As a recent BBC World Service poll suggested, Barack Obama would cruise to victory if countries ranging from France to Kenya to Canada could vote in the U.S. presidential election. But a new Peace Index poll reveals that Mitt Romney has a sizable advantage in at least one country: Israel.

The survey, which was conducted last week by the Israel Democracy Institute and Tel Aviv University, found that 57 percent of Jewish Israelis felt that it would be preferable for Romney to win the election from the perspective of Israeli interests, while 22 percent said the same about Obama. Seventy percent of self-identified right-wingers, 54 percent of centrists, and 30 percent of left-wingers surveyed expressed support for Romney. Meanwhile, a plurality of Arab Israelis in the poll preferred Obama (45 percent) to Romney (15 percent).

A Peace Index poll over the summer, when Romney traveled to Jerusalem, yielded similar -- if less pronounced -- results, with 40 percent of Jewish Israeli respondents supporting Romney and 19 percent backing Obama on a slightly different question: Which candidate would assign "more importance to defending Israel's national interests?"

In this month's Peace Index poll, which will be released in full on Monday, 69 percent of Israeli Jews said they do not believe the result of the U.S. election will influence the outcome of upcoming Israeli elections, while 51 percent of Israeli Arabs said they think the U.S. race will have an impact on the Israeli contest. I've written before about speculation in the Israeli press that Benjamin Netanyahu could be punished at the polls if Obama wins reelection and bilateral relations suffer because of the Israeli prime minister's aggressive efforts to establish "red lines" for Iran's nuclear program during the U.S. campaign.

One surprising result of the BBC World Service poll last week was that the only country where more respondents favored Romney than Obama was Pakistan, where drone strikes and the Osama bin Laden raid have inflamed anti-American sentiment. But the real story there was that most Pakistani respondents were, well, undecided: a whopping 75 percent had no opinion about the candidates. In Israel, at least among Israeli Jews, the preference for Romney appears to be far more resounding. 

BuzzFeed has called it the "moment where Barack Obama won the debate." MSNBC's Rachel Maddow dubbed it a "political disaster" for Mitt Romney. National Review's Jim Geraghty described it as "one of the most egregious misjudgments of any moderator in the history of presidential debates."

During Tuesday night's presidential debate, moderator Candy Crowley corrected Romney when he pounced on Obama for claiming that he'd cdescribed the deadly attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi as an act of terror. "He did call it an act of terror," Crowley noted to applause and Obama's delight. Romney retorted that it had taken a long time for the administration to describe the assault as a terrorist attack rather than a spontaneous reaction to an inflammatory film.

Within hours, political observers were characterizing the exchange as a pivotal moment in the campaign -- a gaffe for the history books. Romney "was even held accountable by Candy Crowley for not telling the truth about the president acknowledging an act of terror," Senator John Kerry (D-MA) noted. "I think tonight Mitt Romney's campaign fell away."

Political Wire's Taegan Goddard, meanwhile, compared Romney's misstep to Gerald Ford's famous declaration during a 1976 debate with Jimmy Carter that "there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration." Here's Goddard:

[Romney] scored many points. But he lost most of them by not knowing his facts on what President Obama said the morning after the attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya. Obama acted like a president in the exchange while Romney was much less. It was Romney's Gerald Ford moment.

Over at the New York Times, Andrew Rosenthal went a step further, likening Romney not just to Ford but to George H.W. Bush: 

When George H.W. Bush looked at his watch in a 1992 debate with Bill Clinton and Ross Perot and absolutely bungled a question about how the national debt had affected him personally, he cemented the impression that he was out of touch with real Americans' lives.

When Gerald Ford denied in 1976 that there was any "Soviet domination" of Eastern Europe, he cemented the impression that he was out of touch with pretty much everything....

Tonight, Mitt Romney may have had a similar moment, during a back-and-forth about the attack on the Benghazi Consulate.

There's ample reason to be skeptical of these damning assessments, however. For starters, the controversy surrounding the candidate's remarks involves semantics -- act of terror or terrorist attack? -- and won't deter Republicans from continuing to criticize the administration's response to the assault and overall Mideast policy.

What's more, Americans were deeply concerned about the Soviet Union at the time of Gerald Ford's gaffe -- something that can't be said for the public's attitude toward Libya at the moment. In a national survey conducted by the Foreign Policy Initiative in mid-September, just over 2 percent of respondents cited Libya in response to an open-ended question about the country that presents the most danger to American national security interests.

Rosenthal concedes that Romney's Libya remarks "likely won't have the same impact as Mr. Ford's Soviet domination gaffe or Mr. Bush's watch episode, which "may have cost them their elections." But even here, there's not much evidence that the Ford and Bush blunders had any such effect.

A 2008 Gallup study, for example, found that the 1992 presidential debates didn't affect the standing of Bush or challenger Bill Clinton, though they may have boosted support for third-party candidate Ross Perot. The polling firm concluded that the 1976 presidential debates may have made the race "more competitive" but did not change the contest's "fundamentals," since Carter was leading before the debates. "After Ford's statement about the lack of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe -- widely perceived as a gaffe - Carter's lead expanded slightly to 6 points and remained at about that level after the third and final debate," Gallup noted.

