Tonight’s remarkably dull State of the Union address  was dominated by President Obama’s heavily flawed vision for reviving the American economy, with plans that remain overwhelmingly mired in an outdated Big Government mentality, and which spectacularly failed to include a coherent strategy for eliminating America’s massive $14 trillion debt.

But the State of the Union is also traditionally a major opportunity to project US leadership on the world stage, and once again Obama has fallen short.

In 2010 I gave the president an F for the foreign policy section of his lacklustre first State of the Union address. His 2011 address was certainly no better. For the second year running, President Obama has demonstrated that he is no world leader, and frankly has little interest at all in foreign policy.

The war in Afghanistan was barely a blip on the president’s teleprompter. With over 100,000 American troops on the ground fighting the Taliban in defence of the United States and the free world, one would have expected the president to have dedicated more than a miserly 132 words to the war effort and the stakes involved. There was no sense from the president of a plan for victory in Afghanistan, or the wider importance of the conflict within the context of a global war against Islamist terrorism, which he resolutely refuses to even identify.