Debating Points, Global Edition

The editors of Campaign Stops asked our contributors and international analysts to share their reactions to the third presidential debate. Tune in here for regular updates.
2:09 a.m. | Updated

Lynn Vavreck:Why Won’t They Stop Agreeing?
Husain Haqqani: A Doomed Strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan
Eric L. Lewis: Mitt Romney’s Egypt
Dennis Ross: Who’s Prepared on Iran?
Michael S. Doran: Romney’s Strategy for Syria
Daniel W. Drezner: The Anti-Bellum Romney
Anne-Marie Slaughter: America’s Narcissism
Hanin Ghaddar: The Winner: Bashar al-Assad
Danielle Pletka: Don’t Diss Defense Workers
Ross Douthat: Mitt’s New Modesty
Dalia Dassa Kaye: A Crucial Difference on Iran
Sheena Chestnut Greitens: Where Was Asia?
Nathan Thrall: Not Enough Daylight on Israel
Marisa Porges: Shopping List Foreign Policy

If we ask people to assess President Obama’s performance on foreign policy issues, we get judgments so closely tied to party identification that they are hardly worth discussing. But when we take approval of the president out of the question and ask people about their own ideas on America’s role in the world, there are some surprising areas of agreement — in fact, strong agreement, it turns out.

Using data from the Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project on the appropriate use of military force, we find that we are not polarized over everything. Ensuring access to oil, destroying terrorist camps, intervening in a civil war, assisting the spread of democracy, and helping our allies are all actions on which most Americans agree — and sometimes profoundly so. The only worthy uses of our military forces, the respondents say, are destroying terror training camps and helping our allies; the rest are not.

Helping the United Nations uphold international law reveals the biggest difference between the parties — Democrats think it is appropriate and Republicans soundly disagree (I’ve presented the percentages separately on this line for Democrats and Republicans).

But lest you think the nation isn’t polarized on foreign policy, consider this: on some issues we see bigger differences between the attitudes of men and women than we see between the parties. On the question of whether it is appropriate to use our military forces to destroy a terrorist camp, 71 percent of men say yes while only half of women approve. On average, women’s support for the use of force is less strong than men’s, by about 10 points.

With women making up the larger share (60 percent) of undecided voters and both candidates fighting hard for their votes, it is not surprising that tonight we heard more agreement between the two candidates than disagreement. And although there is no gender divide on whether Romney “says what he believes,” there is a gender difference on whether Obama is sincere. Women are 11 points more likely, on average, to think Obama says what he believes and 12 points more likely to say this about Obama relative to Romney.

Lynn Vavreck is an associate professor of political science and communication studies at U.C.L.A.

President Obama said, referring to Osama bin Laden’s killing, “If we had asked Pakistan permission, we would not have gotten him.” But if Pakistan can’t be trusted, the president owes the American people an explanation of how he’d deal with a nuclear-armed impoverished country over the next four years.

Mr. Romney seems committed to changing Pakistani behavior. And although he claims he wouldn’t “divorce” Pakistan, Mr. Romney’s answer showed that he would downgrade Pakistan’s status as an American ally. Demanding policy changes from Pakistan in return for American support and friendship is a sound idea but neither candidate has spelled out what specific instruments of persuasion or coercion the United States might successfully deploy to that end.

The discussion over Afghanistan and Pakistan needs to be put in the context of the wider issue of containing Islamist extremism. Mr. Obama defines success against Al Qaeda very narrowly, glossing over how jihadist networks are already preparing to regroup in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region after the withdrawal of American combat forces in 2014. Mr. Obama has not articulated a plan to deal with that challenge.

Killing bin Laden was a positive development but it alone will not make the United States and its allies safe from terrorists. Al Qaeda and its affiliates continue to recruit all over the Muslim world and their ability to organize and train in remote parts of Yemen, Afghanistan and Pakistan has not been completely disrupted. Little has been done to limit the influence of ideas or organizations that lead young Muslims into terrorist training camps. And the withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan has strengthened the jihadi narrative that America simply does not have the staying power and can be forced to withdraw from Muslim regions at very little cost.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban have neither been decisively defeated nor forced to the negotiating table. It is unrealistic to assume that a professional Afghan National Army can be raised and fully assigned the task of securing the country within a short time frame. The Taliban’s ability to infiltrate this hastily assembled army reveals the excessive optimism of this policy.

