The public learned a few things watching Thursday’s presidential debate. We learned, for instance, that President Trump actually has an attention span and can avoid yelling and interrupting his debate opponent for 90 minutes. We learned that Joe Biden thinks Trump lives on another planet when the president rattles off statistics about everything from the economy to solar energy.
Unfortunately, voters also learned that the media do a terrible job when it comes to focusing any attention at all on the world outside of the United States. We are so self-absorbed about the daily political intrigue at home that we can’t even bother to acknowledge the thousands of U.S. troops who are deployed in multiple war zones at any given time. Indeed, turning off the TV after the debate, you could forgive the average person for thinking the war in Afghanistan is over, military involvement in Syria was a thing of the past, and that American pilots weren’t launching air and drone strikes in Somalia.
Last week, the Commission on Presidential Debates previewed the topics, and national security was fortunately one of them. This was a welcome respite from what has largely been a campaign about the coronavirus, a slow economic recovery, and the personality traits of the individual candidates. What the commission failed to mention was that the national security portion of the debate would be about 10 minutes long, with not a single second devoted to the numerous conflicts the U.S. military is actually engaged in.
There was no mention of Afghanistan, America’s longest war. Syria and Iraq were no-shows. Iran, a country the U.S. nearly went to war with earlier in the year, appeared only in the context of election interference. Sure, there was some discussion about North Korea, but it was largely hijacked by Trump’s proclamations about how North Korean leader Kim Jong Un didn’t like President Barack Obama.
National security professionals were miffed and rightly so. Will Ruger, who was nominated as the next U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan over the summer, asked a pointed but totally justifiable question: “How have we had almost an entire debate without a question about our wars in the Middle East?” Stephen Wertheim, deputy director of research and policy at the Quincy Institute, was as peeved as Ruger. “It is a scandal, or it should be,” Wertheim tweeted, “that the presidential debate meant to address national security did not mention America’s forever war across the greater Middle East.”
My colleague Benjamin Friedman, who also teaches at George Washington University, listed all of the foreign policy topics that were left by the wayside in tonight’s debate. Frankly, it would be easier to list the ones that were included.
To be honest, it wasn’t a good night for those of us who believe foreign policy has gotten the very short end of the stick during this campaign season. The only thing more depressing than the lack of foreign policy coverage is how the media has enabled it.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.