The emerging Romney-equals-Ford narrative, in other words, doesn't really work. Still, Ford's experience does offer some cautionary tales for Romney. Ford campaign staffer Doug Bailey once recalled that while the Eastern Europe gaffe didn't sway the election, it did halt the steady gains Ford had been making against Carter in the polls:

Our own polling data would suggest that really in the end we did not lose any people because of the Eastern European statement. That, by and large, people were shocked by it; dumbfounded by it, and some people close to that issue were offended by it.... But over time, almost all of those people came back to us. What it did cost us was momentum because we were just caught dead in our tracks for a week to ten days. And the progress of closing those gaps with about a half point per day stopped, at the same rate, after that ten day gap where everything just stood still.

And news outlets may have played a significant role in creating that dynamic that Bailey described. As the political scientist John Sides recently noted, debate viewers didn't mention the Eastern Europe remarks in a poll conducted on the night of the Ford-Carter matchup. "Only for viewers interviewed the next day did this gaffe become more salient -- evidence that the public needed the news media to point out that Ford had made a mistake," Sides observes. Indeed, the president was subsequently assailed by headlines such as "The Blooper Heard Round the World" and "Jerry Ford Drops a Brick." 

These days, the media's judgment is near-instantaneous. If the press hype over the Libya exchange keeps building, it could be bad news for Mitt-mentum.

Rep. Paul Ryan asserted last night that if defense cuts mandated as part of a bipartisan budget deal go through, "our Navy will be "the smallest it has been since before World War I."

This echoes an even more dire warning on the Romney campaign's website:  "The U.S. Navy has only 284 ships today, on track to hit the lowest level since 1916. Given current trends, the number will decline, and the additional contemplated cuts will cause it to decline even further."

Fact-checkers are dinging Ryan for the statement, noting that ship numbers have gone below 284 several times in the 20th century, but in his defense, he's only echoing a warning by Obama's own defense secretary. Leon Panetta wrote in a Nov., 2011 letter to Sen. John Mccain that,  “Rough estimates suggest after ten years of these cuts, we would have the smallest ground force since 1940, the smallest number of ships since 1915, and the smallest Air Force in its history.”

Whether or not the cuts would actually be this dire, measuring naval strength in terms of number of ships is a bit misleading. Here are the numbers from the 1915 fleet of 231 total ships, according to the U.S. Navy website: 

• 32 battleships
• 30 cruisers
• 3 monitors
• 57 destroyers
• 18 torpedo boats
• 37 submarines
• 17 steel gunboats
• 26 auxilliaries
• 11 gunboats

Here's the current fleet:

• 11 aircraft carriers
• 22 cruisers
• 61 destroyers
• 26 frigates
• 2 littoral combat ships
• 53 submarines
• 14 ballistic missile submarines
• 4 cruise missile submarines
• 14 mine warfare vessels
• 31 amphibious vessels
• 47 auxilliary vessels

Even after a 19 percent cut, I think I'd take the navy with the aircraft carriers and the nuclear subs in a fight. 

Moreover, the pre-World War I line gives the impression that the number of ships has steadily increased since that time and is in danger of staring to decline. The U.S. fleet actually hit its high point at the end of World War II with 6,768 ships. In the post-war era, it hit its high with 1,122 ships in 1953 and has been steadily declining ever since. 

This isn't because of spending cuts, it's because of changes in military priorities. As Naval analyst and FP contributor Michael Peck points out:

In 1916, the largest navy in the world belonged to Great Britain (the U.S. devised plans for war with Britain as late as the 1930s), while Germany and France built powerful fleets. Fears of a German invasion of New York were improbable, if not utterly fantastic, but in a pre-nuclear weapon, pre-smart weapon age, the size of a navy really mattered.

There's certainly a legitimate case to be made that the U.S. should reinvest in Naval power as part of a shift in priorities to the Asia-Pacific region. (See Douglas Ollivant for the counterargument.) But the Defense Department and the Romney campaign's framing of this issue in terms of number of boats in the water is probably not the best starting point for the conversation.

One of Mitt Romney's biggest laugh lines in last night's debate was a promise to cut funding for PBS, essentially vowing to fire debate moderator Jim Lehrer of the PBS Newshour as well as America's favorite freakishly tall, ambiguously speciesed bird: 

I’m sorry, Jim. I’m going to stop the subsidy to PBS. I’m going to stop other things. I like PBS. I love Big Bird. I actually like you too. But I’m not going to -- I’m not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for it

PBS and NPR are popular rhetorical targets for conservatives, both for their perceived liberal bias and the fact that Americans think they pay a lot more for them than they actually do. According to a 2011 poll, 40 percent of Americans think the Corporation for Public Broadcasting receives 1-5 percent of the federal budget. 30 percent believe it receives 5 percent or more. The number, at the time, was closer to .00014 percent. 

It's worth putting this in international context as well. A 2011 report by Rodney Benson and Matthew Powers of NYU’s Department of Media, Culture and Communication, compared U.S. funding for public broadcasting to 14 other developed countries. This chart shows the results:

Keep in mind that the number for the United States here includes state and local funding. The federal appropriation for the CPB -- which, it bears repeating, does not pay for the majority of local or national public broadcasting -- for fiscal year 2013 is $445 million, less than every country on the list except for Ireland. It's also less than the more than $2 billion the BBC recently cut from its budget -- a reduction considered a severe blow to programming.

