ASHINGTON - Matching the stunning speed of the Yugoslav citizens who burst into and took over their parliament, the issue of US foreign policy has stormed into the presidential campaign after months of being buried as a passing point in speeches.
Propelled by breaking news around the world - the Yugoslavia revolt, Middle East violence, and the up-and-down oil prices - the vice presidential candidates in Thursday night's debate fielded five consecutive foreign policy questions.
Senator Joseph I. Lieberman and Dick Cheney faced queries about their positions on Yugoslavia, military readiness, Middle East peace prospects, Iraq policy, and rising oil prices - showing only a few disagreements on how they would handle the problems in office.
Global experts, though, said the issues may not stay prominent for long during the final month of the campaign - unless there's a major crisis in which American lives are at stake or a foreign development wallops people's pocketbooks.
They believe that foreign affairs will slip into the background because of the similarities of positions of the Democrats and Republicans and because polling shows that Americans care more about prescription drug prices for the elderly than the future of Yugoslavia.
In the middle of the Cold War, polls that asked Americans to rank priorities showed that about 50 percent believed foreign policy to be the most important issue.
The percentage dived to 20 percent to 30 percent in the 1980s, and a few recent polls put national security at 2 percent and foreign policy at around 1 percent.
''Those numbers mean a lot to American politicians,'' said James M. Lindsay, a senior fellow in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution and a former director of global issues and multilateral affairs at the National Security Council in the Clinton administration.
''If you look at what candidates say, they focus inordinately on domestic politics. When they turn to foreign policy, they are long on rhetoric and short on substance,'' he said.
Lindsay and other analysts pointed to Republican Governor George W. Bush's campaign and its handling of national missile defense and criticism of military readiness.
In both cases, Bush and his advisers have declined to give specifics about new programs, saying they would do so after the election.
As for Gore, the last time he focused on foreign policy in a major speech was on April 30 - the dead part of the campaign season - before the International Press Institute in Boston.
''This campaign highlights what I call the new politics of American foreign policy in the post-Cold War era,'' Lindsay said.
''The American public is not engaged in foreign affairs because they say, `Look, we're secure.' They're not making much demands on either candidate to spell out details in foreign affairs.''
But Charles A. Kupchan, a professor of international affairs at Georgetown University, said that even if foreign affairs are not a major part of the campaign, voters are likely to weigh the candidates' abilities to handle a major crisis overseas.
''I think in the bigger picture when people are trying to formulate opinions and make their decisions to vote, those sort of background forces could be important,'' Kupchan said.
''Americans like the president to be presidential, they like America to be a great power that has its way around the world, and all those issues filter into the various opinions of the voters.''
Analysts did predict that events in Yugoslavia could rate daily mention on the campaign trail for as long as events there remain in the news.
Bush, as his running mate noted Thursday night, said in his debate that the United States should get Russia's help in dealing with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic - a diplomatic tactic that the Clinton administration indeed employed effectively this week.
Gore also ''can very well take some credit, but he has to be careful not to take excessive credit'' for the popular revolt in Yugoslavia, Kupchan said.
During Gore's debate with Bush on Tuesday, the vice president was cool to Bush's suggestion of getting Russia involved, prompting Bush to say yesterday as he campaigned in Florida: ''Either [Gore] didn't know what the president was doing or he did know what the president was doing and wasn't willing to share it with the American people.''
Walter Russell Mead, a senior fellow for US foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, said perhaps it is best that the presidential candidates mostly ignore foreign affairs.
''Election campaigns are never the best venues for educating the public,'' Mead said.
''You tend to get demagogic, with misleading statements and highly colored opinions. In some ways, I'm thanking my stars that they are not being demagogues on these issues from one end of the country to the other.''
