WASHINGTON — In the days immediately preceding his address to Congress on Tuesday night, President Donald Trump took a chain saw to government agencies, initiated a trade war, cut off arms to Ukraine and sided with a brutal authoritarian, President Vladimir Putin of Russia.

But a visitor arriving from a distant planet who listened to Trump’s address before an audience of enthusiastic Republicans and dejected, powerless and angry Democrats would not have sensed the scale and intensity of the disruption of the past 44 days and the deep concerns it has produced.

While Trump resurrected familiar arguments from his campaign rallies to try to justify his actions — citing waste and fraud in the federal bureaucracy, the dangers posed by migrants entering the country illegally, the unfairness of the global trading system and the need to bring a bloody war to an end — something was missing.

He never made the case for why the potential benefits of the disruption he has triggered — “nothing but swift and unrelenting action,” he called it, quite accurately — was worth the very real costs at home and abroad. He never addressed the fears of investors who have been hitting the “sell” button amid an escalating trade war, or of allies reaching for their panic buttons as Washington aligns with Moscow. He never talked about why he was inflicting more economic pain on his allies than his adversaries.

“They’ll be a little disturbance,” was the closest he came to acknowledging the reaction to his moves, in that case speaking of his steep tariffs.

When he briefly turned to the war in Ukraine toward the end of his more than 100-minute speech, it was chiefly to ask, “Do you want to keep it going for another five years?”

He never addressed the question of what a just peace might look like, or whether America or its European allies would guarantee that Ukraine would remain an independent state. And not once did he suggest that Putin might have to give up something in return — or what would happen if the Russian leader decided to keep on fighting.

It was, in short, a speech oddly detached from the questions that have been roiling Washington since Trump began issuing his wave of executive orders, since he insisted that the United States take control of Greenland and the Panama Canal and rebuild the Gaza Strip without Palestinians, or since he began suggesting, first as a joke and then in tones more menacing, that Canada would be wise to become the 51st state.

True, Trump has never been one to dwell on policy; in his first term, presented with a series of options on dealing with a complex telecommunications issue, he declared, “This is really boring.”

But given the gravity of Trump’s recent actions, it was not unreasonable to look to the speech for insight into where his “America First” instincts are taking the country and the world, as he seeks to scrap portions of the Western-dominated system of laws and rules that have guided states in NATO or the European Union.

Nothing like that was offered. In some ways this speech was pure Trump, designed more for applause lines than deep examination.

But it was also pure Trump to celebrate disruption he had triggered without describing its long-term objectives, beyond the slogan of advancing what he called a “common-sense revolution.” He did not talk in any detail about how to take on America’s biggest global challenges — such as handling China’s growing reach and expanding nuclear arsenal or a strategy for peeling the Russians and the Chinese away from each other.

In fact, he barely mentioned America’s two biggest nuclear-armed superpower competitors at all, much less their work together.

Nor did he dwell on his order for a “freeze on all foreign aid,” a step that has had profound human consequences: the inevitable deaths of the world’s poorest, who had been dependent on American food or medicine that was suddenly locked away in warehouses across Africa and the Middle East, or the paralysis of a program to fight AIDS that President George W. Bush says was the crown jewel of his Republican administration, because it saved millions of lives.

He also did not talk about how the United States planned to replace the role that the U.S. Agency for International Development played in countering the roots of terrorism, or the risks of hacking away at a little-known part of the Energy Department, the National Nuclear Security Administration, that keeps America’s nuclear stockpile secure.