Mitt Romney mounted a big foreign policy display on a flag-draped stage at the Virginia Military Institute on Monday, serving up a lot of tough-sounding sound bites and hawkish bumper stickers, some of them even bumping up somewhere close to the truth, to give the appearance that he would be stronger and more forceful on international affairs than President Obama.

He seems to consider himself, ludicrously, a leader similar to the likes of Harry Truman and George Marshall, and, at one point, he obliquely questioned Mr. Obama’s patriotism. The hope seems to be that big propaganda, said loudly and often, will drown out Mr. Obama’s respectable record in world affairs, make Americans believe Mr. Romney would be the better leader and cover up the fact that there is mostly just hot air behind his pronouncements.

Mr. Romney’s stated policies in Monday’s speech, just as they have been in the past, are either pretty much like Mr. Obama’s or, when there are hints of differences, would pull the United States in wrong and even dangerous directions. His analysis of the roots of various international crises is either naïve or deliberately misleading.

One new element is Mr. Romney’s assertion that the threats have “grown worse.” He desperately wants to undercut the edge that voters have given Mr. Obama on foreign policy, even before he ordered the killing of Osama bin Laden. But he offers no real evidence to back up that particular claim, and if it were true that the threats have been so much worse for so long, it’s odd that Mr. Romney hasn’t really talked about them before.