The United States could have withdrawn from Afghanistan far more successfully if it hadn’t announced a deadline for its withdrawal. That deadline also took away any incentive for Pakistan’s military to work with the United States against the Taliban, thinking that it could instead sit the Americans out and wait for the chance to maximize its influence in a post-American Afghanistan. The Obama administration didn’t succeed in persuading or coercing Pakistan into acting against the Taliban, and its unilateralism has only made it more difficult for the few pro-American elements in Pakistan to fight their own battle against jihadists.

It’s fine to say, “We do not want or like war,’’ but wars against an ideologically motivated enemy, such as Al Qaeda and its affiliates, are wars of necessity. Such wars cannot be fought according to a neat timeline and without effective allies who share both the war’s aims and its strategy.

Husain Haqqani served as Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States from 2008 to 2011 and is a professor of international relations at Boston University and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.

Pity poor Egypt. After suffering through 30 years of the Mubarak kleptocracy, the people of Egypt rose up, deposed the dictator and elected a new president, Mohammed Morsi. To be sure, the victory of Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood may not have been the first choice of American policy makers, but one cannot have a policy of commitment to democracy and then reject democratic outcomes.

The new Egyptian government will no doubt be less friendly than the Mubarak regime, which was reliable, but at the expense of human rights, economic development, transparency and hope for the Egyptian people. Yet Morsi promptly reaffirmed what President Obama called in tonight’s debate a “red line,” the peace treaty with Israel, which has permitted Israel to have predictability from the largest country in the region.

None of these developments appear to satisfy Mitt Romney, who characterized Egypt as part of the “chaos” and “extremism” of Syria and Mali. While hailing the progress in Libya as “wonderful,” he warns that “next door” is Egypt, where the election of a “Muslim Brotherhood president” constitutes a “reversal in the kind of hopes we had for that region.” Romney said he would not have supported retaining Mubarak, but he views the outcome of a free election — indeed, a predictable outcome of an election held so soon after the revolution — as a failure of the Arab Spring.

It is way too early to declare Egypt a success. It is not easy to shake off a sclerotic and corrupt system that was in place for 60 years. It is a country of 80 million people, many of whom live in terrible poverty. It exports many of its most talented people because its economy cannot accommodate them. Its Coptic Christian minority is uneasy, to say the least. The business community has largely remained on the sidelines. And many in its new government have spent the last 30 years avoiding the brutal security apparatus of the Mubarak regime rather than readying themselves for the challenges of governing a modern state.

But Romney’s suggestion that the election of a Muslim Brotherhood government constitutes a reversal for the region is indicative of a dangerous equation of Muslim ruling parties with “jihadists” and “terrorists.” Syria and Iraq were Baathist governments, nominally socialist secular states. The Assad clan and Saddam Hussein did not kill in the name of jihad. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey governs as a moderate Islamist, sharing some ideological roots with the Muslim Brotherhood. Rejected for membership in the European Union, Turkey under Erdogan has surged ahead of the peripheral European nations and assumed a leadership role in the region. To be sure, Hamas also has roots in the Muslim Brotherhood. Whether Egypt moves toward the Turkish model or the Hamas model will be determined in significant measure by the wisdom of American policy.

The Romney approach — lumping Egypt with Mali, Baathists with Islamists, the Muslim Brotherhood with jihadists — retains the ahistorical arrogance of the Bush years. We need to understand the social and political dynamics of countries that we would purport to influence. And we need to have the humility to understand that our influence must be exercised with restraint and pragmatism. Mitt Romney’s apparent belief in restructuring the world from the top down as we would wish it to be shows an obdurate refusal to learn from the tragic mistakes of the past.

