BOCA RATON, Florida: US President Barack Obama and his Republican challenger Mitt Romney on Monday (today in Manila) will face off in their final debate of the campaign, with polls showing them dead even in their race for the White House.

The showdown focusing on foreign policy is being held in the critical toss-up state of Florida just 15 days before the election and promises to be among the most-watched 90 minutes of the entire 2012 campaign.

Raising the stakes, a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released on the eve of the duel showed the rivals in a dead heat, with 47 percent each among likely voters.

The president and his Republican rival will no doubt trade blows over security shortcomings in Libya; how to contain Iran; the roiling crisis in Syria; a rising China; and ending the Afghan war.

It will be Romney’s best chance to recover from what are seen as his missteps in criticizing Obama’s handling of the September 11 attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya that left four Americans dead.

Romney will be aiming to use the head-to-head clash to press his broader point that the Libya attack and other anti-American violence in the Middle East are signs that Obama’s foreign policy is “unraveling before our very eyes.”

Romney is a former businessman who appears more comfortable addressing economic problems. He has stumbled at times on international issues, and his foreign tour last summer was widely panned.

But Obama, too, has issues; a Pew Research Center poll shows his advantage on foreign policy shrinking to just four points over Romney, after being up 15 points last month.

Obama’s mission: remind Americans of his successes as commander-in-chief, such as ending the Iraq war and neutralizing Osama bin Laden, while convincing them that his rival is a throwback to the George Bush era who doesn’t have the experience or resolve to steer the nation through a crisis.

With Romney dominating the first face-to-face encounter in Colorado, and Obama widely seen as bouncing back to take the second outside New York City, the stakes for Round 3 are monumental.

US economy
Even with the zeroing in on international affairs, both camps admitted on Sunday that their candidates will seek to draw discussion back to the issue most pressing for voters: the US economy.

“I think the most important thing we can do as a country on our foreign policy is strengthen our economy here at home,” Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago, Obama’s former chief of staff, said on Sunday (Monday in Manila).

Romney has spoken repeatedly about how a strong domestic economy projects US strength and leadership abroad. He and Obama will face questions about crises like Libya, which has remained a front-burner issue some six weeks after the September 11 attack.

Many analysts said that Obama bested Romney on the Libya issue in their testy second debate, when Romney accused the president of delaying a full two weeks before describing the Benghazi attack as terrorism.

Obama shot back that he called it an act of terror on the day after the attack, challenging Romney to “check the transcript” and berating him for trying to make political gains after the attack.

Romney will seek to put pressure on Obama over Iran and its nuclear program, arguing that presidential weakness has emboldened Tehran and that if elected he would work to prevent the Islamic republic from acquiring a nuclear weapons “capability,” a lower threshold than advocated by the White House.