Democratic presidential candidate Mayor Pete Buttigieg delivers remarks on foreign policy and national security during a speech, June 11,2019, at the Indiana University Auditorium, in Bloomington, Ind. (Michael Conroy/AP)

The Democratic presidential candidate took repeated shots at President Trump, but also sought to make more subtle distinctions with former Vice President Joe Biden.

Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg called for an "end to endless war" in a foreign policy speech Tuesday devised to enhance his seriousness as a major White House contender, as the 37-year-old mayor steadily rises in early state nominating polls.

Laying out a vision that fit safely within the mainstream of the Democratic Party, Buttigieg made repeated critiques of President Donald Trump while also attempting to set himself apart from his older Democratic rivals who seek to "restore an old order," a veiled reference to former Vice President Joe Biden.

"Democrats can no more turn the clock back to the 1990s than Republicans can turn us back to the 1950s," Buttigieg said in a 57-minute address at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.

It marked the South Bend, Indiana, mayor's first major substantive speech as a 2020 presidential candidate and a dip into a policy debate that he's largely eschewed thus far. Foreign affairs have largely been at the periphery in the Democratic primary, but Buttigieg's experience as a Naval Reserve intelligence officer who deployed to Afghanistan lends him particular credibility on national security and military matters, especially against Trump who avoided service.

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Buttigieg called on Congress to repeal the use of force authorization that remains in place to conduct the 18-year war in Afghanistan, as well as deploy forces against the Islamic State group and launch airstrikes around the globe. He pledged to recommit to the Iran nuclear deal, which Trump abandoned last year, and he said that he would reprioritize spending at the Department of Defense to address cyber defense and artificial intelligence, rather than pay for submarines used to wage wars from a bygone era.

Buttigieg also presented himself as a more even-handed arbiter in the Middle East conflict than Trump, warning Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that if he went forward with his threat to annex West Bank settlements, "he should know that a President Buttigieg would take steps to ensure that American taxpayers won't help foot the bill."

Buttigieg peppered his entire speech with jabs at Trump, saying the president arrived at monumental decisions "impulsively, erratically, emotionally and politically," leading to a foreign policy with no core. He said he would not exchange "love letters with a brutal dictator," referring to Trump's ongoing courtship of North Korea's Kim Jong Un and chastised the president for seeing Russia as a real estate opportunity rather than a national security threat.

While he acknowledged his speech was not a "full Buttigieg doctrine," it did set out overarching pillars that would guide him as commander in chief.

Notably, he said the lesson of the Iraq War, which was launched when Buttigieg was just 21 years old, was that military force must be strategic, limited and only used "when left with no alternative."

Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont has tried to make the Iraq War an issue in the primary race, highlighting Biden's 2002 vote in favor of it as a senator. Sanders has called Iraq "the worst foreign policy disaster in the modern history of America," and on Tuesday, Buttigieg similarly labeled it a "self-defeating ... disaster."

Biden, conversely, has pointed to his plethora of relationships abroad as an asset, boasting about the number of foreign leaders who have contacted him as he contemplated another presidential campaign.

"I've literally had a chance to meet virtually every major world leader," Biden has said.

In his call for a new foreign policy era that refocuses U.S. attention on future threats, Buttigieg is again underlining the generational divide with the former vice president and venturing to make it an advantage in his pursuit of his party's nomination. In fact, in his speech he uttered the word "future" a dozen times.

At the same time, Buttigieg did not offer any major breaks with Democratic orthodoxy and left the thorny particulars on many issues for another day. While he called for Congress to repeal the 2001 authorization for military force, all of his Senate rivals have already voted to rescind it.

Like most of his primary opponents, Buttigieg held up climate change as a national security threat and said he would reenter the international Paris agreement. To go even further, he floated hosting a Pittsburgh summit of cities to form additional commitments to cut carbon emissions.

Buttigieg's speech was advised by Doug Wilson, a former assistant secretary of Defense in President Barack Obama's administration, as well as former National Security Council member Ned Price and Tarek Ghani, an assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis, according to the campaign.

Buttigieg has previously said the most important lesson he learned from serving in the military was how to work with people "who are very different than I was and quickly establish trust" in order to survive life-threatening situations. Along with Reps. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii and Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, he is one of three veterans seeking the Democratic presidential nomination.

In April 2007, another fresh-faced Democratic presidential candidate from the Midwest offered a foreign policy vision that lambasted the Iraq War, called for a modernized military and offered "a new spirit – not of bluster and bombast, but of quiet confidence and sober intelligence, a spirit of care and renewed competence."

It was Barack Obama.

