Matt Kenyon illustration
© Matt Kenyon

We are in the closing days of the third US presidential election since September 11 2001. Yet the shadow cast by the Twin Towers attacks has barely receded. In the final debate on Monday night, the killing of the US ambassador in the Libyan city of Benghazi is likely to be the most bitter point of contention between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Christopher Stevens and three others died on the 11th anniversary of 9/11. Mr Romney has been trying to make capital out of it ever since.

On Monday night Mr Romney will get what further help, or rope, he needs from Bob Schieffer, the CBS moderator. Mr Schieffer has allocated two-thirds of the debate to the Middle East. Of his six topics, two are devoted to “the new face of terrorism in the Middle East”, which means Benghazi. Libya may thus get as much time as “The rise of China” and “America’s role in the world” put together. The other topics are Israel and Iran, and Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Mr Schieffer’s list highlights 9/11’s continued hold on the American debate. The 2012 election as a whole shows that the US has not yet left the George W. Bush era behind. The two nominees are essentially offering contrasting versions of Mr Bush’s presidency. Mr Romney promises a return to the unilateralism of his first term. Mr Obama will continue with the lighter touch of Mr Bush’s second. It certainly offers a choice. But it also reflects America’s weak appetite to talk about so many other challenges before it.

Between 2001 and 2003, Mr Bush launched two wars and formally adopted the doctrine of pre-emptive war. In his second term, he sidelined Dick Cheney, sacked Donald Rumsfeld and put foreign policy realist Robert Gates in the Pentagon – an appointment renewed by Mr Obama. Both presidents entrusted their respective troop surges to Mr Gates. Debate viewers will be reminded that the war in Afghanistan – now by far America’s longest – has at least two more years to run. It still costs roughly $100bn a year.

But the biggest price tag of 9/11 may well pertain to what has not happened. In 2008 Mr Obama entered the White House promising a clean break with the Bush era and to renew America’s moral authority in the world. He began with a flurry of initiatives, including ordering the closure of Guantánamo Bay within a year, putting terrorists on trial in US civilian courts, ending CIA rendition and banning torture. Apart from the ban on waterboarding, each of Mr Obama’s proclamations ran into the quicksand of post-9/11 politics.

So too did his attempt to kick-start the Arab-Israeli peace process, which Mr Obama also proclaimed in his first week. Partly as a result of that, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has all but endorsed Mr Romney for president.

Mr Obama has also fallen silent on climate change, although he made a fleeting reference to it in his convention speech last month. Ditto on the nuclear-free world initiative that he unveiled in Prague in 2009 and which has been quietly forgotten. The same applies to the new era of co-operation with China – dubbed “G2” – on which Mr Obama had placed such hopes. And so on.

Many of these disappointments were probably unavoidable, and much of Mr Obama’s initial over-promising reflected his then lack of governing experience. Yet US politics has changed remarkably little since 2008. Mr Obama’s foreign policy pitch in 2012 pretty much begins and ends with the killing of Osama bin Laden. In his quest for a second term he is either playing down or omitting most of what would have differentiated him from Mr Bush. So much for a radical break.

In spite of the sharp rise in drone attacks against suspected terrorists overseas, Mr Obama is more vulnerable on terrorism than had been generally supposed. Until three weeks ago, the president retained a crushing lead over Mr Romney on national security. But the killing of bin Laden may no longer be such a game-changer. Mr Obama’s double-digit advantage over Mr Romney has been shaved to about four points since early October. Some polls even show him trailing Mr Romney on foreign policy. One gives Mr Romney a two-point lead on who would have handled Libya better.

Nothing will supplant the economy as the chief driver of what happens on November 6. But here, too, the debate agenda is revealing for what it excludes. The US share of the global economy has fallen by 8 percentage points to 23 per cent since 2001, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Yet US competitiveness is not a topic for discussion. Nothing, it seems, can compete with the 9/11 lens on the world. Russia will not feature in the debate even though Mr Romney has called it America’s “number-one geopolitical foe”. The western hemisphere is also absent, as is Europe, Africa and the rest of Asia.

So much to talk about. Such little time. At a moment of approaching fiscal austerity – or something more dramatic – Mr Obama feels obliged to maintain high US defence spending, while Mr Romney would scale it up sharply. The latter has promised 15 new frigates a year and another 100,000 soldiers. Both have indicated they would rather go to war than resign themselves to containing a nuclear Iran – although few observers take Mr Obama’s language at face value.

Neither candidate will get caught on camera saying anything positive about Mr Bush. Yet neither seems willing or able to transcend the world he left behind.

edward.luce@ft.com

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