THE Republican Party candidate, Bob Dole, has tried hard to make foreign policy an issue in this election but without success. The problem for him is that his differences with President Clinton in this area are not really significant.
Both men come from the "internationalist" wings of their parties and have successfully resisted pressures from the "isolationists". Thus, Mr Dole supported the President's controversial decision to send 20,000 US troops to Bosnia while many Republicans opposed it.
The President had to push through ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the new GATT agreement on world trade against powerful forces in the Democratic Party such as the labour unions. Both agreements had been, largely negotiated by the previous Republican administration under President George Bush.
But for a time during this election campaign, Mr Dole tried to portray President Clinton as too "inexperienced" in foreign affairs compared with himself with his second World War service and over 30 years in Congress. Mr Dole accused the President of having only a "photo op" foreign, policy last month as first the Iraqi army incursion into the Kurdish region caught the US administration off guard and then the outbreak of violence in Gaza and the Left Bank seemed to threaten the Israeli Palestine accords signed at the White House two years ago.
In both cases, however, President Clinton quickly recovered the initiative by launching Cruise missile strikes against Iraq and by convening a Mid East Summit at the White House. The result was that Mr Dole was unable to damage the President on the foreign affairs front during their two public debates.
Richard Haas, a former White House official under President Bush and now director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution, sums up the Dole problem. "The differences are of degree rather than of kind, and in an election campaign differences of degree tend to get lost. The world is more or less stable and the American people are not tuned in."
Thus, on NATO expansion in Eastern Europe, President Clinton has declared that the first step should be taken in 1999. Mr Dole favours 1998 for the entry of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. This is hardly an exciting issue.
In the Middle East, Mr Dole has sponsored legislation to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and to move the US embassy there. Mr Clinton says that, the status of Jerusalem should be negotiated between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
Mr Dole also criticised the President for having unwisely revealed his support for Shimon Peres in the Israeli election earlier this year and thus risked alienating the winner, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Concerning Russia, Mr Dole has accused Mr Clinton of misguided romanticism" towards President Yeltsin and of the danger of putting all the US eggs in the one basket the way President Bush did with Mikhail Gorbachev.
But these charges have had little effect on the American electorate which seems satisfied with the President's conduct of foreign policy. The blunders early in his first term over Somalia, Bosnia and Haiti are largely forgotten and while the breakdown of the IRA ceasefire has taken the gloss off his involvement in the Northern Ireland peace process, Mr Clinton cannot be faulted for not trying. Likewise, the strain in British relations over the granting of a visa to Sinn Fein president, Gerry Adams, has long been mended even if Mr Dole and some Republicans have tried to revive it in recent speeches criticising the visa.
On relations with Europe and the EU, Mr Dole says he would act tougher than Mr Clinton on various trade disputes such as the controversial Helms Burton law which penalises foreign companies which invest in Cuba. Mr Clinton was reluctant to sign the law because of its contradiction with the free trade principles which he strongly favours but he did so to protect his flank during the election campaign.
He has, however, postponed signing the clause which would allow lawsuits to be taken against foreign companies. With the election out of the way, he would probably try to maintain a flexible approach on Helms Burton while seeking a compromise with the EU.
There has been virtually no debate on national defence policy during the election campaign. Again the differences on defence between Mr Clinton and Mr Dole do not seem significant. Both favour roughly the same spending of $1.6 trillion on defence between now and 2002.
So try as be may. Mr Dole is unable to get home a wounding blow on the President's foreign policy agenda. Mr Clinton has learned a lot in his first four years about the US being the "indispensable nation", to use his own phrase.