State of the Union Address as viewed in the United Kingdom

Here's a view of the State of the Union address as viewed in the UK -- not very flattering.

Editorial from the UK Telegraph, By Nile Gardiner World, January 28th,
2010

As expected, Barack Obama’s 70 minute State of the Union address focused heavily on the
economy and the domestic political agenda. This was hardly surprising in
the aftermath of last week’s catastrophic defeat for his party in the
Massachusetts special Senate election, where the Republicans scored an historic victory.
American voters are turning strongly against the president’s health care
reform package as well as his big government vision for the economy, which has
contributed to spiraling public debt and mounting unemployment, now standing at over
10 percent.

But the scant attention paid in the State of the Union
speech to US leadership was pitiful and frankly rather pathetic. The war
in Afghanistan, which will soon involve a hundred thousand American troops,
merited barely a paragraph. There was no mention of victory over the enemy,
just a reiteration of the president’s pledge to begin a withdrawal in July
2011. Needless to say there was nothing in the speech about the importance of
international alliances, and no recognition whatsoever of the sacrifices made by Great
Britain and other NATO allies alongside the United States on the battlefields of
Afghanistan. For Barack Obama the Special Relationship means nothing, and
tonight’s address further confirmed this.

Significantly, the global war against al-Qaeda was hardly mentioned, and
there were no measures outlined to enhance US security at a time of mounting
threats from Islamist terrorists. Terrorism is a top issue for American voters,
but President Obama displayed what can only be described as a stunning
indifference towards the defence of the homeland. The Iranian nuclear threat, likely to be the biggest
foreign policy issue of 2010, was given just two lines in the speech, with a
half-hearted warning of “growing consequences” for Tehran, with no details
given at all. There were no words of support for Iranian protestors who have been
murdered, tortured and beaten in large numbers by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s thuggish
security forces, and no sign at all that the president cared about their plight.
Nor was there any condemnation of the brutality of the Iranian regime, as
well as its blatant sponsorship of terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan.
As the example of Iran showed, the advance of freedom
and liberty across the world in the face of tyranny was not even a footnote in the
president’s speech.

I cannot think of a US president in modern times who has
attached less importance to human rights issues. For the hundreds of
millions of people across the world, from Burma to Sudan to Zimbabwe, clamouring to
be free of oppression, there was not a shred of hope offered in Barack Obama’s
address. Obama’s world leadership in his first year in office
has been weak-kneed and little short of disastrous. He has sacrificed the
projection of American power upon the altar of political vanity, with empty speeches and
groveling apologies across the world, from Strasbourg to Cairo. He has appeased
some of America’s worst enemies, and has extended the hand of friendship to
many of the most odious regimes on the face of the earth. Judging by the
State of the Union address tonight, we can expect more of the same from an
American president who seems determined to lead the world’s greatest power along
a path of decline.