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.

The campaign of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., Obama's opponent in the U.S. presidential campaign, slammed him for behaving as if he were already president, when he had yet to convince the American people to elect him: "Before they've crossed the 50-yard line, the Obama campaign is already dancing in the end zone," said McCain spokesman Brian Rogers.

The same day Obama spoke in Berlin, McCain supporters aired a new ad on U.S. network television blasting him as a flip-flopper on a succession of major issues, including the successful troop surge policy in Iraq.

In London, columnist Gerald Baker in The Times published a scathing piece parodying Obama as the Prince of Peace, and for acting like a divine child whose every act and word were inspired from heaven.

It must indeed be noted that while Obama clearly wanted to place himself in the pantheon of great American champions of freedom and democracy who have given legendary orations in Berlin, led by Kennedy and Reagan, his differences from them are very striking as well. JFK and Reagan were both seasoned presidents who had led the Western world successfully through major confrontations with the Soviet Union before they spoke in Berlin.

JFK had hung tough against the Kremlin in the 1961 Berlin crisis, and in 1962 he forced the Soviets to withdraw their offensive ballistic missiles from Cuba while maintaining world peace and averting thermonuclear war in the Cuban Missile Crisis, the most dangerous confrontation of the entire Cold War.

Reagan had pushed ahead with the deployment of road-mobile Pershing 2 Intermediate-Range Ballistic Missiles to counter the Soviet SS-20 ballistic missile deployments that had put the major cities of Western Europe more under thermonuclear threat than ever before. The Pershing 2 deployment, indeed, forced the Soviets to eventually scrap their own intermediate missile deployments under the 1987 INF treaty, later concluded between Reagan and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in Washington.

By contrast, not only has Obama never been tested in any such confrontation with the Soviets -- or anyone else -- but he isn't even president yet.

Also, JFK and Reagan were vastly experienced figures in U.S. national politics before they were elected president. Kennedy, young and inexperienced though he was commonly described at the time, served 14 years as a U.S. congressman and senator and was a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy during World War II. In fact, he had twice as much time serving in the Senate as Obama currently has.

Unlike Obama, JFK already had established a strong track record as a champion of a powerful U.S. military, including thermonuclear defenses. And Kennedy not only had served in the U.S. Armed Forces but also was a recognized war hero of great physical courage.

In Reagan's case, he had already been a highly successful two-term governor of California in difficult times. Obama's speech, rhetorically impressive though it was, came with none of that experience to back it up and give his words serious credibility. And it could come back to haunt him if he fails to deliver on his pledges to beef up the fight against international terror and to restrain Iran if he is elected president.

Having said that, making a public commitment to strengthen the Atlantic Alliance in front of 200,000 people below the Golden Angel atop Berlin's Pillar of Victory is no small thing. Barack Obama could not deliver any record of foreign policy and national security achievement in Berlin, but he certainly aimed high in his aspirations, and he'll be judged on it.