Foreign Policy Comes to the Fore
Jules Witcover

After more than a year of fighting over the pace of economic recovery, the race for the White House comes down Monday night to President Obama's supposedly strong suit, the conduct of foreign policy. But has the deadly terrorist attack on the American embassy in Benghazi leveled the playing field for his final face-to-face showdown with Mitt Romney?

The Romney camp clearly hopes the debate scheduled to focus on America's actions abroad will bring a fuller airing of that fiasco, backing up Romney's allegation that Obama and his administration intentionally misled the American people on the origins of the attack.

Obama replied indignantly to the charge that he or his subordinates would play politics in a matter that killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans there. But the administration's early attribution of the episode to an anti-Islamic video as the trigger, based on first inaccurate intelligence reports, has given Romney a hook for this volatile accusation.

Misspeaking on the cause of the attack is hardly comparable to, for example, George W. Bush's more consequential use of faulty intelligence that took this country to war in Iraq in 2003, with its disastrous aftermath. But that was then and this is now.

Obama was helped in the second debate by Romney's own misspeaking of when the president first described the Benghzi assault as an "act of terror." Also, Romney's instant criticism of the president on a critical foreign policy matter ran counter to the traditional notion that politics is supposed to stop at the water's edge.

Nevertheless, so much apparently is at stake in this final debate that it's unreasonable to expect that Marquis of Queensberry rules will be observed, even in the hands of the designated moderator, Bob Schieffer of CBS News, one the fairest, most retrained and level-headed anchormen in television.

An irony in this late-campaign segue to foreign policy is that it's a pivot from the focus on the economy that was supposed to be Romney's best chance to beat the incumbent.

The death of Osama bin Laden was expected to inoculate Obama from serious criticism on foreign policy, along with his directed end to the American combat role in Iraq in a war that turned so unpopular here at home. It will not be too surprising if the economy will also come up in this last debate, but Obama has ample reason to welcome a broader discussion of his conduct of foreign affairs.

It gives him the chance to talk about how he has reversed the junior Bush's policy of unilateral intervention, which was a deviation from America's longstanding preference for collective action. Bush's "coalition of the willing" in Iraq fooled nobody, and Obama has since then demonstrated the more sensible course of multilateral response.

In the eventual ouster of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya, for example, the United States provided air support only, letting Britain and France take the lead. Critics demeaned this restraint as "leading from behind," but it succeeded without loss of American lives.

Romney has now tried to out-talk Obama on barring nuclear weapons to Iran, on support of Israel, and on arming Syrian rebels in their bloody war against Bashar al-Assad. However, after a decade of U.S. fighting in Afghanistan and nearly as long in Iraq, the American people show no thirst for further foreign interventions, a powerful pushback from Obama if he chooses to air it Monday night.

In some ways, the inordinate emphasis on atmospherics and style over substance in much commentary about this year's campaign debates has tended to diminish what's at stake in these perilous times both at home and abroad. Everybody seems to agree that the negativity has eroded public respect for the process and all the participants.

But as long as 60 million or more Americans keep watching what now has become an institutional part of our quadrennial exercise in self-government, we can hope that sober and wise judgment will prevail on Election Day, despite ample evidence that it doesn't always happen.

 

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Foreign Policy Comes to the Fore | Politics

 

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