The report also found that U.S. per capita spending on public broadcasting is around $4, compared to  $30 to $134 for the other countries on the list. And if you think that $4 is still too much for a service few Americans take advantage of, consider that significantly more Americans tune in to NP's Morning Edition and All Things Considered than the nightly newscasts on NBC, CBS, and ABC. 

This is not to say that the U.S. should emulate these other countries. American readers of Haruki Murakami's  novel 1Q84 were probably somewhat confused by a character who works as an NHK subscription fee collector, going door to door to collect payments for Japan's completely state-funded broadcaster. Annoying as they are, pledge drives are quite a bit less intrusive.

And beloved as the singing baby crocodile Schnappi may be by children throughout Europe, even the most devoted PBS viewers are probably fine with the U.S. not spending $10 billion on public broadcasting like Germany -- Europe's top spender -- does. 

But given how the world's largest economy stacks up to its peers when it comes to public broadcasting spending, maybe it's time to give Big Bird a break. 

In their effort to court undecided voters in industrial swing states like Ohio, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have been going to great lengths to demonstrate their toughness on China, hurling attack ad after attack ad at one another.

Romney has pledged to label China a currency manipulator on his first day in office and promised to balance the budget by asking whether each federal program is so important that it's worth borrowing money from China to finance it. Obama, availing himself of the power that comes with already being in office, announced a World Trade Organization complaint against China during a campaign stop in Ohio. Cracking down on China's unfair trade practices is a loaded issue -- encompassing jobs, the economy, U.S. foreign policy, and American power -- and it may very well come up during tonight's presidential debate.

So who's making the better case? A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, conducted between Sept. 26-30, indicates that the advantage goes to Romney. When asked who would do a better job "dealing with the economic challenges we face from China," 45 percent of registered voters selected Romney while 37 percent selected Obama (the poll also shows Romney slashing Obama's foreign-policy edge by more than half, from 47-32 in July to 46-40). The NBC/WSJ survey hasn't asked the China question before, but a Bloomberg poll of likely voters, conducted between Sept. 21-24, showed Obama and Romney tied at 43 percent when it came to who would do the best job of "dealing with China on trade" (50 percent of respondents in that survey were skeptical of Romney's pledge to designate China as a currency manipulator). If Romney has indeed opened up a lead on Obama on China, that would be a significant development.

Still, there are some caveats to these numbers. Democratic pollster Fred Yang pointed out on MSNBC today that Republicans in past elections have enjoyed even greater advantages on China. And while Romney has narrowed the gap with Obama in swing states such as Florida and Virginia, he's still far behind the president in Ohio -- a state where the Republican candidate's message on China should have particular resonance (indeed, a recent Zogby poll commissioned, fittingly, by Death by China Productions found that likely voters in Ohio trust Romney more than Obama to crack down on unfair Chinese trade practices). If Romney is in fact winning the China argument, it's not yet clear that the achievement will translate into electoral success.

Even so, Obama would probably like to have that eight-point lead on China. After all, all he got for his tough line on Beijing is a lousy (if legally shaky) lawsuit.

I think we can add Hugo Chavez to the list of Obama endorsements that Ohioans won't be seeing in the president's campaign ads: 

"If I were American, I'd vote for Obama," Chavez said in a televised interview that aired Sunday.

The Venezuelan leader called Obama "a good guy" and said if the U.S. president were a Venezuelan, "I think ... he'd vote for Chavez."

Not surprisingly, Romney supporters are gleefully publicizing the endorsement.

No other leaders have have been quite as blatant in picking a candidate in the U.S. election. After all, they're going to have to deal with whoever gets elected and generally duck the question when asked. (See Hamid Karzai's diplomatic answer to Wolf Blitzer: " It's for the American people to decide their president. I like them both and have worked well with both.") But a number of other leaders have dropped some hints about who they'd rather see in the White House in November. 

Probably leaning Obama:

Francois Hollande: The French president was not exactly subtle when asked about the U.S. election in New York last week. "I'm careful to say nothing because you can imagine if a Socialist were to support one of the two candidates that might be to his detriment," he said. He then quipped: : “So I suppose I should endorse Mitt Romney. But I won’t.”

Hollande may be a socialist, but Obama fandom seems to cut accross party lines in France. Nicolas Sarkozy set a precedent for this sort of thing, when he essentially endorsed Obama in 2008.  He also said of Obama's mideast peace efforts in March, "President Obama, who is a very great president, won't take the initiative before he's re-elected -- and I hope he will be."

David Cameron: Conservatives on either side of the pond hoping for Thatcher-Reagan II if Romney is elected might be disappointed. From all the signals we've gotten, Cameron seems to be an Obama man. Visiting the United States in March, Cameron praised the president for his  “strength, moral authority, and wisdom" as well as his "strong and beautiful words." The British tabloids had a field day over Cameron's "fawning" after taking in a basketball game with the president and U.S. conservatives complained about Camerons"unprecedented" Republican leaders while in Washington. Then came the GOP candidate's visit to London and the series of gaffes that came to be known as "Romneyshambles." Cameron, not surprisingly, differed with Romney's doubts about whether Britain could successfully come together to "celebrate the Olympic moment," saying, "We'll show the world we've not only come together as a United Kingdom but are extremely good at welcoming people from across the world." (London mayor Boris Johnson was a lot more blunt.)

