WARMING up for last night's foreign-policy debate, I was curious about what the neoconservative crowd was thinking these days, so I went to see what good old Bill Kristol had to say at the Weekly Standard. I got as far as the first half of the first sentence of Mr Kristol's pre-debate piece: "On September 2, 1939, the day after Hitler invaded Poland..." Serious question: does Mr Kristol have any idea how boring the forever-1939 schtick has become? Does he have even the slightest inkling? Or has he, by dint of long repetition, lost the ability to say anything about foreign policy that is not based on the World Book Encyclopedia summary of 1938-39 which he trots out on every occasion, no matter how inappropriate? He's like Uncle Toby, the character in "Tristram Shandy" who turns every conversation back to artillery strategy at the Siege of Namur. I ultimately managed to plough through, though, and it turned out that what Mr Kristol wanted to say was a bit surprising. He wanted Mitt Romney to avoid pressing a hard-line attack on Barack Obama's foreign policy during the debate, "to rise above partisanship and gamesmanship" and "speak for America".

What does this mean? It means speaking in a bipartisan way. It means appealing to the broad American tradition of international leadership, to the actions of Harry Truman as well as those of Ronald Reagan. It means citing Joe Lieberman as well as John McCain, and the Washington Post editorial page as well as The Weekly Standard. It means praising our soldiers and our Marines, our diplomats and our intelligence professionals. It means finding something to praise in the actions of President Obama—perhaps his authorization of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden—and someone to praise among Obama’s appointees—perhaps Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for her tireless travels on behalf of the nation and for stepping forward to take responsibility for the tragic failure to provide security in Benghazi.

For anyone wondering why Mitt Romney avoided drawing any distinctions between his foreign-policy plans and those of Barack Obama last night, this should clear it up. This is the advice he's getting from the Republican Party foreign-policy elite, which remains largely composed of neoconservatives. They clearly realise that, their own preferences notwithstanding, most American voters are not interested in a more confrontational foreign policy that runs the risk of entangling America in further conflict in the Middle East. So they're dialing it down for the remainder of the campaign. Mr Kristol invoked the opening days of the second world war in his piece because his publication is read by conservatives, and if you want to bring a conservative readership along on the project of non-partisanship, your best bet is to drape it in Churchill.

Does this indicate that Mr Romney would, as president, be less confrontational abroad than he sounded in his campaign for the Republican nomination? If he continues to follow Bill Kristol's advice on foreign policy most of the time, I doubt it. We know what Mr Kristol's foreign policy looks like. On Iran: "It’s long since been time for the United States to speak to this regime in the language it understands—force." On Syria: "(T)he United States—working with European allies, Turkey, and other regional partners—should advance a new strategy that uses combined airpower to impose a safe zone in northern Syria." On Afghanistan: "(T)o say we're ending our war on schedule means we're not fighting our war to win." This is the neoconservative foreign-policy prescription. It hasn't changed just because they've recognised that their candidate needs to appear conciliatory and say the word "peace" a lot in order to get elected.

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