Donald Trump might have won last night’s Republican debate by default. And the only reason is that the other presidential contenders completely failed to fill the GOP’s missing middle on foreign policy and national security.

Those issues don’t mean the same thing as they did during the last presidential election. This is why Mitt Romney has felt largely vindicated on international matters, but only in a way that feels vaguely beside the point. It’s not just war and diplomacy any more: Counterterrorism and traditional war, security and surveillance, and immigration and guns are now a single political entity oozing across the campaign trail.

And the only candidate to capitalize on it is Donald Trump, whose seemingly catchall xenophobia is actually a stalling tactic, a mask for complete ignorance about how to restore a U.S.-led global order that instills basic confidence in a supermajority of Americans.

It’s not that candidates aren’t trying. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio spent much of last night contrasting each other’s security credentials. But Rubio, trying to make Cruz look weak, stayed too Orwellian on surveillance, while Cruz, casting Rubio as a junior varsity neocon, stayed too Jacksonian on bombing campaigns.