Eric L. Lewis is a partner at Lewis Baach P.L.L.C. in Washington.

Listening to tonight’s debate, one would be hard-pressed to identify a clear difference between what President Obama and Mitt Romney would do in dealing with Iran. Both made it clear that prevention, not containment, of a nuclear-armed Iran is their objective. The president was particularly blunt, saying that as long as he is president, Iran will not become a nuclear-armed state. While Mr. Romney made it clear that America could not accept Iran becoming nuclear-weapons-capable, the president went further and said that we could not allow Iran to develop a “breakout capacity.” By this he meant that America could not allow Iran to reach the point where its accumulated enriched uranium, the level of enrichment, and the numbers and quality of centrifuges would allow Iran to quickly create nuclear weapons before we could act militarily to prevent it.

Their mutual emphasis on prevention does not mean that either Mr. Obama or Mr. Romney will forgo diplomacy and rush to war. Both were clear that the use of force is the last resort. Both cited their belief that increasing the pressure of crippling sanctions may yet alter Iranian behavior. The president took pride in having mobilized the world to impose crippling sanctions that are now wreaking havoc with the Iranian economy. Mr. Romney agreed on their effect, and the need to do more. We can certainly anticipate that both would seek to tighten the economic sanctions in 2013. To be sure, Mr. Romney went further in one respect: he is prepared to indict the president of Iran under the genocide convention and treat Iranian diplomats the way those of apartheid South Africa were treated.

Both also indicated that they would see if a diplomatic or negotiated outcome was possible. My expectation is that regardless of who is elected, there will be a diplomatic initiative or endgame proposal designed to test whether Iran is prepared to accept an outcome in which it has civil nuclear power but its nuclear program is restricted in a way that would largely deny it a breakout capability.
I say that because prevention as an objective necessarily will lead at some point to the use of force against the Iranian nuclear program if diplomacy fails. I don’t see either Mr. Obama or Mr. Romney resorting to force without being able to demonstrate that they sought to exhaust all other options first.

The bottom line: their basic approach to Iran seems very similar. But the president, having lived with and thought through the issue for the last four years, is more equipped to move more quickly on Iran than Mr. Romney. If elected, Mr. Romney would have to establish his administration and probably conduct a review of his options. President Obama has already done that.

Dennis Ross, a former State Department and National Security Council official, was a special assistant to President Obama for the Middle East and South Asia from 2009 to 2011. He is now a counselor at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

On Syria, Mitt Romney won — but only on points, certainly not with a knockout blow. Mr. Romney addressed the question in a manner that showed a superior strategic vision. He framed the civil war in Syria as an opportunity, a chance to strike at Iran. “Syria,” Mr. Romney said, “is Iran’s only ally in the Arab world,” stressing the role the regime of Bashar al-Assad plays as Iran’s base for extending its influence in the eastern Mediterranean. Toppling Mr. Assad, Mr. Romney correctly explained, would deal a blow to Hezbollah and roll back Iranian influence throughout the region.

By contrast, President Obama listed a number of actions that his administration has taken, but failed to place them in a wider context. He did not even mention Iran in the course of the discussion.

Syria represents a very rare thing in international politics: a crisis in which our strategic interests and values are in perfect alignment. At least 30,000 have died, and millions have been made refugees. As the greatest power in the Middle East, the United States is untrue to itself if it fails to take decisive action against a dictator who murders civilians with impunity.

Yet in fact, the Obama administration has been relatively passive, as Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey recently complained. “Right now,” Mr. Erdogan said, “there are certain things being expected from the United States,” but America has “not yet catered to those expectations.” In the debate tonight, Mr. Romney struck a similar note, stressing that America “should be playing the leadership role.”

But Mr. Romney did not define a clear path forward. The president claimed that Romney “doesn’t have different ideas, and that’s because we’re doing exactly what we should be doing to try to promote a moderate, Syrian leadership.” There was truth in the statement.