Vladimir Putin: Putin was the only foreign leader mentioned by name in Romney's convention speech, so it makes sense that he takes the U.S. race a bit personally. The Russian president suggested in an interview with the satellite network RT that Obama would probably be easier to work with than the candidate who has described his country as America's "number one gepolitical foe." “Is it possible to find a solution to the problem, if current President Obama is re-elected for a second term? Theoretically, yes,”Putin said. He continued: "My feeling is that he is a very honest man, and that he sincerely wants to make many good changes. But can he do it? Will they let him do it?”

He has also paid a backhanded compliment to Romney: “I’m grateful to him for formulating his stance so clearly because he has once again proven the correctness of our approach to missile defense problems... The most important thing for us is that even if he doesn’t win now, he or a person with similar views may come to power in four years. We must take that into consideration while dealing with security issues for a long perspective.”

Probably leaning Romney:

Benjamin Netanyahu: Romney has made his support for Netanyahu, whom he has known since the 1970s, a centerpiece of his campaign. Anonymous sources close to Netanyahu say would prefer to see Romney in the White House. As Romney notes in his now infamous hidden camera fundraising speech, some of his campaign consultants also worked for Netanyahu and the two share a number of major donors as well. All the same, Netanyahu has denied that his recent comments asserting that Obama has no "moral right" to prevent Israel from attacking Iran were not meant to undermind the adminsitration. "What's guiding me is not the election in the United States but the centrifuges in Iran,"he recently told an Israeli newspaper. This hasn't really satisfied his American critics. 

Donald Tusk/Lech Walesa: As recently as 2011, despite past disagreements over issues like the planned missile defense system in Poland, Tusk told Obama  “We feel that you are one of us” during a visit to Poland. But this May, Tusk responded with rare vitriol to a reference made by the president to "Polish death camps" -- as opposed to Nazi death camps located in Poland -- during a White House ceremony. Tusk said the remarks smacked of " ignorance, lack of knowledge, bad intentions" and rejected the White House's explanation that the president has simply "misspoke." Tusk met with Romney during the GOP candidate's trip to Poland in July but hasn't said anything that can be construed as an endorsement of either side.

Former Polish President and anticommunist icon Lech Walesa was not so subtle, telling Romney, “I wish you to be successful because this success is needed to the United States, of course, but to Europe and the rest of the world, too." Walesa had refused to meet with Obama in 2011. Romney has made confronting Russia a centerpiece of his foreign policy and has accused Obama of abandoning Poland in the name of the "reset" with the Kremlin. Though feelings toward the U.S. haven't really changed much in Poland in recent years. 

Leaning Robot:

Fidel Castro:Back in 2008, Castro called Obama  "more intelligent, refined, and even-handed" than John McCain. But this time around, he has argued that a robot would do a better job preventing "a war that would end the life of our species". (Jokes about his personality aside, Castro's no fan of Mitt Romney. He says Republicans have "more nuclear arms on their backs than ideas for peace in their heads.") Really, he just seems excited about the robot idea, writing,  "I'm sure 90 percent of voting Americans, especially Hispanics, blacks, and the growing number of impoverished middle class, would vote for the robot."

Am I missing any endorsements or near endorsements? Write them in the comments. 

The foreign-policy results of the new Bloomberg National Poll haven't gotten much attention yet, but the survey contains some bad news for the Obama campaign. According to the poll, Mitt Romney has a 48-42 advantage over Barack Obama on the question of which candidate would be tougher on terrorism. Romney, in other words, has encroached on one of Obama's signature strengths.

What makes this result so surprising is that the president has consistently trounced Romney when it comes to counterterrorism. A Fox News poll earlier this month found that 49 percent of respondents trusted Obama to do a better job than Romney in protecting the United States from terrorist attacks, compared with 41 percent who put their faith in the Republican candidate. The president had a 51-40 advantage on handling terrorism in an ABC News/Washington Post poll around the same time, and a 50-35 edge on carrying out the war on terror in an Ipsos/Reuters poll in August. The Democrats' rare national-security muscle was on full display at their convention, where speakers boasted about the administration's successful raid against Osama bin Laden and targeted killings of al Qaeda leaders.  

The Bloomberg poll contains other grim findings for Obama -- such as declining approval of the president's diplomacy and a neck-and-neck battle between Obama and Romney on flashpoint campaign issues such as energy independence, Chinese trade practices, relations with Israel, and Iran's nuclear program (61 percent of respondents were skeptical about Obama's pledge to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon). There are also bright spots for the president, like healthy skepticism about Romney's promise to designate China a currency manipulator and Obama's continued advantage over Romney on the question of which candidate would be better suited to handle a Mideast crisis.

Significantly, Bloomberg's survey, which was conducted from Sept. 21-24, is one of the first polls to come out since the wave of anti-American protests in the Middle East. The key question: Is Romney's terrorism advantage an anomaly, or a sign that Obama is more vulnerable on national security after the unrest in the Middle East and the administration's shifting account of the deadly attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi?

