Presidential candidates’ ideas basically the same

Monday marked the final presidential debate and the countdown has begun for the race to the White House. For those that missed the debate Monday night, it was about foreign policy, a subject Obama was thought to have had the advantage on, until the Benghazi attack happened.

If you went into this debate looking for stark differences, you most likely left disappointed.

Take for example the differences between Obama and Romney on how they would deal with Syria. Obama said they are currently trying to coordinate resistance fighters, ensure rebels who like the U.S. are getting weapons and help, and trying to get allies in the region like Turkey and Israel to help.

Romney said his plan was really different, because he would try and get our allies in the region to work with us to get the rebels coordinated and give them weaponry to fight with. Or, in non-political terms, pretty much the same thing.

This seemed to follow in the majority of things—they both have the same plans on how to deal with Iran, economic sanctions and keeping war on the table, the same desire to work with Israel, and they both seem to have the same idea on how to deal with the new democracies in the Middle East—give them aid to ensure they continue to grow and thus become more secular in their actions.

The only difference seemed to come in trying to do the tried and true boogeymen tactics that only a challenger can pull off. That means saying our military is weak and that Russia/China is a serious threat.

Once you are in office you can’t really talk like that because the fact is that the U.S. spends more on our military than any other country (more than the other top 10 militaries combined) and we are a part of NATO, making any attack on us a suicide attempt.

But raising up the specter of a China and saying our military is weak always plays well and is done nearly every year, so little can actually be made of it. What it all comes down to is that both sides agree on the basics of what the U.S. should be doing, and the real fight rests on their differences on domestic issues.