At a moment when there is no appetite among Americans for a new foreign adventure, Mr. Romney was careful to stress that he did not support deploying the American military in Syria. He even rejected the idea of enforcing a no-fly zone. Yet an American-implemented no-fly zone is precisely what is needed to turn the Romney strategic vision into a practical reality.

Mr. Romney displayed a much better grasp of the strategic stakes in Syria, but when it came to specifics, his policy differed little from the president’s.

Michael S. Doran, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, served on the National Security Council and at the Defense Department official from 2005 to 2008.

Many people believe that Mitt Romney won the first debate because of Barack Obama’s somnambulant performance. That overlooked Romney’s deft pivot to the center, which he pulled off by doing things like praising government regulation. This is consistent with a truism in political science: in an election, candidates try to target the median voter. In presidential politics, candidates might win primaries by pleasing their party’s ideological base, but in general elections, they target the moderates, because those are the voters decide the election.

Romney doubled down on that strategy in the foreign policy debate. After a year of very hot and bellicose rhetoric, the governor sounded different tonight. He argued that “we can’t kill our way out of” the problems in the Middle East. He averred that “we want a peaceful planet.” He explicitly stated he didn’t want to get involved militarily in Syria. Romney said the sanctions in Iran were working. He praised the president on numerous fronts — Afghanistan and Pakistan in particular. He even talked about China as a partner before bashing its trade policies. To be fair, the governor has said some of this before, but tonight the emphasis was on diplomacy and peace, not brute force.

In doing all this, Romney was trying to allay the fears of undecided voters who are wary of expending more blood and treasure overseas. Romney’s sotto voce message was that he would not be a hot-headed, trigger-happy cowboy — like the Last Republican President Who Shall Not Be Named. For undecided voters who are clearly sick of foreign wars, this could be very soothing indeed.

Will it work? One difference between this debate and the one in Denver is that President Obama seemed prepared for the pivot this time. The president was ready, willing and able to highlight the inconsistencies in Romney’s previous statements and claims. He accused Romney of being “all over the map” on numerous issues. He also ridiculed Romney’s proposed naval buildup, pointing out that foreign policy wasn’t a game of Battleship. It seems like the president was genuinely proud of his foreign policy accomplishments, as opposed to simply treading water on the economy.

For the past month, Mitt Romney had been chipping away at Obama’s foreign policy record. Tonight he seemed to want to emulate it. His clear hope is that the performance was good enough for voters to be comfortable with him as a sober and prudent commander in chief. That way, they can ignore Obama’s critique and happily forget about international relations for another four years. We’ll find out over the next few days if he succeeded.

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at Tufts and blogs at Foreign Policy magazine.

The much-heralded foreign policy debate wasn’t really a debate, as Barack Obama and Mitt Romney agreed on 90 percent of the issues. And it was barely about foreign policy, as education reform (we all love teachers), Detroit, nation building at home, and taxes got far more play than any part of the world other than the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and China.

Mr. Romney trotted out a new rhetorical meme: “America must promote principles of peace.” Mr. Obama looked and sounded every inch the commander in chief. But the lasting impression of the debate, certainly for anyone watching in the rest of the world, is just how narrowly Americans define foreign policy. Neither candidate mentioned NATO. Indeed, neither candidate mentioned the European Union or the eurozzone crisis, other than Mr. Romney’s dire predictions that the United States will soon be Greece unless he is elected.

Moving east, the candidates barely mentioned a single country in East Asia other than China. There was only the briefest reference to Japan (our closest ally in Asia) by the moderator and a single mention of North Korea (another very dangerous nuclear power). Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world, didn’t come up. For that matter, there was no reference to India (a mere billion people). This silence is all the more striking given Mr. Obama’s reference at the end of the debate to his administration’s purported “pivot to Asia,” a pivot that was supposed to be away from the Middle East. Yet when Mr. Obama was asked to name the greatest threat to the United States, he said terrorist networks; Mr. Romney said a nuclear Iran.

Beyond individual countries, consider the silence on the global issues that are vitally important to the rest of the world. Neither candidate ever uttered the word “climate.” Or drug violence. Or poverty, disease, food, water, or even energy.

