In the face of Barack Obama’s aggressive mastery during the third presidential debate, Mitt Romney seemed to have decided it was best just to agree with the president (but with a scowl). Oh, and to sweat a lot.

By Michael Reynolds-Pool/Getty Images.

Just a decade ago, I spent some of the most miserable months of my life covering foreign policy for The New York Times. Miserable not because I saw the wonders of the world, in the company of Secretary of State Colin Powell and a passel of very smart people, but because I could never quite crack the self-protective, jargon-filled code of the confraternity that elevates international politics to a plane higher than the grubby, graphic domestic kind.

So I wasn’t sure whether to feel pity or empathy for Mitt Romney last night, as he struggled to move beyond rote talking points in his last debate with Barack Obama, in Boca Raton. I know too well how it feels to be in Brunei or Bangkok, Cairo or Katmandu, and be uncertain of what to say. Small wonder, halfway through their encounter, that Governor Romney’s face was beaded with the glow of Florida flop-sweat.

But Romney did what all nervous competitors do in such circumstances: He followed the lead of the best-informed person in the room (just as I used to do with my colleagues from The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press, Reuters, and the A.F.P.) and seconded the views of President Obama, whether or not they actually coincided with many of his own past criticisms of the president’s stewardship, on issues from the timing of the American-troop withdrawal from Afghanistan to the elimination of Osama bin Laden (which Romney once famously said he would not move heaven and earth to effect).

All evening long, Obama seemed the clear winner on points, not only by besting Romney on the specifics of foreign policy itself but by gamely turning many answers back to domestic policy.

“If I’m president, America will be very strong,” Romney said, in one of many canned, and thus all-but- meaningless-but-still-sensible-sounding assertions. Asked if he would support the use of drone attacks on terrorists, he said he would use “any and all means necessary,” and boldly added, “It’s widely reported that drones are being used in drone strikes.” Even on one of his supposedly strongest lines of attack—his critique of the Obama administration’s handling of the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya—Romney could only manage to say, “I think we know by now terrorists of some kind” were responsible.