Foreign Policy

Steve Coll, Jamie Zimmerman and Ali Gharib highlight the glaring omissions and surprising moments of the presidential foreign policy debate, and grade the candidates' global talking point. Elizabeth Weingarten hosts.

It took barely half an hour for Barack Obama and Mitt Romney to change the subject of their final debate from foreign to domestic policy. Responding to moderator Bob Schieffer’s question—“What is America’s role in the world?”—the candidates launched into their respective plans for rebuilding the U.S. economy. Obama talked about creating manufacturing jobs; Romney vowed to support entrepreneurs. Then they sparred over the merits of hiring more public school teachers.

Barack Obama didn’t win tonight’s foreign policy debate. Neither did Mitt Romney. George W. Bush did.

Bush won it because the framework for understanding the world that he put in place after Sept. 11 still holds, even though it wildly distorts the world that the next president will actually face.

After the recent unrest at embassies in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and Tunisia and the killing of U.S. ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, there may be mounting pressure in upcoming weeks or months to permanently shut down embassies or rupture diplomatic relations. Already, there have been significant diplomatic staff withdrawals from many of the embassies.

Neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney had much to gain from Monday night’s foreign-policy debate. After four years, the country is familiar and largely comfortable with Obama’s handling of foreign affairs. The president’s principal goal was to remind voters, as early and often as possible, that he is the president who killed Osama bin Laden. Romney’s objective was even simpler: avoid any embarrassing gaffes that could halt his campaign’s momentum and raise doubts about his fitness to be commander-in-chief.

Mitt Romney came to Monday night's debate with a choice.

He could run to the right of President Obama on national security issues and also differentiate himself on such tricky matters as what to do about Syria, or the United States' complicated alliance with Pakistan.

Or he could essentially endorse Obama's aggressive campaign against American enemies such as al Qaeda and the Iranian regime and his administration's approach to knotty problems such as Syria and Afghanistan.

Last chance! On Monday, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney square off on foreign policy. It will be the final debate and President Obama's last major opportunity to convince American voters to give him four more years.

The man charged Wednesday with attempting to blow up the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the latest alleged jihadist to be charged in a law enforcement sting, may or may not have had the capability to create a major terrorist incident. But if his case follows the pattern of other similar sting operations, what is clear is that he faces very long odds in court.

Quazi Mohammad Rezwanual Ahsan Nafis, a 21-year-old Bangladeshi from Queens, is accused of plotting to detonate a 1,000-pound bomb outside the Federal Reserve building in Manhattan.

On Monday, Mitt Romney delivered what his campaign billed as a major foreign policy address, in which he sought to distinguish himself from the man he called the "lead from behind" president.

The speech at the Virginia Military Institute, which largely focused on the Middle East, served as something of a warm-up for the two remaining debates between Romney and Obama to be held later this month, one of which will focus entirely on foreign policy, while the other will deal with both domestic and national security issues.

At some point in the next 200 million years, according to Yale University scientists, the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates will collide at the North Pole. When they are eventually joined by Africa, the singular super-continent will re-emerge, reminiscent of the Pangea that existed hundreds of millions of years ago.