Foreign policy and controversial statements by the Republican candidate were at the forefront of the first and only televised debate between the US vice presidential candidates.
Republican Indiana Governor Mike Pence and Democrat Senator for Virginia Tim Kaine locked horns in a heated debate in Farmville, Virginia, as they defended their respective running mates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the race to the White House.
Surprisingly, Kaine adopted a more aggressive tone while Pence was calmer, perhaps in a bid to compensate for Trump's polemical style.
The debate was divided into nine segments lasting ten minutes each and began with the issue of foreign policy, where billionaire Trump's links with Russia and Hillary Clinton's role at the forefront of US diplomacy took centrestage.
Pence argued that Iraq had been overrun by Islamic State because of Clinton's failure to renegotiate the presence of US forces in the country while she was Secretary of State between 2009 and 2013.
He said Clinton's tenure under Barack Obama's administration was the reason that large swathes of the world, particularly in the Middle East, were now "literally spinning out of control".
"The situation we're watching hour by hour in Syria today is the result of the weak foreign policy that Hillary Clinton helped lead in this administration and create," he said.
However, his subsequent reference to Russia's growing heavy-handedness led Kaine to interrupt with a counter-attack on Trump's affinities with Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying: "You guys love Russia. You both have said Vladimir Putin is a better leader than the president".
He said the Trump campaign management team had been fired over "shadowy connections with pro-Putin forces".
"Vladimir Putin has run his economy into the ground. He persecutes LGBT folks and journalists. If you don't know the difference between dictatorship and leadership, then you have got to go back to a fifth-grade civics class," he said.
On Syrian refugees, Pence said both he and Trump proposed to suspend the program admitting them into the country, and prohibit immigration from areas of the world linked to terrorism.
Kaine said the Democrats would uphold immigration laws and vet refugees "based on whether they're dangerous or not", and recalled Trump's anti-Mexican remarks in which he termed them rapists and criminals.
The calmer tone adopted by Pence, his strategy of avoiding justifying Trump's statements and broaching the issues from another viewpoint, led most analysts and major US media outlet polls to declare him the winner of the debate, though by a narrow margin.
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