n a campaign dominated by domestic issues and personalities, how the candidates would handle the foremost responsibilities vested in the president by the Constitution - to be commander in chief of the armed forces and oversee foreign affairs - has hardly been mentioned.
A commercial here, a flurry in a debate there, a few speeches early-on is about all there has been, and none of it has excited much public interest. The country has drifted through two presidencies and a dozen years since the need to redefine America's role in the post-Cold War world was recognized.
Issues in international relations that will challenge the next president already are simmering: development of antiballistic missile systems that could protect allies like Taiwan, Japan, and Israel but antagonize Russia and China; a drug war in Colombia that could become an El Salvador-style quagmire; continuing erosion of support for sanctions on Iraq.
All are intertwined with the need to redefine why, how, and when the country uses its power, but none of the candidates is saying anything specific in that regard. They simply say America's national interest would be a key to decision-making, and this, say diplomats and other foreign affairs specialists, is a problem.
''The notion of national interest is about as elastic as chewing gum,'' said Stanley Hoffmann, longtime head of Harvard University's center for European studies. ''It's whatever they say it is.''
In foreign affairs, perhaps more than in other realms, Vice President Al Gore would continue the policies of the Clinton administration, while Texas Governor George W. Bush would revert to the Republican internationalist policies that characterized the presidencies of his father and Richard M. Nixon.
Arizona Senator John McCain advocates the more-activist Republican strain of the Reagan years with his rogue-state rollback policy, which endorses aid to insurgencies fighting US enemies. Former New Jersey senator Bill Bradley emphasizes developing the capacity of NATO and other international organizations to act without the involvement of US forces.
Gore and Bush have laid the groundwork for increases in military spending, while McCain and Bradley would hold the line on costs.
Former ambassadors and scholars at a Simmons College conference on global security this week said the candidates' positions regarding deployment and use of US power abroad correspond strongly to their relationships with the Washington power elites.
''Two candidates are deeply in the bubble'' of their party establishments' thinking, ''and two are refreshingly outside of it,'' said Trusten Frank Crigler, who was ambassador to Rwanda during the Carter administration and ambassador to Somalia during the Bush presidency.
''It's like Bush and Gore are shrink-wrapped - it will be more of Bush the First or more of Clinton'' if one of them is elected, he said at the conference. ''McCain and Bradley are prepared to encounter new problems and think about new approaches. ... What we don't need to do is pretend we know solutions'' to the complex ethnic conflicts proliferating in the post-Cold War ''and try to impose them.''
Foreign policy advisers to all four leading candidates said any decision about using American force abroad would depend on the odds of success, whether there are any alternatives, and the if other nations are willing to help.
On a spectrum with traditional, materialist calculations at one end and moral considerations of human suffering at the other, ''George Bush is very much toward the side of the cold, clear-eyed calculation of our national security,'' said Richard L. Armitage, a foreign policy adviser to the Texas governor and a veteran of the last two Republican administrations.
''Nevertheless, values are important,'' Armitage said, and ''interventions to support our values will occasionally occur.''
By far the most cautious of the campaigns is Gore's, which carries the Clinton legacy for better and for worse. The president's first-term record was marred because Clinton was forced to back off of a strident posture toward China adopted during the campaign, and by flawed attempts to improve US positions in Somalia and Bosnia that he inherited.
Leon S. Fuerth, the vice president's national security adviser, said, ''There is going to be a lot of continuity'' from Clinton to Gore. ''People at top have learned. What we learned in Haiti was applied as lessons in Bosnia. What we learned in Bosnia was applied as lessons in Kosovo.''
After years of reduction in military spending, the administration increased defense outlays in the current budget, and Gore has embraced the idea that US forces should be prepared to fight wars on two fronts without assistance.
The Bush camp asserts the military has not had the capacity to wage two major engagements simultaneously for years, but arrives at its rationale for rebuilding forces along traditional lines by only a slightly different route.
''The United States has interests in every part of the globe,'' Armitage said. ''We have to be able to participate anyplace, anytime.''
McCain's focus is much more activist. Randy Scheunemann, the McCain campaign's foreign policy and defense coordinator, said it amounts to a ''21st century version of the Reagan doctrine'' - supporting opponents of dictators like Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic as much as Reagan supported the opponents of communist regimes in the Third World.
Bradley, who early in the primary season spoke about foreign affairs at Tufts University, plans what aides describe as a major speech on the subject in Providence this afternoon.
None of the candidates' differences seem to make too much difference with the electorate. Diplomats, scholars, and partisans agree on some reasons: The United States is at peace; the candidates are not challenging one another on foreign policy; and debate moderators rarely pursue the topic.
Nevetheless, ''many people in the United States have feelings of unease'' that could quickly alter the political debate if a crisis arises, Armitage said. ''Unease about five-year shelters [now being discussed] for the Kosovo troops, unease about the continued bombing of Iraq, unease about an intervention in Haiti that does not seem to have left Haiti in a better situation.
''But it's a general unease,'' he said, ''not a major malady in their minds.''
