If Vice President Kamala Harris wins November’s election to succeed President Joe Biden she will inherit a war-torn, climate-ravaged, politically divided world still recovering from the destructive “America First” isolationism inflicted by former President Donald Trump.
Harris is being hailed by foreign policy experts from the left, right and center as an advocate of the internationalism that Biden has attempted to revive to provide the U.S. influence necessary to resolve conflicts and divisions ravaging the planet.
It is telling that as the days to the Nov. 5 election tick down that more veterans of the one-term Trump administration are urging fellow conservatives to vote for Harris against their old boss they now describe as a danger to democracy and national security. On Tuesday, more than 200 prominent Republicans of the George W. Bush presidency and the campaigns of Mitt Romney and the late John McCain called on voters to choose Harris and deny Trump a second term.
Dozens of former Trump appointees and allies have dismissed him as a preening narcissist more influenced by the flattery of dictators than the security and intelligence guidance offered by his former chiefs of staff, defense secretaries and national security advisors.
Harris set out her foreign policy goals in her Aug. 22 acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, a four-day whirlwind of joyful warriors energized by a new choice for the world’s most powerful position. Less than a month after Biden ended his campaign for a second term, Harris and her hurry-up offense carried out a convention displaying the big-tent Democratic Party welcoming defectors from the twice-impeached Trump’s chaotic administration.
Much of Harris’s international policy aligns with Biden’s. She is a staunch ally in Ukraine’s valiant defense against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked war that has killed tens of thousands on each side. Some foreign intelligence estimates put Russia’s casualties as high as 500,000.
“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty,” Harris pledged to uproarious applause at the convention finale.
“She has worked with President Zelensky to fight back against Russia. She knows that protecting their democracy protects our democracy as well,” Leon Panetta, a former defense secretary and White House chief of staff for President Bill Clinton and CIA director during the Obama administration, told the packed convention center. “Trump tells tyrants like Putin they can do whatever the hell they want. Kamala Harris tells tyrants the hell you can. Not on my watch.”
Harris has laid out a nuanced position on the war in Gaza, making a distinction between support for Israel’s right to defend itself while condemning excessive violence against Palestinian civilians. She has put distance between backing Israel as an embattled nation and the reckless actions of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s pursuit of total annihilation of Hamas at the cost of more than 40,000 Palestinian lives, the vast majority women and children.
Palestinians have “their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination,” Harris declared, calling the Gaza civilian casualty toll “devastating” and “heartbreaking.”
As vice president she represented the United States at international gatherings such as the Munich Security Conference in February where she denounced the toll of innocent lives in the fight against Hamas as “unacceptable.” Her focus on Palestinian suffering may bridge a rift within the Democratic Party where mostly young students and activists have been protesting in demand of a ceasefire in Gaza to stop the civilian bloodshed. That expression of concern and endorsement of a path to statehood for Palestinians hasn’t detracted from the Biden administration’s commitment to help Israel defend itself after the horrific violence of the Hamas Oct. 7, 2023, attack that killed 1,200 Israelis and took hundreds hostage.
Trump and Netanyahu are seen as mutually devoted to winning their respective battles — Trump the U.S presidency and Netanyahu the war in Gaza — to prevent being sent to prison for corruption and a host of other offenses if they lose power.
With threats of the Middle East war escalating to engulf the whole region, Trump’s scuttling of the Iran nuclear deal in 2018 is revealed as a devastatingly bad decision. French President Emmanuel Macron warned at the time it “would open the Pandora’s box. There could be war.” Since Israeli Defense Forces and Hamas militants have been at war for 10 months, provocations and attacks by other Iran-backed militias have disrupted global shipping and destabilized Palestinian and other Islamic communities beyond Israel in Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq and Syria.
The Iran nuclear deal enacted in 2015 provided some sanctions relief for Iran in exchange for verifiable cessation of the Islamic Republic’s pursuit of nuclear weapons. International Atomic Energy Agency inspections of Iran nuclear facilities reported full compliance at each 90-day interval before Trump followed through on his campaign pledge to withdraw the United States from the agreement that had been negotiated and joined by the world’s most powerful countries—the United States, Britain, Russia, China, France and Germany.
Efforts to revive the nuclear deal failed due to Trump’s opposition, leaving angry Iranian hardliners to resume the uranium enrichment needed to create nuclear weapons. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Friday that Iran’s breakout time – the time needed to produce enough weapons grade material for a nuclear weapon – “is now probably one or two weeks.”
Trump also withdrew the United States from the 2016 Paris climate accord and ratcheted up fossil fuel production, dissuading other major polluters from fulfilling their commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The United States and China account for almost 40% of global emissions among the 174 states and the European Union that are signatories to the accord. The year-on-year, month-on-month flare of record climate disasters provides frequent evidence that ignoring the consequences of a warming planet does nothing to halt the dangerous escalation.
