THE final presidential debate in the US was the first real opportunity to assess Gov Mitt Romney’s likely foreign policy if he is elected president in November. With the race tightening, the possibility of a Romney presidency is very real but because the US electorate is more focused on domestic matters, little is known about the kind of worldview the presidential aspirant has and what his administration’s foreign policy would be like. Surprisingly, on Afghanistan and Pakistan, Mr Romney came across as measured and reasonable-sounding. In fact, there was little to separate the policies of President Obama from that of a putative President Romney. The presidential contender embraced the Obama administration’s 2014 withdrawal deadline in Afghanistan; endorsed the policy to go after Al Qaeda aggressively, including the use of drones; and berated neither Afghanistan nor Pakistan. When asked by the moderator if it was time for the US to divorce Pakistan, Mr Romney responded: “No, it’s not time to divorce a nation on earth that has a hundred nuclear weapons and is on the way to double that at some point, a nation that has serious threats from terrorist groups.” The bottom line: Pakistan’s stability is of deep concern for the US but that does not translate into a policy of isolation or containment with devastating consequences for Pakistan’s positive interconnectedness with the outside world.

Of course, a presidential debate on foreign policy does not make for a properly fleshed-out policy. Both Mr Obama — whose approach to Afghanistan and Pakistan is, for all the talk of clarity and purposefulness, racked by contradictions and internal squabbling — and Mr Romney were sparse on details. Conditioning aid, not cutting Pakistan loose, not isolating Pakistan — none of that really articulates either a vision or the nuts and bolts of policy. If Mr Romney does win the election two weeks from now, he is expected to pick his foreign and national-security policy teams from among the ranks of neocons and hardliners. So ‘Moderate Mitt’ could just be a temporary phenomenon, one designed to tick the commander-in-chief box for an electorate not very interested in the outside world.