SCOTLAND'S First Minister delivered a trio of set-piece speeches in America this week. They garnered precious little coverage over here. Our media was much more interested in Sir Tom Hunter's take on an independence referendum, John Swinney's latest spat with London over funding for his council tax freeze and local income tax plans and Donald Trump's latest claim that his Aberdeenshire golf development is all but assured because "they like what I've done . . . and my mother is Scottish".

So I checked to see if Alex Salmond's Scotland Week addresses had been more eagerly received over there. Sad to report, there has not been a single mention of Salmond over the past seven days in the Boston Globe, the New York Times or the Washington Post. You can, of course, read everything he said on the Scottish Government's website. I have.

What a poor return from all those carefully-crafted sound-bites. Like "Go east young industry, east to Scotland". Or "The principles of Jefferson are the axioms of a free society", that one with help from Abe Lincoln. Or "The Pentland Firth - the Saudi Arabia of tidal power". The First Minister's reflections deserve a wider audience. If only because, for me, they demonstrate just how ruthlessly simplistic a lot of his thinking tends to be on some of the great issues confronting us.

Alex Salmond doesn't entertain uncertainty or doubt. In life, there are either proven goods - independence; small nations; perpetual economic growth, based on low taxes on business. Or indisputable bads - London rule; nuclear power; council tax. Consummate salesman that he is, our First Minister does very few shades of grey.

Take Salmond's University of Virginia speech on contemporary lessons to be drawn from the land of Jefferson, the third American President, principal architect of the 1776 Declaration of Independence. The First Minister's objective was three-fold - to celebrate the links between Scotland and the United States; to discuss the relevance of Thomas Jefferson's intellectual legacy to modern Scotland; and, finally, to explore Scotland's place in today's world. You don't really have to read the whole speech to see what Salmond's game plan is.

We know he and his party believe Scotland's place in the modern world is as an independent nation state. We know Jefferson helped draft that unaimous declaration of the 13 American states 232 years ago this July. "When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another . . . We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among them are life, liberty and the pusuit of happiness . . ." And so on.

Bingo. Millions of Americans boast Scottish roots. I'm among them. So why not bang the drum loudly for Scotland, very belatedly, taking the Jefferson trail. Salmond laid it on thick: "The strength and depth of the bonds between Scotland and America - and the exchange of ideas, of people, of values, of technology - show that this truly is a strong partnership. And, although Scotland is a small nation and America is large, it has always been, and remains, a partnership of friends and equals."

Strike out the word "America" in these two sentences and replace it with "England" and a great many Scots would still agree with such sentiments. But could you imagine our First Minister delivering those words in London? No chance. Indeed, he went out of his way to remind his audience that "in an age when the Scottish Parliament had capitulated into an incorporating Union with London" Jefferson and the other founding fathers "had the courage to challenge autocratic rule" by King George III.

These two events were, in fact, separated by nearly seven decades. And by the time King George was losing his American colonies, Scotland, even within that crippling Union, was giving leading form and substance to an intellectual enlightenment which so inspired Jefferson and his co-signatories. And what of America's complex third President? He was certainly a polymath. He was also, despite his advocacy of the rights of the individual and the common man, an owner of slaves until the day he died, in 1824. He had around 150 at Monticello, the hill-top home in Virginia Alex Salmond visited. There is modern DNA evidence that he had six children by one of them, Sally Hemings. Such were his accumulated debts that, in his will, only she and her family were freed. The others had to be sold on to pay Jefferson's creditors. He had spoken out against slavery all his life and had even included a condemnation of the British crown's sponsorship of that evil trade in his first draft of the Declaration. But he couldn't live without them. As he himself put it: "We have the wolf by the ears - and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other."

Jefferson had many shades of grey. But Alex Salmond didn't let any of them intrude into his rather laboured thesis that "it is to Thomas Jefferson that we can look for guidance on the principles and conduct of our national debate."

This, surely, is pastiche politics, masquerading as serious historical analysis. Alex Salmond did allow one tone of grey into his Virginia speech. The nature of modern political independence has, he admitted, changed. In our 21st-century world, the "pooling of sovereignty at an international and global level" has, he believes, become inevitable.

An independent Scotland would remain a committed member of the European Union. Presumably that is also why, unlike the staunchly republican Jefferson, our present Scottish Government would, if and when Scotland became independent, still embrace the House of Windsor and the pound sterling, too. But why precisely is it that, in Alex Salmond's mind, the only pooling of sovereignty that is beyond the pale is the Union we have been in with England for the past 300 years?

One last point. Doesn't Salmond's Harvard call to young US businesses to come east, to Scotland, rather neglect the real consequence of globalisation. Not that fleet-footed small economies will rule the roost, but that the unipolar economic dominance of the United States in the 20th century is on the wane and given way to a different, multipolar future where greater economic power will be in the hands of emerging power-houses such as China, India, Brazil and Indonesia, with whom we have fewer historic bonds or shared belief systems.

Perhaps we will hear something about that when Scotland Week goes on tour to other destinations.