The single best description that one can make about Mitt Romney's foreign policy agenda to date is that, quite simply, it's a critique, not a policy.

Rather than lay out a vision for American power, or even an alternative to the national security stewardship of Barack Obama, Romney has been content to simply say why he thinks the president has done a lousy job, without offering voters any sense of what he would do differently as commander-in-chief. And his speech at Virginia Military Institute Monday was pretty much more of the same.

Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to find a single substantive difference between what Romney is proposing as a candidate and Obama is actually doing as president. Consider, for example, Romney's discussion of Iran – an area in which he has claimed there are significant contrasts between his views and those of the president:

"I will put the leaders of Iran on notice that the United States and our friends and allies will prevent them from acquiring nuclear weapons capability. I will not hesitate to impose new sanctions on Iran, and will tighten the sanctions we currently have. I will restore the permanent presence of aircraft carrier task forces in both the eastern Mediterranean and the Gulf the region – and work with Israel to increase our military assistance and coordination. For the sake of peace, we must make clear to Iran through actions – not just words – that their nuclear pursuit will not be tolerated."

I dare you to try and identify any difference between this policy and the policy currently being implemented by President Obama. Aside from perhaps a slightly more punitive approach to sanctions, and a more direct reference to the use of force in the last sentence, the two candidate's approaches are almost completely identical. Monday's entire speech from Romney was like this.

• On Libya, Romney says he will "support the Libyan people's efforts to forge a lasting government that represents all of them" – this is President Obama's strategy.

• On Egypt, Romney says, "I will use our influence – including clear conditions on our aid – to urge the new government to represent all Egyptians, to build democratic institutions, and to maintain its peace treaty with Israel". This is President Obama's current strategy in Egypt.

• On Afghanistan, Romney says, "I will evaluate conditions on the ground and weigh the best advice of our military commanders. And I will affirm that my duty is not to my political prospects, but to the security of the nation". Again, this is the same approach taken by President Obama.

The only single area where one could possibly find even a hint of variance between the two men is on sending arms to the opposition forces in Syria who, as Romney put it, "share our values". Good luck in determining that; but again, this, according to the New York Times, is to some extent already happening.

Romney's entire speech relies on projecting a version of Obama's foreign policy that is simply belied by reality. For example, Romney continues to claim that "the president has not signed one new free trade agreement in the past four years", even though he has signed three – with South Korea, Panama and Colombia.

Where Romney criticizes Obama, his objections are contradicted by his own platitudes. On the one hand, he talks about the struggle between "democracy and despotism" in the Middle East; at the same time, he attacks the Obama administration for not keeping troops in Iraq longer – even though the departure of US troops was the explicit desire of a freely-elected, democratic Iraqi government. Apparently, Romney's support of democracy is correlated, somewhat, with his own policy preferences.

He says that he will call on America's Nato allies to pony up more for defense spending and hitting their Nato benchmarks – a perennial call from US policy-makers that has always fallen on deaf ears in Europe. The idea that Romney, who has directly insulted the UK, Spain, France and other European nations for their social welfare policies, will extract bigger shares of Nato's defense budget from them seems far-fetched at best.

But Romney's foreign policy delusion is not limited to Europe. While he has repeatedly insulted the Palestinian people and said they have no real interest in peace with Israel, he says that a new president – a Romney presidency – "will bring the chance to begin anew" in resolving the conflict. And this from a man who says Barack Obama believes "hope" is a strategy!

Perhaps the most delusional element of Romney's speech, though was this:

"It is the responsibility of our president to use America's great power to shape history – not to lead from behind, leaving our destiny at the mercy of events."

To be sure, these are words that have a long history on the presidential campaign trail: paeans to American exceptionalism and influence on the world stage are nothing new. In 2008, Barack Obama spoke of his desire "to lead the world anew". These sentiments are indicative of a larger and more troubling conceit in American foreign policy: the notion that we Americans possess the power to shape global events.

During the cold war, arguably, the United States possessed some semblance of political suasion: the potential for planet-destroying nuclear war and the presence of a rival superpower had a way of grabbing the attention of like-minded nations. But in the post-cold war era, while the US remains a powerful global actor, we are miles away from omnipotence. To an extent greater than our politicians would like to admit, the United States is often "at the mercy of events"; and our ability to bend other nations and peoples to our will is surely limited.

Even in places where the US has directly intervened, like Iraq and Afghanistan, our influence over nominal allies has been remarkably constrained. In places where we provide significant financial assistance: Pakistan, Israel and, again, Afghanistan, each of these nation's leaders do largely as they please, not as the United States demands. Minor considerations like reality did not, however, prevent Romney implicitly criticizing Obama's policy in the Middle East – and arguing that a better course exists:

"We cannot support our friends and defeat our enemies in the Middle East when our words are not backed up by deeds, when our defense spending is being arbitrarily and deeply cut, when we have no trade agenda to speak of, and the perception of our strategy is not one of partnership, but of passivity."

But no serious observer of the region believes that any of these policies would have any significant impact on the process of political transformation taking place in the Middle East. And Romney is silent about why, even in places where our engagement is the greatest, our influence appears to have such a minimal impact.

In Mitt Romney's worldview – in so much as one can detect one – the key to American power lies in some amorphous notion of US leadership disconnected from the extraordinary challenges of actually conducting foreign policy. Talking about leadership and resolve is easy – doing it is the hard part.

This explains, more than any other reason, why Romney's policy prescriptions are so vague and meaningless. It's the yawning chasm between what American power can actually achieve and what a politician seeking to be president says it ought to be doing.

In the end, Romney doesn't have much of a coherent policy agenda and his critique is wildly off-base. His real problem, though, is that he barely seems to grasp how the world – and, in turn, American power – actually works.