Mitt Romney's task in Monday night's foreign policy debate was to demonstrate that he could be a credible commander in chief, prepared to execute American power with more muscle and less compromise than President Obama, but without veering into what Mr. Obama called the "wrong and reckless" policies of the last Republican in the Oval Office, George W. Bush.
But in a combative 90-minute debate that veered from whether the United States could control events in the fractious Middle East to which man has a better chance of forcing Iran's mullahs to surrender their nuclear program without resorting to war, Mr. Romney avoided the more bellicose tone he often struck during the Republican primaries.
While he sometimes pushed back at Mr. Obama, he explicitly said he would not intervene militarily in Syria, remain beyond 2014 in Afghanistan or rush into a confrontation with Iran. He ended up agreeing with the broad outlines of Mr. Obama's approach on the use of drones, and opposed a breach of relations with Pakistan, arguably America's most frustrating ally.
Mr. Romney had a narrower political task on Monday night: to show he was conversant in the subject matter and to reassure a war-weary public that he would not plunge the country into new conflicts.
As he did in his previous two debates with Mr. Obama, he shifted to the middle, and at times he even sounded the nation-building theme the president talked about as a candidate in 2008 and abandoned after he was elected. "We're going to have to do more than just going after leaders and killing bad guys," Mr. Romney argued several times, saying he would provide aid to build up democracies and discourage terrorism — something he rarely stressed before. He frequently talked of bringing about a "peaceful planet."
Yet time and again, the president suggested that managing a world that at once craves and resents American power requires a lot more than martial-sounding declarations about calling in airstrikes or threatening to turn on and off American foreign aid.
And he relentlessly cast Mr. Romney as a man unwilling to recognize how perceptions of American strength have changed. When Mr. Romney complained that the Navy had shrunk to its smallest size since World War I, Mr. Obama dismissed the criticism. He noted that the capabilities of American ships are far beyond what they once were and added, "Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets."
For Mr. Romney, this final debate before the election in two weeks was clearly his weakest. While he seemed familiar with a range of topics, speaking about rebellions in Mali and ticking off the insurgent groups in Pakistan, he also took every opportunity he could to turn back to economic issues at home, his campaign theme. Soon the two men were arguing about domestic job creation and support for education and teachers, until the moderator, Bob Schieffer of CBS News, said with some exasperation, "We all love teachers."
Even when the conversation turned to the intersection of international affairs and economics, Mr. Obama attacked his challenger, contending not only that Mr. Romney's prescription for America's automakers in 2009 would have put Americans out work, but also that it would have strengthened the Chinese.
"We'd be buying cars from China instead of selling cars to China," Mr. Obama argued, before the two men engaged in a now-familiar argument over whether Mr. Romney's call for allowing General Motors to head into bankruptcy, without government investment, would have weakened Detroit.
On most of the specifics they argued about, Mr. Romney had a hard time explaining how he would act differently from Mr. Obama. He said he would not send the American military into Syria, or even attempt a no-fly zone over the county. Though he noted several times that 30,000 people had died in the Syrian uprising, he said: "I don't want to have our military involved in Syria. I don't think there's a necessity to put our military in Syria at this stage."
It was Mr. Obama, oddly enough, who made the case for the use of force, saying he had made the call to hunt down Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya, and noting that Mr. Romney had called that "mission creep" and "mission muddle."
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