It is hard to make a speech about the European Union’s goals and not, at some point, seem to move beyond ambition to delusion. David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, failed to avoid that pitfall entirely yesterday, when he portrayed the EU as a tool waiting to be deployed in the service of his own favourite causes of climate change and the righting of distant injustice.

All the same, it was a resonant and moving speech (delivered to the College of Europe in Bruges): a reminder of the EU’s achievements in finding common values after the horror of two world wars, and in solidifying half a century of peace. It is an honourable project to try to say how this union might now be used to tackle the problems of this century, even if there seems little constituency at the moment in many countries for some of Miliband’s more ambitious ideas.

Some of the interest in his “landmark speech” will now be deflected by the significant changes made between the highlights given to the press on Wednesday and the version he gave yesterday, which is less gushing about the European project. It drops a plan to “adopt a zero emission standard” for “all cars consumed in Europe” (surely not the best phrase) in favour of a pledge to be “on the road” to that goal. And was “Europe must step into this void” so worrying that consistency (and rhetorical punch) were sacrificed for “Europe has a chance to step into this void”?

If a minister is going to plant key quotations in the media precisely to get his speech more attention, then it is daft to excise the most ringing phrases in the final text, and it is comedy to produce two versions of a 20-year vision within 24 hours.

That aside, his most radical notion is that EU membership might eventually be extended to the Middle East and Northern Africa (although again, his original target of extending the single market to them by 2030 disappeared by yesterday). But his lesson about the dangers of protectionism and fear of what he called “unplanned migration” is a good one, although it will have patchy popular appeal.

His impatience with the EU’s collective military efforts is fair but the transformation he wants into a bigger, faster force is not going to happen. The present strain on the British and French armed forces, and German ambivalence are real constraints; he cannot swat them away.

The Miliband philosophy – the framing theme of all his speeches – is that no country or region can detach itself from far-off turmoil, because it will reach them in the end through conflict, terrorism, migration or climate change. The theory has much to be said for it – except that, as scientists would say, it is not falsifiable, as he interprets it. When he warns that the bell tolls for us all, you can’t reply that it doesn’t, because he will respond “but it might”. He wields this tool too glibly in arguing for Europe’s intervention in Darfur, Chad – almost any problem dear to his own heart; indeed, he uses it to dismiss as myopic, even immoral, the thought that people might prefer to focus on problems closer to home.

But he is right that Europe needs to be generous and active tackling problems outside its borders – in its own self-interest, but also as an expression of its own values.

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