This really wasn’t a debate about foreign policy or world affairs. It was the projection of the American electoral map onto the globe. All discussion of Israel and Islam was targeted at Florida; all discussion of China was targeted at Ohio. From a real foreign policy perspective, a business in which we devote a great deal of time and effort to reassuring and mobilizing our friends and allies and trying to solve global problems, we can only hope the rest of the world wasn’t listening.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton, was director of policy planning at the State Department from 2009 to 2011.

Tonight’s debate was expected to reveal the candidates’ thorough and detailed strategies when it comes to the American foreign policy. However, this debate offered very little.

Syria is a case in point. Both candidates seem to have the same confused and paralyzed policy towards Syria. They both want to make friends with the Syrian people, but the real competition was instead on who can be a better friend to Israel.

Mitt Romney was simply advocating President Obama’s foreign policy in Syria, which is inaction. There are simply no meaningful differences. Both want to let the Syrian people “determine their own fate,” which so far has been a very bloody and dark one.

Power comes with responsibility, and the Syrians expected a more responsible stance from what should be the most powerful state in the world. On both Twitter and Facebook, Syrians expressed disappointment with both candidates. They saw America’s power implemented in Libya and wanted the same treatment. However, it seems that both Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama have washed their hands of the Syrian people and decided to stay in the viewing seat.

The policy of inaction in Syria, which apparently will continue no matter which candidate wins, has led to the humanitarian crisis which both candidates lamented, and also to the rise of Islamists. Because of inaction in Syria, the United States is losing the opportunity to lead. America’s inaction in Syria is causing chaos to spread to neighboring countries, such as Turkey, Jordan, and last but not least Lebanon, where a car bomb killed a senior Lebanese security official, Gen. Wissam al-Hassan, and unleashed a wave of sectarian street violence across the country. More inaction will mean more sectarian violence, not only in Syria, but throughout the region. The United States and its allies surely do not wish to see that.

For the Syrian people, intervention never meant boots on the ground. They have specifically asked for safe havens and antiaircraft missiles, not more. That’s all they need to defeat the Assad regime. Both candidates failed to discuss these options in detail. The Syrian people deserve to know why these two specific requests are so hard for the United States to offer. Instead, all they heard was, “We are afraid to give you arms because we do not trust you won’t use it against us.” Without trust, there can be no friendship.

The only difference between the two was that Romney seemed to see the Middle East as one big space of terror. He repeatedly referred to the developments in the past two years in the region as chaos and tumult. This is an insult to the people who have sacrificed their lives, and still are, in order to topple their dictators. That’s also a bad way to make friends.

The Syrians understood tonight that no matter who wins, they are on their own, and that the big winner of this debate is Bashar al-Assad.

Hanin Ghaddar is the editor of NOW Lebanon.

If what you care about is foreign policy and you tuned in tonight, you may have been a tad disappointed by the focus on car tires and teachers and by Barack Obama’s rather robotic insistence on “nation building here at home.” If you care about national defense and are particularly worried about sequestration (the plan that would likely cut $500 billion from the defense budget in January), the president’s blithe assertion that it won’t happen — no proof, no policy, just “I’m Barack Obama and I approve this message” — may not have convinced you.

On the other hand, Mitt Romney did little more to convey the security costs of a rollback in defense that could mean that by the end of this decade, Americans will be spending more annually to service their national debt than they will on national security.

Mr. Romney recycled the oft-used sentiment that the president’s request for naval ships will be the smallest since 1917. Mr. Obama quoted Mr. Romney’s talking points back to him, citing the actual year — 1916 — and ridiculed Mr. Romney’s failure to understand that the military doesn’t fight with bayonets and horses anymore. But the reality is that Mr. Obama’s request is for a Navy unseen since 1916. And for an Air Force little improved from the one our fathers knew. And for a tanker fleet so ancient, all operations are analog. And for a bomber fleet conceived during the Carter years. In that context, cute horse comments are a lame comeback.