While Harris expressed views supportive of banning natural gas fracking in the United States during her short-lived run for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, she has not revived it in her current run for the White House. That may be more political strategy than weakening conviction as Trump has no environmental protection policy at all in his ill-defined platform, leaving the subject for Harris to define on her own terms.
As with Biden’s approach to China, Harris toes a middle line of holding the Communist leaders of the world’s second-largest economy to account for intellectual property theft and human rights violations while proposing trade restrictions that make economic sense for U.S. producers rather than punitive or mutually destructive tariffs.
Harris’s toughest challenge on foreign policy is likely to be the surge of migrants crossing through the southern border that left thousands each day huddling under bridges and in makeshift camps. Harris was appointed by Biden early in their administration to investigate the causes of the spiraling migration as crime-ridden, gang-controlled countries in Central America and Venezuela drove millions to flee, with or without legitimate claims to asylum. On her first foreign trip as vice president in 2021, Harris told Guatemalans that the U.S. would work to eradicate corruption strangling opportunity and security in their country but urged them in the meantime: “Do not come.”
The numbers have dropped since the Biden administration began earlier this year implementing what it could of the elements of a bipartisan immigration overhaul negotiated over months by conservative Sen. James Lankford (R-OK), his liberal counterpart Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ). The bill was hailed as the strongest measure to address immigration and asylum in three decades before Trump in February ordered his backers in Congress to shoot it down, fearing that resolving the border crisis would be seen as a win for the Biden administration too close to the presidential election.
Harris’s foreign policy positions are seen as reflective of the influence of Philip H. Gordon, her national security adviser and close associate of Biden’s national security chief Jake Sullivan.
“Harris depends heavily on his advice given his deep experience and knowledge of all the players,” the late former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk said in December of Gordon, who has played senior national security roles in the Clinton and Obama administrations before taking Harris into his realm of expertise. (Indyk died in July).
Gordon’s most recent book, Losing the Long Game: The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East (2020), dissects a recurring Beltway Mideast policy that “suffers from the fallacy that there is an external American solution to every problem, even when decades of painful experience suggest that this is not the case.”
Gordon’s views that scrapping the Iran nuclear deal and seeking the overthrow of dictators have been failures of strategy and judgment.
Harris’s articulation of her foreign policy priorities poses a stark contrast with what little Trump has said on issues of national security and America’s place in the world beyond the span of his Make America Great Again followers.
An already long list of former Trump appointees denigrating his character and urging voters to deny him a second term has expanded of late. His first national security advisor, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, excoriates the former president in a just-released book: At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House. In it, the veteran of wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Persian Gulf recalls Oval Office meetings as “exercises in competitive sycophancy” as senior administration officials fawned over Trump’s allegedly brilliant instincts and his “outlandish” suggestions to attack across borders, including bombing suspected drug storehouses in Mexico and to “take out the whole North Korean Army during one of their parades.”
McMaster’s biggest gripe is Trump’s obsession with reports on Russian interference with the 2016 election that put him in the White House, and that he refused to believe Russian President Vladimir Putin “was not and never would be Trump’s friend.”
Former Defense Secretaries James Maddox and Mark Esper have denounced Trump’s abilities as commander-in-chief and lack of interest in security briefings that lasted longer than a few minutes. His former chief of staff Marine Corps Gen. John F. Kelly, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, and National Security Advisor John Bolton have all broken with Trump over a multitude of incidents in which the former president sought to use the military to quell protests or carry out politically motivated actions in contradiction of military policy to remain neutral in political matters.
With 10 weeks remaining until Election Day 2024 more 11th-hour revelations may be forthcoming, if further evidence of the contrast between Harris and Trump is necessary to sway the few voters still undecided or the many newly energized by a choice no longer between two old men that 70% of the population didn’t want.
An insightful analysis of what we have seen so far of Kamala Harris’s foreign policy and what we can expect to see if she’s elected. We have an idea of where she stands on the known threats. And perhaps those provide a prediction of how she will respond to what she can’t foresee, like Bush in 9/11. Was that really almost 23 years ago?
Not a reply, but a cheer: the best analysis I have read of the foreign policy potential of a Harris administration. Only someone like Ms Williams with 30 years of reporting experience knows the difficulty of writing predictive behavior from a less well known Presidential candidate. The nuanced writing is a lesson in: experience counts.
I’m curious about how Tim Walz will shape Harris’ China policy. He’s been there many times as a tourist and English teacher, speaks conversational Chinese (Mandarin?), and loves the people and culture; however, he’s been a sharp critic of the Communist Party’s human-rights record. That’s some good information for Harris to access.
At least Harris will actually read the daily intelligence briefing. Trump never bothered, apparently.