The good news in Monday night's foreign policy debate was that Mitt Romney and Barack Obama basically agreed with one another on almost every issue they discussed.
That's also the bad news.
Their agreement was good news because it meant that viewers came away with an unexpectedly accurate sense of the deep continuities in American foreign policy. The big secret of the Obama administration's approach to national security, which neither party has had a strong incentive to admit, is that the president's first-term policies have mostly been a continuation of policies put in place during George W. Bush's second term, when the Cheneyite maximalism of the immediate post-9/11 era was tempered by a dose of pragmatism.
Obama campaigned in 2008 as a critic of the entire Bush record, first and second term alike. But the president has mostly governed – sometimes by choice, sometimes out of necessity – as a steward of the powers Bush successfully claimed and the war-on-terror architecture that he established. What's more, in his presidency's biggest decisions about the use of force abroad – the Afghan surge, the Libya intervention, the escalated drone campaign (and the "kill list" that accompanies it), the green light on the raid to get Bin Laden – Obama has almost always erred on the side of hawkishness and expanded executive authority.
In the 2012 campaign, Romney has often talked as though this hawkish record doesn't exist, painting the president as a dove and an appeaser at every opportunity. But a closer look suggests that a Romney administration, too, would promise more continuity than change: On the issues that have earned the most press this campaign season — from the Arab Spring to Syria's civil war to the Iranian bomb to our looming withdrawal from Afghanistan — Romney has attacked the president in general terms while remaining deliberately vague about what exactly he would do instead.
So it was healthy for American voters to see this Bush-Obama-Romney overlap crystallized on stage Monday night. An acknowledgment of consensus is always better than a bogus disagreement, and Romney's decision to play up his areas of concord with the president didn't just serve the cause of reassuring swing voters worried by his sometimes hyper-hawkish rhetoric: It served the cause of truth as well.
Just because a consensus exists, though, doesn't mean that the consensus is correct. Americans who watched Monday night's showdown benefited from the relative honesty of the discussion. But they were deprived of a real critique of the incumbent's record, and a real debate about what an alternative approach might look like.
Just as Obama's choices once in office have effectively ratified many of the war-on-terror decisions and tactics that Democrats once criticized, Romney's "me-too" approach on Monday night gave the impression that there should be nothing particularly controversial about, say, the dubiously constitutional way the president took us to war in Libya, or his march-up-the-hill-march-down-the-hill strategy in Afghanistan, or his willingness to claim and then use the power to execute an American citizen without trial.
Likewise, you would never guess from Monday's debate that conservatives as well as liberals and libertarians have raised questions about the wisdom of the president's escalated drone campaign, citing the risk of blowback, the costs to our intelligence-gathering and so on.
More broadly, you would have no sense that there are any alternative grand strategies available to America beyond our current focus on terrorism and the greater Middle East – and, of course, the occasional detour into China-bashing. Some of this tunnel vision reflects the questions that were asked, but neither Romney nor Obama showed any particular interest in changing the subject to Europe or India or Latin America or Southeast Asia. On the evidence of the debate, the world beyond the borders of the United States starts in Mali and ends in Kandahar. Entire continents and major powers might as well not even exist.
Romney's consensus-oriented rhetoric in Boca Raton was clearly designed to distance him from the hard-edged, boots-on-the-ground neoconservatism that his rhetoric (and list of advisers) has sometimes evoked. But the Bush-Obama consensus he embraced has already marginalized many other groups and ideas as well. Obama's policy choices have co-opted or neutered the anti-war and civil libertarian left. Romney's campaign rhetoric has marginalized realists and right-wing libertarians. The result is a landscape where huge swathes of public opinions and major schools of thought are represented only by fringe third party candidates – or else are as invisible as, say, the European currency crisis was in Monday night's debate.
I agree with enough of this consensus to be glad about some of the ways that it constrains our leaders. I'm happy that Obama has proven more ruthless in his approach to terrorism than many expected, and I'm pleased that Romney didn't use Monday night's debate to promise yet another surge in Afghanistan or a Syrian expeditionary force.
But it's a consensus that affords extraordinary powers to the man in the Oval Office – powers that expanded under Obama as they expanded under Bush, and that would probably expand under a potential Romney administration as well.
Every four years, we have an important opportunity to debate the way those powers are being executed – how wisely, how effectively, and yes, how constitutionally. That debate didn't happen on Monday. It's barely happened in this campaign cycle. And whoever wins in November, there is a price to be paid, in lives or liberties lost, for the fact that neither party's candidate particularly wants it to take place.
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