If your aim is to win in Virginia, it is probably better not to make fun of the naval fleet (note to the Obama team). Defense workers in Ohio and Virginia are game for more investment. If you want to score points on national defense, it’s probably best not to be snide (though hipsters love it). Truth be told, many who believe in America’s national mission are comfortable with the “peace through strength” message Mr. Romney sought to convey.

Fundamentally, the question is less about the score that Twitter and the spinners give to their favored obsession. Rather, it’s about who sends a message of American resolve, belief in American power, and commitment to American investment in defense. If that’s what matters to you — be you American voter, adversary, or terrorist — then it’s likely that Mr. Romney’s message, on principle and politics, hit home a little harder than Mr. Obama’s. And that, folks, is what the debates are all about.

Danielle Pletka is the vice president for foreign and defense studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

When Mitt Romney punctuated one of his early answers tonight with a reference to the Islamist forces gaining power in the collapsing state of Mali — a reference obscure to almost every viewer, except those who share my particular obsession with the ripple effects of our Libyan intervention — I had the sense that genuine swing voters must have almost all the time: I thought, hey, he’s talking to me.

That sense persisted for much of the night. As a conservative who’s grown steadily more skeptical of military interventions ever since the weapons of mass destruction didn’t turn up in Iraq, I’ve been critical of Romney throughout this campaign for trying to outhawk President Obama at every turn, and for trying to sell a war-weary public on the largely implausible idea that Obama is a weak-kneed appeaser unwilling to show toughness overseas. But tonight, given the chance to throw that argument in the president’s face, the Republican nominee mostly soft-pedaled it, shying away from sharp contrasts, emphasizing areas of agreement and repeatedly mentioning his own desire for peace.

Romney’s turn toward pragmatism was most pronounced on Afghanistan, where he basically endorsed the White House’s plan for a 2014 withdrawal without offering any of his usual hawkish criticisms and caveats. But the same difference-blurring thread ran through almost all his answers. Yes, he promised more military spending and tried to hit the president hard on Obama’s supposed “apology tour” in the Middle East, but otherwise this debate felt like a 90-minute confirmation of what a lot of analysts have pointed out: Strip away the “no apologies” rhetoric, and the differences between the president and his rival on foreign policy look relatively modest.

This isn’t necessarily a good thing for the country, which probably deserves a more robust debate over American strategy than the one we just watched. And by essentially acknowledging the overlap between his posture and the president’s, Romney almost guaranteed that Obama would win the debate on points — which the president pretty clearly did, deploying the advantages of incumbency (not to mention the execution of a certain Al Qaeda leader) effectively in an arena where Americans are still inclined to trust him.

The question is what the audience was looking for. If they were looking for evidence that a Romney administration would deliver significantly better results overseas, then they probably came away disappointed, and Obama’s win will boost him in the polls. But if they were just looking (as I’ll admit that I was looking) to be reassured that Romney is something other than a wild-eyed warmonger, then the Republican nominee may have helped his cause tonight even in defeat.

Ross Douthat is an Op-Ed columnist.

Mitt Romney and Barack Obama had some sharp rhetorical exchanges, but on substance there were few discernible differences. If Mr. Obama was expecting Mr. Romney to distinguish himself by supporting military policies that would be unpopular with Americans (whether in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan or Iran), he was probably disappointed. Mr. Romney went out of his way to argue that killing bad guys would not be enough to fight radical forces; economic development, education and civil society are key ingredients to future stability. Mr. Obama couldn’t agree more.

Mr. Obama said his aim was to get Iran to stop its “nuclear program,” while Mr. Romney spoke about preventing a “nuclear-capable” Iran. But neither candidate defined the point in Iran’s nuclear enrichment that would trigger military action. Both agreed that military action would be the last resort. And Mr. Romney even credited Mr. Obama for applying crippling sanctions, criticizing him only for not doing it earlier (which of course Mr. Obama denied) and suggesting that he would find ways to strengthen them.