Given that a separate poll this weeks shows Obama besting Romney on national security among likely voters in swing states, it may be too early to answer that question.

In his 60 Minutes interview on Sunday night, Mitt Romney offered an interesting response to Scott Pelley's question about what sacrifices he would ask the American people to make in his effort to balance the budget. He argued that those sacrifices would depend on the extent to which he is willing to go hat in hand to China, the largest foreign holder of U.S. debt. 

I'm going to look at every federal program and I'll ask this question, "Is this so -- program so critical it's worth borrowing money from China to pay for it?" And if it doesn't pass that test, I'm going to eliminate the program because we just can't afford to keep spending more money than we take in. This is, this is something which is not just bad economics. I think it's immoral.

Romney didn't specify exactly how he'd determine whether a federal program passes the China sniff test, but the line, which the Republican candidate hasn't used much yet on the campaign trail, is attractive for several reasons. For one thing, it draws a straight line between two top issues for Republicans: the swelling national debt and a perceived loss of America's geopolitical power. As Paul Ryan declared during a PowerPoint presentation on the debt over the weekend, "We are now relying on other governments to basically cash-flow our government. And when you rely on other countries to lend you their money to run your country, you lose your sovereignty."

The line also plays into Romney's larger argument that Obama has been weak on China and failed to stop Beijing from "cheating" by manipulating its currency and engaging in unfair trade practices -- an argument the campaign hopes will play well in swing states like Ohio, which depends on the auto industry (during a campaign stop in Ohio last week, Obama announced a WTO complaint against China over its subsidies for exports of cars and auto parts).

In the latest installment of the Obama-Romney ad wars on China, the Romney campaign released an ad today accusing China of "stealing American ideas and technology" and Obama of failing to take action against Beijing (Obama has filed several trade cases against China, though he's never labeled the country a currency manipulator) -- just as Romney and Ryan begin a bus tour in Ohio (the Obama campaign retorted that Romney's 2011 tax returns included Chinese investments).

Given that Romney has repeatedly called the Chinese cheaters and pledged to label Beijing a currency manipulator on his first day in office, I'm getting the sense that federal programs would have to have a whole lot going for them to pass Romney's litmus test for balancing the budget.

President Obama hasn't mentioned the unpopular Libyan intervention much on the campaign trail, making only a passing reference to the successful operation in his convention speech last week (Senator John Kerry was the only speaker who addressed the conflict at any length). 

Late on Tuesday, however, Vanity Fair released a much-anticipated profile of Obama by journalist Michael Lewis -- one that relies on unprecedented White House access to illuminate the process by which the president decided to intervene in Libya, interwoven with the story of a U.S. airman whose plane crashed in the Libyan desert during the operation. Obama comes across as a decisive, thoughtful, and principled commander-in-chief -- the kind of portrait the Obama campaign would want to see in the press during the final months of the election.

The article, however, is getting drowned out today by criticisms of the president's Libya policy in the wake of an assault on the U.S. consulate in the eastern city of Benghazi that killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three staffers. While many Republicans and Democrats are calling for unity in the face of the attack and the simultaneous storming of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, some on the right are criticizing the Obama administration instead.

On Wednesday, Mitt Romney, who has criticized Obama in the past for bungling the intervention and neglecting Libya's political transition, declared that "American leadership is necessary to ensure that events in the region don't spin out of control." On Facebook, Sarah Palin added, "these countries represent [Obama's] much touted 'Arab Spring.' How's that Arab Spring working out for us now?"

In his Vanity Fair profile, Lewis sheds light on Obama's approach to the Arab Spring in a vivid description of a Situation Room discussion in mid-March, as Muammar al-Qaddafi's troops advanced toward Benghazi. Believing that a no-fly zone would prove ineffective, Obama peppered his national security team with questions about what kind of damage Qaddafi could inflict on the civilian population, before upending the meeting's agenda altogether:

The Pentagon then presented the president with two options: establish a no-fly zone or do nothing at all. The idea was that the people in the meeting would debate the merits of each, but Obama surprised the room by rejecting the premise of the meeting. "He instantly went off the road map," recalls one eyewitness. "He asked, ‘Would a no-fly zone do anything to stop the scenario we just heard?'" After it became clear that it would not, Obama said, "I want to hear from some of the other folks in the room."

Obama then proceeded to call on every single person for his views, including the most junior people. "What was a little unusual," Obama admits, "is that I went to people who were not at the table. Because I am trying to get an argument that is not being made." The argument he had wanted to hear was the case for a more nuanced intervention -- and a detailing of the more subtle costs to American interests of allowing the mass slaughter of Libyan civilians. His desire to hear the case raises the obvious question: Why didn't he just make it himself? "It's the Heisenberg principle," he says. "Me asking the question changes the answer. And it also protects my decision-­making." 

Lewis writes that it was mainly these junior staffers -- some of whom were haunted by America's failure to stop the Rwandan genocide -- who argued for intervention in Libya, adding that Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, who would be tasked with drafting a Libya speech, "said in the meeting that he preferred to explain why the United States had prevented a massacre over why it hadn't."

