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SALEM, N.H. -- Struggling for traction in the polls, Jon Huntsman has sought to gain attention by doing just about everything a bit differently than the other candidates in the Republican presidential field.

Most of Huntsman's most visible efforts to stand out have been stylistic: He tweets sardonically, dresses down in sneakers, and rides a motorcycle, as he did briefly following his address at a GOP picnic here on Monday.

While the top-tier GOP hopefuls ventured to South Carolina for Sen. Jim DeMint's forum on Labor Day, Huntsman was in New Hampshire, where he has banked his candidacy on mounting a come-from-behind victory over Mitt Romney. And in a marked departure from the other White House contenders’ typical stump speeches, Huntsman devoted a large portion of his remarks to foreign policy.

“We have a generational opportunity to clean up the map, and that’s going to require us to take a look at where we are, where we’ve deployed, and to make sure what we’re doing is consistent with American foreign policy interests and that it’s serving the taxpayers of this country,” Huntsman told reporters after his brief remarks to the few dozen Republicans on hand. “We’ve fought the good fight in Afghanistan for 10 years, and we don’t need 100,000 troops there, and we don’t need to be nation-building, and we shouldn’t. We have 50,000 troops in Germany, and I’m here to tell you: The Russians aren’t coming anymore.”

Huntsman’s previous position as ambassador to China under President Obama has been one of his most difficult challenges in a GOP political climate in which anything even hinting at cooperation with the Democratic president is often greeted with disdain.

But Huntsman’s non-interventionist rhetoric could tap into an understated, yet growing sentiment among the Republican rank-and-file here that the U.S. military is overextended in regions of the world where it should have a smaller presence. Even as he made this argument, Huntsman also highlighted his unique expertise on China.

“I think we’re going to be looking more at a Pacific-centric strategy in the 21st century,” he said. “That’s where the rising militaries are, that’s where the trade routes are going to be most prominent, so I’m by no means an isolationist; all I’m saying is, let’s deploy our interests based on a realistic look at the globe and a realistic look at our national security needs.”

Huntsman made clear that he is no Ron Paul on the question of withdrawing more aggressively from the world stage. (“I am a realist,” he said.) But the former Utah governor argued for using the upcoming 10-year anniversary of 9/11 as a moment to reconsider priorities in light of the country’s economic woes.

“We have free elections in Kabul, we’ve uprooted the Taliban, we have dismantled al-Qaeda -- they’ve scattered, although many are in Waziristan -- we’ve killed Osama bin Laden,” Huntsman said. “But more than anything else, I think the guiding foreign policy tenet for this country right now really ought to be strengthening our core here at home because if our core is weak, we can’t project that goodness to the rest of the world.”

Asked about his lack of resonance so far with Republican voters in the first-in-the-nation primary state, Huntsman cited the past near-victories in New Hampshire of Bill Clinton and Lamar Alexander as evidence that candidates often don’t catch fire until the home stretch.

“This is a state that rewards hard work,” Huntsman said. “The election doesn’t really begin -- the election cycle -- until Labor Day. So here we are, and the pace is going to pick up, and we’re going to see a lot more frenetic activity in the months ahead, and that’s going to be the kind of activity that I’m going to follow closely.”