Bush legacy lingers in debate The one thing friends and foes can agree on about George W. Bush is that he has been a principled ex-president, going to great lengths to keep out of the public eye and avoid political controversy since he left office in January 2009. Yet even in his absence, the core ideas and instincts about America's place in the world that Mr Bush articulated after September 11 2001 are still shaping a substantial amount of the discussion about foreign policy in this election. On the face of it, Monday night's presidential debate on foreign policy was another exercise in burying Mr Bush's legacy and the neoconservative ideas of muscular American intervention associated with the former president. If Mitt Romney had one overarching goal in the debate, it was to distance himself as far as possible from the last Republican to occupy the White House, at one stage announcing: "We do not want another Iraq, another Afghanistan." On issue after issue, where Mr Romney has in the past tried to appear more hawkish than President Barack Obama. But he used the final debate to adopt a more moderate posture. He agreed with Mr Obama's opposition to US intervention in Syria, even though some Republican senators are calling for a more robust US response. Mr Romney concurred with the administration's 2014 deadline for ending military operations in Afghanistan, a policy he has tried to criticise in the past. He even talked about gender equality as being a key issue in bringing stability to the Middle East. The change in tone by Mr Romney was both an attempt to come across as presidential and an accurate reading of the mood of a country weary from more than a decade of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. "His performance was not designed to increase the enthusiasm of his conservative base," says Clifford May, president of the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies, a Washington think-tank often associated with neoconservative positions. "But he did not want to allow himself to be portrayed as a trigger-happy hothead" just as former President Lyndon Johnson did to Barry Goldwater in 1964, said Mr May. While in private there was some grumbling in Republican circles about Mr Romney's embrace of the Obama administration's national security record, there were few immediate signs of public dissent. Tonight, Romney seems as fully capable as - probably more capable than - Barack Obama of being the next president. He probably will be," wrote Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard and a leading neoconservative voice, shortly after the debate. Yet the rhetorical rebukes to Mr Bush tell only part of the story. They ignore the way that the foreign policy debate in the US is still framed around the central tenets that Mr Bush emphasised after 9/11 - the threat from Islamist terrorism and the heavy concentration on the Middle East, almost to the exclusion of the rest of the world. America may have little appetite for more interventions in the Muslim world but the Bush-era themes still dominate the conversation. After the killing of Osama bin Laden last year, it seemed to many observers that terrorism would fade as a primary national security preoccupation. "I've devoted 20 years of my life to this problem," Peter Bergen, one of the leading experts on al-Qaeda in Washington, said last week. I feel like a Sovietologist in 1989, and that's a good feeling. Yet, as Monday's debate showed, the subject remains at the centre of American concerns about the world. It explains why Mali - where a group sympathetic to al-Qaeda controls part of the country - received more mentions than the EU, Latin America and Canada combined. It also helps explain why, although Israel has been discussed regularly during the debate and the campaign, the peace process with the Palestinians has been largely ignored. The excessive focus on the greater Middle East means that, in an election largely defined by economic issues, there has been little discussion of international economics - apart from the Ohio-directed barbs about Chinese trade practices. Those China attacks were the only substantive mentions of Asia, even though politicians from both parties agree that US strategy for the region and for dealing with the rise of China will be one of the critical tasks for the next generation of policy makers. Amid all the barbs, Mr Bush might take a certain amount of satisfaction from the fact that foreign policy discussion is still framed in terms he would recognise.