Connecting Obama's Libya decision to the theory of "just wars" that the president articulated in accepting his Nobel Peace Prize, Lewis argues that Obama ultimately bucked his Cabinet's advice in pushing for a U.N. resolution authorizing "all necessary measures" to protect Libyan civilians -- and that he may have done so in part because the American public did not feel strongly about how the United States should respond to the Libyan crisis:

Once again he polled the people in the room for their views. Of the principals only [U.N. Ambassador] Susan Rice (enthusiastically) and [Secretary of State] Hil­lary Clinton (who would have settled for a no-fly zone) had the view that any sort of intervention made sense. "How are we going to explain to the American people why we're in Libya," asked [White House Chief of Staff] William Daley, according to one of those pres­ent. "And Daley had a point: who gives a shit about Libya?"

From the president's point of view there was a certain benefit in the indifference of the American public to whatever was happening in Libya. It enabled him to do, at least for a moment, pretty much whatever he wanted to do. Libya was the hole in the White House lawn.

Obama made his decision: push for the U.N resolution and effectively invade another Arab country. Of the choice not to intervene he says, "That's not who we are," by which he means that's not who I am. The decision was extraordinarily personal. "No one in the Cabinet was for it," says one witness. "There was no constituency for doing what he did."

In connecting Obama's decision-making process back to the experience of the downed Air Force pilot, Lewis points out that the administration's narrative on Libya would have looked very different had the navigator not been rescued:

Then the story would no longer have been a complex tale ignored by the American public about how the United States had forged a broad international coalition to help people who claimed to share our values rid themselves of a tyrant.

The story would have become a much simpler one, ripe for exploitation by his foes: how a president elected to extract us from a war in one Arab country got Americans killed in another.

Will the narrative on America's involvement in Libya change after this week's tragic events?

In defending Mitt Romney's national security credentials to BuzzFeed on Tuesday, foreign policy advisor Robert O'Brien cited a rather curious data point -- the French Romney picked up while serving as a Mormon missionary in France in the late 1960s:

"The Governor is an extraordinarily well-traveled businessman, he lived overseas as a young man, he speaks French, he understands the world and he's written extensively about foreign policy and national security," he continued. "The idea that he's this naive guy at 65 years old, given his experience heading the Olympic Winter Games and everything else, I just don't think that's going to play."

Take that Mr. President, with your "passable" Bahasa and middling Spanish! Barack Obama, after all, admitted that he lacked foreign language skills on the campaign trail in 2008, remarking that "it's embarrassing when Europeans come over here, they all speak English, they speak French, they speak German. And then we go over to Europe and all we can say is merci beaucoup, right?" Wrong. Not if you're Mitt Romney. 

What's particularly striking about O'Brien's comment is that Newt Gingrich, who speaks a little French himself, attacked this very trait in the Republican primary, pointing out that Romney spoke French while promoting the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics in 2002. In the campaign ad below, the narrator observes that "just like [former Democratic presidential nominee] John Kerry, he speaks French too." 

Now, it seems, the campaign is turning Romney's French skills into an asset-- a testament to the candidate's wordliness. Over the weekend, Romney's running mate Paul Ryan also defended his record on foreign policy -- in a line that sounded eerily similar to Dan Quayle's assertion during the 1988 vice-presidential debate that he had "as much experience in the Congress as Jack Kennedy did when he sought the presidency." Here's what Ryan had to say:

I have more foreign policy experience coming into this job than President Obama did coming into his....

I've been in Congress for 14 years. He was in the Senate for far, far less time that that. I voted -- you know, Norah, I voted to send men and women to war. I've been to Iraq and Afghanistan. I've met with our troops to get their perspectives. I've been to the funerals. I've talked to the widows. I've talked to the wives, the moms and dads. That's something. That matters.

I take this very seriously. I've done doing this for 14 years.

So far, the Obama campaign hasn't borrowed a page from Lloyd Bentsen, Quayle's challenger in 1988, who famously told the Republican senator, "I served with Jack Kennedy, I knew Jack Kennedy, Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you are no Jack Kennedy."

During national security night at the Democratic convention on Thursday evening, we heard a lot about how Barack Obama has navigated international affairs. But what do those actions look like in practice? Here's a quick rundown of some of the numbers underlying his foreign policy over the past four years:

Reported drone strikes* in Pakistan: 282

Estimated militant casualities in Pakistani drone strikes (range): 1,349 - 2,330

Estimated civilian** casualties in Pakistani drone strikes (range): 37 - 52

Numbers of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay in 2009: 242

Number of prisoners at Guantánamo in 2012: 168

Troops withdrawn from Iraq: 142,000

U.S. casualties in Iraq: 264

Size of Afghan troop surge: 33,000

U.S. casualties in Afghanistan: 1,484

Number of nuclear warheads U.S. can deploy in 7 years under New START: 1,550

Free trade agreements: 3

Countries visited by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: 108

Confidence in Obama in Europe (2009 - 2012): 86% - 80%

Confidence in Obama in Muslim countries (2009 - 2012): 33% - 24%

Confidence in Obama in Russia (2009 - 2012): 37% - 36%

Confidence in Obama in China (2009 - 2012): 62% - 38% 

* Drone strikes are tallied starting from Obama's inauguration on Jan. 20, 2009.

