Kamala Harris and Donald Trump – Worlds Apart on Foreign Policy

With the exception of President Joe Biden, Kamala Harris would be the most foreign policy-experienced U.S. president to take office in 35 years if she is elected in November.

That is the assessment of Chatham House, Britain’s widely respected Royal Institute of International Affairs whose century-old global mission is “to help governments and societies build a sustainably secure, prosperous and just world.”

As the child of immigrants from Jamaica and India, Harris grew up in diverse communities and traveled the world with her family from an early age. She prosecuted violent gangs, drug cartels and human traffickers as district attorney in San Francisco and as California’s attorney general. Harris served on the Senate Intelligence and Homeland Security Committees during her four-year stint as a U.S. senator. And as vice president she traveled to 21 countries, met with more than 150 foreign leaders and played a key role in forging the global mission aiding Ukraine since Russia invaded.

In the Middle East, Harris has signaled unwavering support for Israel’s right to defend itself while also voicing concern for the “unacceptable” level of civilian suffering and casualties in Gaza. As the sitting vice president, she has had to toe a diplomatic line drawn by Biden. But her intention is clear that as president she would take a tougher stance against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Israeli hardliner’s retaliation for Hamas extremists’ Oct. 7, 2023, deadly attack has devastated the Palestinian enclave that was home to 2.3 million and inflicted more than 41,000 deaths in Gaza, mostly women and children. Harris, like Biden, pledges support for a two-state solution to bring peace in Israel by creating separate, self-governed entities for Israeli Jews and Palestinians.

There couldn’t be a starker contrast between Democrat Harris’s foreign policy priorities and those of her Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump.

“Israel has a right to defend itself and how it does so matters. What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating,” Harris told reporters after meeting with Netanyahu in July. “We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering, and I will not be silent.”

Trump vows unconditional backing for Netanyahu, urging him to intensify the Gaza operation to “finish the job.” While Biden hasn’t spoken with the Israeli leader since August, Trump claimed in a Fox News interview on Sunday that he received Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago “like two days ago.” Netanyahu’s visit to Trump’s Florida estate was in July.

Since that visit, Netanyahu has resisted international pressure for a ceasefire in Gaza and restraint by Israeli Defense Forces invading and attacking Hezbollah militants in Lebanon. Mediators in the stalled peace talks in the year-old Israeli war have expressed fears that Netanyahu is holding out for a Trump victory in the presidential election to have a freer hand in his war against Palestinians than would be the case if Harris becomes U.S. president.

Harris is a strong advocate of alliances to address global challenges like climate change, nuclear proliferation and threats to the security of fellow democracies posed by dictators and terrorists.

Harris would be unlikely to change much in the Biden administration’s relations with China and countries of the Indo-Pacific. She has met with China’s President Xi Jinping and attended summits of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation alliance and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations with U.S.-allied leaders from Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines. She has spoken of the need to collaborate with China and other Asian states to ensure mutually beneficial trade relations and a proper balance between the risks and rewards of the evolving science of artificial intelligence.

Trump has given every indication that if re-elected president he would resume the “America First” approach he took during his earlier term in the White House. After defeating former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election he pulled the United States out of international alliances including the Paris climate accord and the hard-fought Iran nuclear deal signed by the world’s major powers. His sledgehammer approach to forcing renegotiation of what he deemed “bad deals” failed, leaving the United States on the sidelines of U.N.-led efforts to jointly tackle global problems. He disparages climate change as a “hoax” and the Biden administration initiatives to reduce planet-warming fossil fuel emissions as wasted investments when the United States has vast stores of oil and gas to burn or sell abroad.

Harris has promised continued support for Ukraine in its defiant resistance to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion, an unprovoked aggression that has killed or gravely wounded an estimated 100,000 Ukrainians and at least six time that number of Russians. Ukraine war casualties are monitored by the intelligence arm of the UK Defense Ministry, whose latest update a week ago reported a continuing rise in the number of Russian dead and injured, averaging through the month of September 1,271 each day.

Trump has declared he will immediately end Russia’s war in Ukraine if he is elected. That is a feat that could only be accomplished by forcing Kyiv’s surrender by cutting all U.S. military, monetary and moral support to Ukraine, signaling to Putin that he has a clear path to conquest.

At a rally in Savannah, Ga., three weeks ago Trump praised imperial Russia’s success in conquering foreign lands and its World War II role in defeating Nazi Germany. Wars, he said, “That’s what they do. They fight. And it’s not pleasant.”

Seattle-area Russian and Eastern European academics got an insider’s view of the Ukraine war and its consequences for the wider world last week from Wall Street Journal chief international correspondent Yaroslav Trofimov, a Kyiv-born journalist who has spent 25 years “covering other peoples’ wars.”

“Standing in a street with no cars, wearing a flak jacket and helmet like I was in Afghanistan—it felt like an insult,” Trofimov told a gathering at University of Washington’s Jackson School of International Studies on Thursday. “Ukraine with the help of the United States and Europe is fighting fiercely. Ukraine is fighting to protect the rest of Europe and to prevent autocracy from spreading.”

