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Mitt Romney and Barack Obama at the first presidential debate in Denver
With just over two weeks until the US presidential election on 6 November, the two candidates faced off in a televised debate one final time, this time over foreign policy. A substantial portion of the discussion focused on US policy in the Middle East, perhaps in response to the unprecedented change the region has experienced over the past four years and the US’s heavy involvement therein. President Obama has been widely declared to have won the debate; the CBS Instant Poll found that 53 percent of registered voters thought Obama had won, compared to 23 percent for Romney and 24 percent feeling it was a tie.
Romney came off fairly well in terms of pure debating technique, “re-interpreting” questions and taking every opportunity to declare. This was helped in part by seemingly inexistent moderating, with both candidates indulging in long digressions into education policy, the auto industry bailouts, and the US budget in a debate that was meant to be about foreign policy. But Romney’s answers seemed to be mostly buzzwords and slogans—or, more strikingly, agreement with the strategy of the Obama administration—and in the end, he sounded hollow and one-note despite his confidence and skill in presenting his answers. President Obama was a less forceful debater, but he managed to consistently attack his opponent’s inconsistency on foreign policy issues. This strategy is unlikely to convince any remaining undecided voters, however: he tried it in the previous two debates, and failed spectacularly in the first.
Mitt Romney: “My strategy’s pretty straightforward, which is to go after the bad guys, to make sure we do our very best to interrupt them, to kill them, to take them out of the picture. But my strategy is broader than that. . . the key that we’re going to have to pursue is a pathway to get the Muslim world to be able to reject extremism on its own.”Given the candidate’s propensity to stray into domestic issues, and the economic crisis in particular, it was striking how little mention was made of either Europe or China—both of which have far more influence on the US economy than the Middle East. (Europe was not mentioned at all, if we disregard Romney’s facetious comments about the US becoming ‘the next Greece’ in the event that his preferred neo-liberal economic policies are not applied.) In the end, 80 percent of debate time focused on US foreign policy in the Middle East.
After repeatedly failing to score points against Obama in previous debates over the current administration’s response to attacks in Benghazi on 11 September 2012 that caused the death of four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, Romney did not mention the incident in response to the question on Libya. Obama seized a question on Libya to demonstrate the success of US-led NATO support in removing the country’s dictator of four decades, Muammar Qadhafi, from power. After glossing over the attacks on the Benghazi embassy, Romney mentioned a rise of extremism in Mali—twice—in what one cynical commentator for the Guardian referred to as a ‘two hundred percent increase in mentions of Mali in US presidential debate history.’
Both parties were expectedly ardent in their support of Israel, and correspondingly tough in their treatment of Iran. One of the governor’s few new concrete positions was suggesting that Iranian President Ahmadinejad should be indicted for incitement under the Genocide Convention, which while legally possible seems unlikely to happen given the political wrangling involved and the generally low status of international law in the US (and especially among the GOP). The president has a notoriously poor relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Romney stated that his good standing with the prime minister could assist the US in articulating a stronger cooperation with Israel should he be elected.
President Obama: “What we need to do with respect to the Middle East is strong, steady leadership, not wrong and reckless leadership that is all over the map.”
Romney made one factual error in the debate: “Syria is Iran’s only ally in the Arab world. It’s their route to the sea,” he declared, apparently failing to recall that Iran has coastline along the Gulf and makes regular threats to obstruct oil being transported to Western markets through its (disputed) territorial waters. However, in the context of his wider argument—that Syria is an Iranian proxy and that US interests lie with supporting the removal of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad—it was a minor gaffe. The Syrian crisis was also one of the few issues discussed where the candidates offered different solutions. “Syrians are going to have to determine their own future,” said the president, stating that a second Obama administration would not arm Syrian rebels. Romney countered that his administration would “make sure they have the arms necessary to defend themselves. We do need to make sure that they don’t have arms that get into the the wrong hands. Those arms could be used to hurt us down the road.”
But in the end, it was clear that both candidates are acutely aware that ordinary US citizens are concerned more with domestic issues, and do not want to entangle resources abroad in expensive “nation-building” projects while so many people remain unemployed at home. Romney made perhaps his biggest step towards the center when he stated that “We don’t want another Iraq. We don’t want another Afghanistan. That’s not the right course for us.” This was a huge change from his initial support for the war in Iraq, and his opposition to ending the war last year. It is also contradicted by the presence of several of George W. Bush’s most hawkish amongst his cadre of advisors. Obama seized this further opportunity to highlight Romney’s famous “flip-flopping” on major issues, but did not articulate any major new ideas—probably given that the Iraq war has officially ended and US troops are set to leave Afghanistan in 2014.
Despite the challenges and near-insults exchanged between the candidates, what is most striking is how similar their policy positions appear to be. Obama often resorted to reiterating the foreign policy of his administration, and Romney (in a huge leap towards the Centre) often agreed. Romney failed to articulate a foreign policy vision that differed from that of President Obama’s first term in any material war—in part, perhaps, because Obama has shown himself to be a hawkish Democrat and any position further to the right would raise fears of new US wars. It is clear that Americans desperately wish to avoid that.