But on the Iran file, a consequential distinction emerged. For Mr. Obama, the intent of crippling sanctions is to bring Iran to the negotiating table to agree to give up its nuclear program and abide by United Nations resolutions, arguing that there’s a “deal to be had.” In contrast, Mr. Romney called for diplomatic isolation of Iran, arguing that Iran’s diplomats should be treated like pariahs around the world. Diplomatic pressure, as Mr. Romney advocates, is not the same as negotiations. The dilemma is how sanctions and pressure would dissuade Iran’s leaders from pursuing their nuclear program (as Mr. Romney recommended) if a President Romney wouldn’t agree to sit down and talk with them.

Mr. Obama did not appear to pick up on this disconnect, most likely because he wanted to emphasize the “tough” aspects of his Iran policy and not the off-ramp strategy that will inevitably involve bilateral negotiations with Iran. But if a Romney administration were to pursue a policy shunning diplomacy, it is hard to see how the current sanctions policies, and more covert actions like sabotage, would lead to a resolution. The more likely scenario if diplomacy is rejected or fails is continued escalation — and potentially war.

Dalia Dassa Kaye is director of the Center for Middle East Public Policy at the RAND Corporation.

Tonight both presidential candidates acknowledged the centrality of Asia to America’s interests. The Obama administration offers its “Asia pivot” as a foreign policy success story. Mitt Romney wants a bigger Navy to keep America’s commitments in the region credible and robust. According to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, 60 percent of the Navy’s warships will be located in the Pacific by 2020.

Not once tonight did anyone talk about what those ships are going to do when they get there.

Tonight’s foreign policy debate allotted less than 15 of its 90 minutes to Asia, a region with the world’s fastest economic growth rates and over half of its population. The only country receiving more than a passing mention was China, and even China was discussed only in economic terms.

How to handle the security relationship between the two countries with the world’s largest military budgets went unmentioned, as did the United States’ broader strategy in a region critical to American security interests, where the next president will have to make a series of tough choices and may well face multiple foreign policy crises.

There was no discussion of American policy on the Korean peninsula, where 28,500 American forces stand watch in a war that has not ended, and where our allies this weekend evacuated residents along the DMZ after North Korea threatened to retaliate against an activist group’s balloon launch with artillery fire.

There was no discussion of the recently announced plan to rotate more American planes, ships, and personnel through the Philippines, which in April sailed an American-made cutter into confrontation with China in disputed waters, and then suggested that America was obligated to assist in that confrontation under the terms of a 1951 mutual defense treaty.

There was no discussion of Taiwan, which asked the United States for over 60 new F-16 fighters and last year got a $5.8 billion upgrade to its old ones instead — a decision that the official Chinese press called “a despicable breach of faith” — or of the American “air-sea battle” concept, generally perceived to be a template for future conflict with China.

There was no discussion of whether America’s commitment to those who call for democracy and human rights — a commitment both candidates affirmed — can or should extend past Tunisia and Tahrir to Tibet, where over 50 people have set themselves on fire without producing the political change that a single self-immolation sparked in the Arab World.

Today the world’s attention is riveted on crises in the Middle East. Tomorrow’s flash points lie in Asia. Unfortunately, tonight’s debate did little to clarify how either candidate would handle a 3 a.m. phone call that comes not from Benghazi, but from Beijing.

Sheena Chestnut Greitens is a doctoral candidate in government at Harvard and a fellow at the United States Institute of Peace and at the Miller Center, University of Virginia.

Monday’s debate in Boca Raton offered another venue for President Obama and Mitt Romney to compete over who can appear closer to Israel. Mr. Obama trumpeted his administration’s “unprecedented military and intelligence cooperation” with Israel, while Mr. Romney advertised his close relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.

Mr. Obama contrasted Mr. Romney’s decision to use his recent trip to Israel to “take donors” and “attend fund-raisers” with the president’s own visits to Israel’s Holocaust memorial and the town of Sderot, “which had experienced missiles raining down from Hamas.” Mr. Romney countered by asserting that the president had generated “turmoil” with Israel, noting that 38 Democratic senators had signed a letter urging him to repair the damage.