** These estimates do not include victims who were not identified in media reports as either militants or civilians.

Republicans may be rallying around Mitt Romney at the GOP convention in Tampa, but over in Russia the GOP presidential candidate is getting a far chillier reception.

Romney has been tough on Moscow during the campaign, calling the New START nuclear arms reduction deal Obama's "worst foreign-policy mistake," labeling Russia America's "number one geopolitical foe," and characterizing Russian President Vladimir Putin as a man bent on rebuilding the "Soviet empire." His advisors have echoed these sentiments, as has the Republican platform, which cites "Russian activism" as one of the "gravest threats to our national security" and alludes to a "hot mic" moment between Obama and former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev as evidence that the president wants to "appease Russia" on missile defense. It's remarkably aggressive rhetoric -- albeit from a party whose most revered figure famously referred to Russia as an "evil empire."

The Russian press was already up in arms about Romney's trip to Poland earlier this month (money quote from the state-funded RT: "the Mormon from Michigan has been time-warped back to the Soviet era, behind an Iron Curtain and inside of a 1950s black-and-white television set"). But the outrage has resurfaced in recent days, as the GOP released its platform and opened its convention. 

In an article entitled "Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan promise Russia Republican hell," for example, Pravda, which has been known to engage in colorful outbursts against Romney, declares that the GOP ticket supports the "radicalization of the country's foreign policies" -- particularly those concerning Russia. "According to the Republican Party," the newspaper scoffs, the "Russian administration is authoritarian and does not respect human rights.... They refer to Russia as a traditional rival of the United States along with North Korea, Iran and China.... To crown it all, Mitt Romney expressed his willingness to be the godfather of the Russian opposition and organize the training for opposition activists at American educational centers."

Pravda isn't alone. At the state-owned news agency RIA-Novosti, journalist Fyodor Lukyanov observes that "no matter how much you may dislike Russia and its authorities, the time when it was America's enemy number one is long past." In a blistering column for the state-run radio station Voice of Russia, presenter John Robles warns that Romney and his "cold war thinking" will signal the death knell of Obama's "reset" with Russia, and he doesn't stop there:

To say that Romney and his Republican brethren are a danger to world peace would be an understatement. Their "ultra-conservative" views and stances on a number of issues will bring about another era of neo-conservative subjugation for the American people and the world and their backward thinking and confrontational posturing will destroy much of the delicate compromise that has kept the world stable for the last four years....

To listen to Romney and his Republican like and read how they plan to "curb Moscow", "confront Russia", surround Russia with missiles and the like is to get the impression that he is talking about some small third world nation they can just obliterate at any moment and not the largest country on the planet and a formidable nuclear power.

Another Voice of Russia article -- entitled "Republicans choose presidential candidate and external enemies" -- includes an interview with an expert identified as Valey Korovin, the director of the Center for Political Expertise. "It is a fact that Russia and the US are geopolitical opponents," Korovin is quoted as saying. "This logic is based on the confrontation of two kinds of civilizations, and the Republicans openly speak about it. The Democrats think the same but use more roundabout expressions and adhere to the use of soft, smart force. As for Romney, he is only a presidential candidate, so he does not care about beating around the bush and bluntly calls a spade a spade."

The intense focus on Romney's posture toward Russia isn't limited to government-controlled news outlets, either. In a report today on the GOP convention, for instance, the privately owned daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta leads with, "Russia is once again among America's enemies." The business daily Vedomosti highlights a recent Citi report suggesting that a Romney victory in November could batter the Russian stock market and explores what a GOP win would signify more generally for the "reset" and U.S.-Russian relations.

Of course, we don't know whether a President Romney would actually follow through on his Russia rhetoric. As Peter Baker points out in the New York Times today, "the pragmatic dealmaker in Mr. Romney may find that even if he does not want to sign a nuclear arms treaty with Moscow as Mr. Obama did, it is useful to be able to move supplies through Russian territory to Afghanistan."

For now, at least, Romney may want to soak up the moment in Tampa -- and avoid picking up any Russian newspapers.

ABC news reports on one hell of a bad optics moment in Florida -- a party for top Romney fundraisers held on board a 150-foot yacht flying a Cayman Islands flag:

The event, attended by no more than 50 people, along with Romney relatives, including older brother Scott, appeared on no public calendars. ABC News obtained a schedule of the Romney campaign's "Victory Council" and waited dockside to speak with members.

"It was a really nice event. These are good supporters," said billionaire Wilbur Ross, an energy industry executive.

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell was scheduled to speak.

Registered in the Caymans, and flying a version of the Caymans' "civil ensign" or merchant flag, the Cracker Bay has an impressive art collection and can seat 30 for dinner.

The Cracker Bay is owned by Gary Morse, developer of the Villages retirement community. Companies controlled by Morse gave nearly $1 million to the pro-Romney Restore Our Future superPAC.

