Josh Barro, Columnist

Foreign Policy Debate Omits Most of the Globe

October 23, 2012 at 4:01 AM UTC

Josh Barro is the lead writer for the Ticker, Bloomberg View's blog on economics, finance and politics. His primary areas of interest include tax and fiscal policy, state and local government, and planning and land use. Previously, Barro was a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a commercial real estate banker at Wells Fargo. He holds a bachelor's degree in psychology from Harvard and lives in Queens, New York.

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Mitt Romney was in the odd position tonight of arguing that President BarackObama’s foreign policy is a failure, while advocating a substantially similarone. Given the impossibility of that task, it’s no surprise the presidentsoundly won tonight’s debate, according to CBS News's instant poll.

From Libya to Afghanistan to China, Romney sketched out positions virtuallyindistinguishable from the president’s. In some cases, that meant abandoning hispast positions, most notably by endorsing the 2014 deadline for Afghanistanwithdrawal that he previously opposed.