He echoed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s criticism of U.S.-imposed restraints on Ukraine using donated long-range missiles to strike at bases hundreds of miles inside Russia. Biden administration officials worry that letting Kyiv use U.S.-supplied armaments to take out the weapons and aircraft launching aerial bombardments across Ukraine will cross a red line set by the Kremlin and give Putin a pretext for escalating with the potential use of nuclear weapons.

“The war needs to come to Russia to prompt a just settlement,” Trofimov said. “Russia’s red lines exist only in the minds of Western politicians.”

Biden and Harris have spent much of the nearly four years they’ve been in office cleaning up the international wreckage of Trump’s earlier presidency. They have reassured U.S. allies in NATO and the European Union that the United States can be counted on to come to their defense should Putin or any other ravenous aggressor invade their territory. They have also rescinded most of Trump’s disruptive trade policies that imposed ineffective tariffs on goods from countries, both allied and adversarial, regardless of whether U.S. manufacturers could provide cheaper products of similar quality.

Efforts by the Biden administration to resurrect the Iran nuclear deal have largely failed, due in part to concern in Iran and among our allies that America’s word is only good for the term in office of the president who gives it. Four months after his inauguration in 2017 Trump withdrew U.S. support for the multinational agreement to prevent Iran developing nuclear weapons. He claimed he could renegotiate a better deal than his predecessor had signed to ensure Tehran never obtained those weapons of mass destruction.

The International Atomic Energy Agency had verified throughout the three-year duration of the accord signed by President Barack Obama that Iran was compliant with the agreement’s conditions limiting uranium enrichment to levels needed for peaceful domestic uses. Since Trump scuttled the accord, Iran has moved its uranium enrichment to be within a week or two of weapons-grade propellant, ready for deployment whenever the Tehran regime decides to join the world’s nuclear powers.

Harris as president would continue the efforts at restoring U.S. international engagement, to retain and strengthen NATO, maintain membership and collaboration with Paris climate accord allies and support Israel in its necessary defense of statehood while working to resuscitate the two-state solution that Netanyahu has spent a quarter century undermining.

For the past two years, Harris has been assisted by a veteran foreign policy official in crafting her strategy for how to bring the United States back to its place of positive influence in the world. A former national security advisor to Presidents Bill Clinton and Obama, Philip Gordon would council Harris to continue Biden and other democratic leaders’ policies of restraint in foreign interventions aimed at regime change. When Trump was in office Gordon declared the transatlantic alliance between the United States and Europe “dead” in a compelling and dispiriting essay for Foreign Affairs in 2019. His advice during his time in the Obama administration translated into a short-lived effort to normalize relations with Russia, outreach to the Arab world and strengthening of U.S. alliance with other developed and aspiring democracies.

In the Chatham House analysis issued in July, 59-year-old Harris is hailed as representing “significant generational change” against Trump, who would be 82 at the end of the next presidential term.

“She embraces the globalized outlook one might expect of a daughter of immigrants who spent part of her childhood in Canada,” the Chatham report said. “She will take office with a seasoned team around her. And other than Biden, Americans must go all the way back to George H.W. Bush in 1989 to find a president who would take office with more foreign affairs experience than her.” 

Not that they have a vote in the election but foreign allies overwhelmingly prefer Harris as the next U.S. president. A July poll by the Danish market research institute Megafon found that 85% of Danes wanted Harris to win, versus 8% favoring Trump. A survey by DeutschlandTrend in August found 77% of Germans preferred Harris over 10% for Trump. The gap is narrower in Britain where the right-wing, anti-immigrant Reform Party has significant following but even there Harris had 50% percent to 21% for Trump in a July Ipsos poll.

Trump has his supporters in the autocratic world. Trump fawns in the presence of Putin and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, and he speaks of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban as if he were the leader of a global powerhouse, not an illiberal renegade presiding over the economic laggard of the European Union.

Neither is Trump a lone voice advocating that Ukraine capitulate to Putin’s aggression by ceding Russian-seized territory to the invaders. Russian troops now hold about 20% of Ukraine’s land within its internationally recognized borders. Trump’s acolytes in the U.S. House of Representatives held up $61 billion in aid for Ukraine for more than six months, giving Russia time to seize more territory and bomb Ukraine’s national power grid to the extent that its citizens enter the coming winter with household blackouts of 16 hours each day.

Influential media like Britain’s The Economist news magazine advocate “an urgent change of course” whereby Ukraine recognizes it cannot recover all the territory currently occupied by Russia. Donor fatigue in the West is a growing hindrance to the “just resolution” of the war sought by Zelensky and other former Soviet republics and Warsaw Pact allies who fear Putin’s victory in Ukraine would only embolden him to make further land grabs.

Whether the moral clarity cited by the majority of countries denouncing Russia’s invasion is sustainable depends heavily on which of the polarized foreign policy agendas U.S. voters choose on Nov. 5 in a presidential election where U.S. credibility in the world is on the ballot.