A vapid American debate that dodges the real challenges

No matter what the US presidential candidates promise on Monday evening, foreign policy, and US policy in the Middle East in particular, is less important to Americans today than ever.

'Be careful what you wish for," my mother used to say, "because someday you may just get it."

And so I have. After years of bemoaning the absence of foreign policy issues in US presidential campaigns, even during the hyperactive unilateralist madness of the George W Bush administration, my mother's words have come to pass. As we wind our way towards the November 6 presidential election, a too-close-to-call race for the most powerful office in the world may well come down to a televised debate tonight (5am Tuesday morning UAE time) on foreign policy.

Of course, the United States faces some of the most serious challenges in its history at the moment, many of them emanating from abroad. The ability to adjust to the realities since the 2008 financial crisis is the paramount foreign policy challenge of the day, challenging Americans to rethink their role in a world where economic power and political influence are shared among many actors.

This requires careful, long-term planning and frank conversations with friends and foes alike on topics as diverse as the future of global finance, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the use of drones in warfare, the threat of drug-resistant pandemic diseases, the continuing need for leadership in settling territorial disputes in the Middle East, the two Koreas and the South China Sea, and the reform of international institutions that still reflect the status quo of 1945.

I should be ecstatic that a prime-time forum on foreign policy will be watched by millions of Americans.

Yet the prospect of President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney trying to out-duel each other on how the United States should handle the changing world is terrifying.

Start with the president: if the past four years have shown anything about Mr Obama's foreign policy, it is that no "doctrine" rules it; he's a tactician, not a strategist. He reacts to events, sometimes (as in his decision to take out Osama bin Laden) with deft determination, other times (his tacit backing of Bahrain's actions in dealing with protests, and silent acquiescence when Iran smashed its Green Movement in 2010) with a lack of mettle. In a tight re-election campaign, such men throw principle to the wind.

And the challenger, Mr Romney? If anything, he seeks to outdo the president in his advocacy of ideas formulated solely to please certain US constituencies rather than advancing the interests of the country. He has shown little feel for international affairs - his summertime jaunt to Europe and Israel was notable primarily for the offence he gave at each and every stop, saying Palestinians were culturally inferior to Israelis, getting snubbed by Poland's Solidarity movement and accusing Britain of a lack of preparedness for the Olympics.

Sadly, like most political "conversations" in the United States these days, developments overseas are just so many buoys around which to navigate, or opportunities to make the other side look bad.

Consider the likely topics of this clash of foreign-policy titans:

Ÿ There will be a fruitless back-and-forth over which of them is "soft on China", as if the US is in a position to be harsh with the country that covers its deficit spending every year.

Ÿ They will vie with each other to be more pro-Israeli than a Likud party organiser, promising to back Israel come what may, with Palestinians cast as an annoyance if, indeed, they come up at all.

Ÿ There will be the same empty threats cast at Iran. Each, in his own way, has said that Washington must prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. But neither has a creative plan for doing so, and as a result the Israelis and Iranians set the agenda and the world slips closer and closer to accidental conflict.

Ÿ And, of course, there will be great time wasted on the recent violence in Libya. Indeed, the brewing "controversy" over the ugly attack that killed four Americans at the Benghazi consulate in early October has taken on a life of its own. As often in US presidential politics, what appears to be an obvious case of misjudgement (refusing to "harden" the embassy's security force) was exacerbated by bureaucratic incompetence and finally transformed into a scandal when politicians began to dissemble about what actually happened.

Here I feel less guilty being so cynical, for what could be more cynical than elevating whatever it is that happened in Benghazi to the level of a major foreign-policy issue? In a country awash with weapons and struggling to regain its footing after the removal of one of the 20th century's most despicable dictators, trouble was inevitable. Libya today is a dangerous, unpredictable place, like the Lebanon of 1982 or the Somalia of 1993.

Unlike energy policy or financial regulation, foreign policy tends to leave Americans cold. This is not because Americans are ignorant, although some certainly are. The primary reasons that US voters care so little about foreign policy are the enormous size of their country and the distance that exists between their affluent society and the world's trouble spots.

Indeed, even the one great tie that bound the US to the Middle East - oil - is diminishing as a factor. In the short term, Saudi Arabia's role as the sole possessor of a global reserve capacity holds US attention. But this, too, shall pass. The emergence of large Brazilian reserves, Canadian oil sands, the realisation that Venezuela sits above at least as much oil as Saudi Arabia, plus the arrival of technology for extracting "tight oil" from US shale deposits - all of this means that in the medium term, the United States will have far less reason to care what happens in the Middle East.

Michael Moran is director and editor-in-chief of Renaissance Insights at the investment bank Renaissance Capital and the author of The Reckoning: Debt, Democracy, and the Future of American Power