all.”

But Trump has developed a habit of embracing those whose values are antithetical to our own. He repeatedly expresses admiration for the Russian President, Vladimir Putin. “I do respect him,” Trump told Bill O’Reilly, in February. “But he’s a killer,” O’Reilly said. “There are a lot of killers,” Trump replied. “We’ve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country’s so innocent?”

In early April, Trump welcomed to the White House the Egyptian President, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, a leader who has locked up tens of thousands of his political opponents, decimated the human-rights community, and severely undermined Egypt’s democratic institutions. In their Oval Office meeting, Trump enthusiastically embraced Sisi, calling him “somebody that’s been very close to me from the first time I met him.”

In late April, Trump reached out to Rodrigo Duterte, the mercurial leader of the Philippines, who has invoked Hitler’s mass extermination of Jews as a model for how he would like to dispose of drug dealers and addicts. In what White House aides called a “very friendly conversation,” Trump congratulated Duterte for doing “ an unbelievable job on the drug problem,” and invited him to visit.

And, last month, Trump called President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, of Turkey, to congratulate him for winning a much-disputed referendum that will solidify his autocratic rule and further erode the country’s democratic institutions. Since a failed coup attempt last July, Erdoğan has sacked academics and thousands of judges and other public officials. Earlier this month, Trump welcomed Erdoğan to the White House—a visit that was marred by an attack on peaceful demonstrators outside the Turkish Embassy by his security agents.

In keeping with this pattern, Trump delivered his first major foreign-policy address to government leaders from the Arab and Muslim world, calling for a “principled realism, rooted in common values, shared interests, and common sense.” It makes sense for the President to talk about shared interests in regional security, in fighting terrorism, and in challenging Iran’s misadventures in Syria and Iraq and its support for Hezbollah. But shared values? According to Freedom House, Saudi Arabia is the eleventh least-free nation on earth: a place where free speech, assembly, and association are a distant dream; religious tolerance is nonexistent; and gender discrimination is pervasive.

Much of Trump’s speech was a call to isolate and weaken ISIS and other violent extremist groups by denying them financial support. “We must strip them of their access to funds,” he urged, failing to acknowledge, even implicitly, that the Saudis have doled out tens of billions of dollars in recent years to support the spread of Wahhabism, a puritanical strain of Islam, underwriting thousands of religious schools and mosques throughout the Arab and greater Islamic world. A number of these institutions have served as recruiting havens for violent extremists.

Perhaps most distressing is the President’s seeming lack of understanding of the root causes of the violent extremism that has plagued the Middle East and South Asia for decades, much less a willingness to confront them. As Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations Secretary-General at the time, wrote last year, “Violent extremism tends to thrive in an environment characterized by poor governance, democracy deficits, corruption and a culture of impunity for unlawful behavior engaged in by the State or its agents.” Elliott Abrams, a senior official in the George W. Bush Administration, addressed this point in reaction to Trump’s speech in Saudi Arabia, saying that “the President’s approach would work if terrorists were coming from outer space and our task was solely to organize against them militarily. That’s no doubt part of the task—but that’s not all of it, because they are coming from within the societies whose leaders he was addressing. He offered no explanation of what was producing this phenomenon.”

Trump assumes that foreign policy boils down to national-security and economic interests and that everything else, especially attention to human rights and democracy, is a distraction. Earlier this month, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told State Department employees that pursuing such issues “really creates obstacles” in achieving what is best for America. That two-dimensional world view was on clear display in Riyadh, as Trump declined, even by inference, to challenge the Muslim leaders on their own bleak human-rights records, or to point out the link between their failures and the pervasive violent extremism in the region. Trump is right to recognize that America’s strategic and economic interests are vital, and oftentimes primary, and that the government often does need to engage with autocratic states to protect them, yet, in ignoring human rights, his Administration misses a valuable opportunity to advance these very interests.

What Trump and Tillerson both fail to see is that the bipartisan support for human rights over the past four decades has come not from a place of naïveté but from a practical recognition by political leaders of all stripes that democratic, rights-respecting governments have been and are America’s most reliable allies in the fight against terrorism. When the U.S. military looked to build military coalitions in Afghanistan, the nations who stepped forward most significantly were the U.K., Germany, Canada, and Australia. When U.S. intelligence agencies gather and share the most sensitive information affecting national security, it is with the U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, the so-called “five eyes.” Many of these same countries are also our most trustworthy political allies and our best trading partners. When the world faced the public-health crisis caused by Ebola in West Africa, our essential partners, in providing both funding and expertise, were the French and the British. And when the U.S. looks to promote its political interests at the United Nations, or to chart its economic future and develop plans for the twenty-first-century global economy, this same group of countries is its first port of call. Rather than abandoning a human-rights policy that has so clearly advanced our national interests over the past forty years, this is the time to double down.