 I was listening carefully to the State of the Union address trying to discern whether there was in fact a grand strategy either being articulated or hidden somewhere in there. One of the things that struck me very forcibly was the, first of all, the relatively minimal time he spent talking about anything foreign policy related, good 85 to 90% of the substance of the speech was on domestic issues. But one of the things that actually struck me was there really, there is a real strategy there on the domestic side and in a funny way his vision on the domestic side in contrast to his vision on the foreign policy side is both more humble and at the same time far more strategic whereas on the foreign policy side he's got a vision that is both grandiose but doesn't seem to be linked to any particular blueprint or strategy for why do we want to get there, how do we get there. So on the domestic side he actually lays out a very clear but at the same time fairly modest vision of where we want to go and he essentially says we have this American promise and the American promise is that if you, the American dream is that if you work hard you can send your children to college, you can afford a home, you can save for retirement and he actually says the defining issue of our day is to keep that promise alive. On the foreign policy side it's much less humble. A lot of references to American leadership, American power, our military might, America is the indispensable nation. He is clearly trying to ward off criticism that he's apologizing for American anyway or wants to weaken America or is a defeatist about American power. He says straight out, anyone who says that America is in decline, anyone who says that American influence is waning doesn't know what they're talking about, a statement that I think many, many specialists in foreign policy as well as many of our diplomats probably would disagree and would think that they do know what they're talking about. But it's a pretty grandiose idea, it's we're number one, unquestionably we're number one, we're going to stay number one and there's not much else in terms of a vision of our role in the world nor is there much of a vision of what we think the world should look like, what we want the global arena to look like, what we want the community of nations to look like. That doesn't get laid out at all. So there's a grandiose notion of American power and then nothing that really tells us how to get there. It's still, what we have that follows that is still, it's a list of successes and they are real successes, Libya ending the Iraq war beginning to withdraw from Afghanistan, the death of Osama bin Laden, those are genuine successes. So it's a list of successes. But it doesn't really clearly articulate to what ultimate end and what do we do next and for what purpose. It remains very modest and it just closes with a sort of a feel-good sentiment which I think everyone can get behind but it's not much of a blueprint for action. The feel-good sentiment is can't we all be more like the military in the sense that within the military it's a meritocracy, race doesn't matter, gender doesn't matter or sexual orientation doesn't matter anymore and within the military people put the mission first and personal ambition, personal identity issues second and think how much more we could accomplish if we all had that spirit in all of our endeavors, domestic and foreign policy related and that's nice, that's good. I don't know that there's anyone who would necessarily disagree with that Democrat or Republican but it's not particularly an agenda for action. It falls into the category of why can't we all just get along sentiments without any recipe for getting there. To some extent I think this is, it's inevitable. It's not really fair to ask that the State of the Union Address have the logical coherence or the, it's not fair to ask it to do everything at once. We know that especially in election years these are campaign speeches. It's not the moment to engage in more complex reflections on much of anything. It's the moment to say, here are the good things I did and I'm going to do some more good things tomorrow and you don't want to get too specific, you don't want to distract people too much from all those good things. So in a sense I think that what we have here is as a State of the Union speech goes it's a pretty decent one, it's a pretty decent one and it does lay out a pretty impressive agenda and impressively ambitious and ambitious agenda for reaching a modest goal on the domestic side but I certainly would have liked to see a little bit more specificity and a little bit more specificity of vision with less grandiosity of vision on the foreign policy side.