Romney has, of course, attracted some unwanted attention for his holdings in investment funds based in the Caymans. I wrote in January about the advantages of setting up a corporation in the Caymans, but it turns out the British protectorate a pretty good place to register your boat as well. A 2009 article in the Cayman Financial Review explained: 

Although it is generally recommended to use a Cayman Islands vehicle for ownership purposes, it is, in fact, possible for any corporate body to own a Cayman Islands registered yacht or ship either by appointing a representative person or registering as a foreign company under Part IX of the Cayman Islands Companies Law. This allows owners the flexibility to use a foreign corporate vehicle where there are taxation benefits or other reasons for doing so. Using a corporate body to own a vessel has the important benefit of limiting the liability of the owner if a collision or other event incurring liability should occur. However, in practice, usually a new Cayman Islands company limited by shares is incorporated to own each vessel as this is generally simpler administratively and less likely to result in delay.

The Cayman Islands is renowned as a leading offshore jurisdiction with a tax neutral environment. It has a solid political, legal and fiscal environment with a stable parliamentary democracy since 1831. There are no income, capital gains or other taxes imposed by the Cayman Islands on vessel owning companies. With the Privy Council in England being the ultimate court of appeal, the CISR operates within a stable British based legal system which is a compelling reason to choose the CISR for the registration of vessels and any associated loan financing and security.

While there are no restrictions on the nationality of the owner or crew, ships flying the Union Jack-ed flag of the Caymans are entitled to the protection of the British Navy. According to the Cayman Islands Chamber of Commerce, "About 20% of the world's yachts over 50m were registered in the Cayman Islands by 1999."

We've already taken a look at the 10 most divisive foreign-policy issues in the 2012 Republican platform, which will be publicly released shortly at the GOP convention in Tampa.

But there's one passage that has flown under the radar so far. Take a close look at the draft platform that Politico discovered on the Republican National Committee's  website on Friday, and you'll see that the Republican party arguably lavishes more praise on India than on any country mentioned in the document except Israel and Taiwan. The plan reads: 

We welcome a stronger relationship with the world's largest democracy, India, both economic and cultural, as well as in terms of national security. We hereby affirm and declare that India is our geopolitical ally and a strategic trading partner. We encourage India to permit greater foreign investment and trade. We urge protection for adherents of all India's religions. Both as Republicans and as Americans, we note with pride the contributions to this country that are being made by our fellow citizens of Indian ancestry. 

The passage particularly stands out when compared with the more businesslike language employed in the GOP's 2008 platform (the 2008 Democratic platform, for its part, praised India as a "natural strategic all[y]"):

We welcome America's new relationship with India, including the U.S.-India Civil Nuclear Accord. Our common security concerns and shared commitment to political freedom and representative government can be the foundation for an enduring partnership.

Why the change in wording? According to the Indian news portal Rediff, Gopal T.K. Krishna, an Indian-American convention delegate from the battleground state of Iowa, worked with GOP staffer Neil Bradley to craft the "unprecedented" platform language.

Krishna initially sent Bradley a 282-word proposal that included an affirmation of the "special relationship" between the two countries, a call for the "free movement of intellectuals" between India and the United States, a reflection on the recent shooting at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, a pledge to help India establish nuclear power plants, and an endorsement of bilateral trade, including the import of "beef, pork, corn, soybeans and wheat" from the States (rather detailed language for a statement of party principles). Bradley, Rediff explains, got back to him with a counteroffer:

Bradley then got back to Krishna saying, "I wanted to raise three potential issues. Immigration is being handled by another subcmte so I worry about including immigration specific language here. The specificity of the trade language could also give rise to each of our country specific sections getting caught up in discussions about emphasising some exports over others."

"Finally, I worry about addressing the Wisconsin shooting here and the possibility that we inadvertently do not address the other recent shootings elsewhere," he said. "I took the liberty of addressing these items while attempting to incorporate your points into style being used for the larger draft. Do you think this might work?" 

Krishna then submitted three amendments to this draft which included the all-important language that "we hereby affirm and declare that India is our geopolitical ally and a strategic trading partner."

Not only does the passage highlight the give-and-take behind the compromise language we'll see in the final platform this week, but it also highlights the growing importance of Indian-Americans as a political bloc. A record number of Indian-Americans competed for U.S. House seats in 2010, and Indian-American leaders such as South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley and California Attorney General Kamala Harris will speak at the Republican and Democratic conventions, respectively. As the Times of India explains, Indian-Americans, who overwhelmingly support Barack Obama, wield more political influence than their numbers might suggest:

Assuming a higher turnout than the usual 40% or so for the general population, only around 500,000 Indian-Americans are expected to vote nationwide in the November election, and in no state or district are they in sufficiently high numbers to influence the outcome.

But what they lack in numbers they contribute in some measure in money and activism. No other ethnic group outside white, African-Americans, and Latinos - including Chinese-American and Filipino-Americans who are numerically larger groups than Indians - have as many political heavyweights.

The Rediff article touches on this very point:

Krishna had informed Bradley that "if the whole platform contains only bland language, it would be disappointing to myself and others like me, who are looking for courageous commitments, faithful friendships and specific statements from the campaign," and added, 'We hope our trips to Tampa will not turn out to be a total waste."

Krishna may have already suffered a setback now that Bobby Jindal, Louisiana's Indian-American governor, has announced that he won't be speaking at the convention as planned so that he can focus on preparing for Tropical Storm Isaac. But if the language Krishna crafted makes it into the final platform, flying to Tampa will have been well worth the effort.