WASHINGTON, July 25 (UPI) -- Say this for Sen. Barack Obama: He continues to confound all the expectations of friends and foes alike.

Obama's remarkable speech at the Column of Victory in Berlin's Tiergarten Thursday was not the vague, uplifting oration skeptics had expected. And it wasn't what many of his admirers on both sides of the Atlantic wanted to hear either.

The Democratic presumptive nominee for the presidency of the United States walked in the footsteps of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan not just in spirit but in substance: He called for a renewal and strengthening of the historic trans-Atlantic partnership between the major Western European nations and the United States, and he went into hard-nosed specifics, calling for European cooperation in imposing significant economic sanctions on Iran and joining America in much closer cooperation against nuclear proliferation.

Obama also served notice that the European nations need to beef up the scale of their ground-force contributions to the NATO mission in Afghanistan.

This clearly was not welcome news in Germany -- either to conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has a tough time defending Germany's current deployment of 3,500 troops in a non-violent part of Afghanistan, and even less so to Obama's many German and European admirers, who don't want to send any more ground troops there. Applause for Obama at that point in his speech was tepid, to say the least.