Nonetheless, a parallel debate has raged about whether the Israeli Army is losing face and deterrent power in the region.
But a parallel debate has played out in the Situation Room of the White House, time and again.
While the policy issue was always whether to extend the lease, the parallel debate over park service science moved to the forefront in recent years.
By criminalizing the denial of genocide in Armenia, France followed the examples of Switzerland and Slovenia and helped sharpen a parallel debate in Israel.
Over the past decade, on a far smaller scale, the country's military and intelligence leadership have gone through a parallel debate about how to use the Predator drone.
A parallel debate must also occur about how the government should be involved, going forward, in fulfilling the companies' original mission: to ensure that underserved groups have access to mortgages and that low-income housing needs are met.
While European leaders have been scrambling to come up with a plan to stop migrants getting on boats bound for Greece, a parallel debate has been raging about reforming the EU's defunct asylum rules.
A parallel debate continues between rich countries like the United States that want to acquire artifacts of ancient civilizations, and poor countries like Egypt that have belatedly understood how much of their cultural patrimony is leaving their shores.
There has been a parallel debate between American officials who have met with the Syrian opposition over the past two weeks to discuss the basic parameters of the strike.
It is not obvious that his latest batch of ideas will prove a stronger umbrella against the political weather.In any case, more eyes and ears are trained on the parallel debate about public spending.
And as the parallel debate about sinking A-level standards wars on, the "harder" subjects may be a better barometer of a candidate's worth than the actual grade they get; perhaps at some stage, the "softer," media-studies type subjects will even be denied the status of A-level.