Mr. Romney also repeated his earlier criticism of the president having reportedly stated that there should be daylight between the United States and Israel when negotiating a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. Yet by definition, some distance must exist between a mediator and the parties to a negotiation if that mediator is to live up to its claim of being an honest broker.

If wishing to eliminate any daylight between America and one party to the conflict is Mr. Romney’s desire, it is one at odds with his professed goal to help Israelis and Palestinians reach a peace agreement — a goal he did not seem to possess when, at a closed-door fund-raiser in Florida earlier this year, he said the Palestinians have “no interest whatsoever in establishing peace,” and, “The pathway to peace is almost unthinkable to accomplish.” Mr. Romney went on:

You hope for some degree of stability, but you recognize that this is going to remain an unsolved problem — and we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it.

Kicking the ball down the field while professing an interest in an Israeli-Palestinian settlement is precisely what President Obama has been doing for the last several years. The policy of the next administration, whether Mr. Romney’s first or Mr. Obama’s second, will be to uphold this status quo: supporting an unelected Palestinian prime minister and a Palestinian president whose term long ago expired; continuing to prevent the exercise of power by the victors in the last Palestinian national election; negotiating with a set of unelected P.L.O. leaders who cannot credibly claim to represent most Palestinians; prioritizing the funding of Palestinian security forces who arrest their political opponents and prevent peaceful protests against Israeli settlements and military installations; and meekly criticizing Israel’s expanding settlement construction while exercising no leverage in order to thwart it.

These policies will eventually backfire, as they have in other parts of the region where the United States stood against popular aspirations and supported authoritarian regimes. But on these issues, there is precious little daylight between the candidates.

Nathan Thrall is a Jerusalem-based Middle East analyst with the International Crisis Group.

At least Game 7 of the National League Championship Series was a blowout. But if you chose to watch tonight’s debate instead of baseball — hoping, like many of us, for clarity on the next four years of American foreign policy — you were sorely disappointed.

What did we hear? Not a lot. Not a single mention of looming cyberthreats, despite the fact that Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta recently sounded an alarm about America’s vulnerability to a possible “cyber Pearl Harbor.” No mention of Yemen and the growing influence of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which many consider the most significant terrorist threat in the world. Nor was there any discussion of Guantánamo or the future of American detention operations, leaving major questions unanswered about how the United States would handle captured terrorists in the future.

How would each candidate face the considerable challenges of the Afghanistan transition — like propping up the Afghan security forces, trying to negotiate a settlement with the Taliban, or forestalling a full-scale civil war after American and NATO forces depart? Apparently, it’s not a concern. For Mr. Romney, it was simple as saying the Afghans “will be ready by the end of 2014.” Full stop. While President Obama acknowledged in passing that the transition in Afghanistan “has to take place in a responsible fashion,” he quickly changed course and began talking about veterans and jobs in America. Both are critical issues, to be sure. But neither is particularly helpful for those wondering if thousands of American lives lost and billions of dollars spent in Afghanistan will be wasted by a poorly executed transition.

Those concerned with the future of American engagement in the Middle East were likewise frustrated. Regarding the ongoing threat of extremism in the Arab World, Mr. Romney simply suggested a shopping list of grand objectives: economic development, better education, gender equality and rule of law — a plan that sounds an awful lot like nation building. What remained entirely unclear is how Mr. Romney would actually make progress on any of these fronts, particularly in countries of critical concern. Meanwhile, Mr. Obama pointed out that we “cannot just meet these challenges militarily” and quickly mentioned religious minorities and women and encouraging economic development before neatly sidestepping to “nation building here at home.”

Ultimately, tonight’s debate didn’t change many (any?) voters’ opinions about either candidate. And it left national security wonks I know banging their heads against the table, still wondering how the election will affect America’s foreign policies in the years ahead. But at least we’re now certain that the military has fewer bayonets than it did in 1916.

Marisa L. Porges, a former counterterrorism adviser in the Departments of Defense and Treasury, is a fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.