As the saying goes, “Personnel is Policy.” President Trump learned this the hard way, depending heavily on the very Washington, D.C. swamp creatures whose swamp he sought to drain. George W. Bush, having scant foreign policy experience himself, leaned heavily on a stable of neoconservative advisors, who had long pressed for another war with Iraq. What might a Kamala Harris victory in November portend for US foreign policy? Harris’s statements and advisors tell the story.
In 2019, when Kamala Harris was running for President, her campaign website’s foreign policy featured bright spots. Harris stated that, “[a]s president, she’ll work with our allies and local leaders to end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and protracted military engagements in places like Syria.” However, Harris said “she’ll do so responsibly,” which is Washington-speak for delay and cover for a President’s failure to end a war.
Harris clearly postured as a foreign policy progressive, but most policies were establishment to the core. She expressed concerns about the “threat” of “Russian aggression,” wanted to reinvigorate our participation in institutions and alliances like NATO, and stated she would “confront white supremacy by re-establishing the Domestic Terror Intelligence Unit and reversing President Trump’s cuts to programs designed to combat white nationalism.” Ultimately, her foreign policy was bland and undeveloped, as it remains today. Notably, her campaign page was silent on Taiwan.
With few real convictions, her foreign policy will likely repeat the Obama and Biden administrations: she will posture as progressive—occasionally acting as though wielding American power can be detrimental—but largely carry out a left-wing variety of establishment policy, easily swayed by the hawkish foreign policy establishment on most issues. Harris’s Senate Intelligence Committee experience—for which she received “high marks”—bodes ill; here, the intelligence community would have repeatedly exposed Harris to constant fear-mongering.
Her foreign policy advisors’ views also foretell a liberal establishment future. Her national security advisor in the Senate, Halie Soifer, was Samantha’s Power’s policy advisor in the Obama administration. Power was Obama’s US Ambassador to the U.N. and is Administrator of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) under Biden. Power’s most significant book, A Problem from Hell, argued that the US has not done enough to prevent genocide. Power represents a “progressive” foreign policy vision that shows some reticence toward American intervention, but is still Wilsonian at heart, dedicated to globe-spanning American power and “solving big problems.” In other words, progressive establishment foreign policy retains a large degree of good-old American hubris.
That hubris is evident in Harris’s 2019 claim that she would prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, but “without . . . risking an unnecessary war.” Unsurprisingly, details on how Harris would do this were not forthcoming. But this confused witch’s brew of bellicosity and restraint is endemic to progressive foreign policy visions, whether branded as progressive realism, progressive advocacy for American power, a post-liberal-international-order “open world” vision, or some other variant of internally-conflicted establishment liberalism.
Militarily, this variety of progressivism purports to comprehend the lessons of disastrous interventions like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, yet lacks sufficient comprehension or conviction to apply this lesson to future conflicts. It bridges the realist recognition that foreign adventurism is politically toxic, with the progressive hawk’s craving to do-good around the world today. Progressives criticize past administrations while failing to recognize their own hubris. They think that they can repeat the interventionist errors of the past without courting the same disastrous results. Progressive foreign policy is a different brand of the same establishment product, old wine in new bottles.
On the more hawkish end of the spectrum, Harris’s Deputy National Security Advisor, Rebecca Lissner, wrote in 2020 that “an isolationist retrenchment” is bad foreign policy, and rejected the realist notion that nations should have “spheres of dominance.” As such, the US must “oppos[e] the efforts of hostile nations to dominate their regions, subvert the political processes of independent states, and close off vital waterways, airspaces, or information spaces.” Lissner urges merely “reimagining” the “liberal international order,” which seems to merely contemplate marginal tweaks to the existing system purportedly informed by progressive values.
Harris’s current “foreign policy guru,” Phillip H. Gordon, worked in various roles in the Clinton, Obama, and Biden administrations. On the one hand, Gordon is characterized as an Iran dove, with Ted Cruz stating that Gordon advising Harris “would be unspeakably catastrophic” for a Harris administration’s foreign policy. (Gordon championed the Iran nuclear deal, as well as criticized the Trump administration’s assassination of Iran’s Major General Qasem Soleimani as unnecessarily antagonistic). Gordon also questions sanctions, which often harm the people living under sanctions without successfully changing the sanctioned nation’s behavior.
More generally, the media has framed Gordon as “understanding . . . the limits of American power and the need for a much more humble foreign policy than most of those in Biden’s inner circle.” Gordon’s book, Losing the Long Game, highlights regime-change failures, including the failures of the Obama administration’s wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya.
Gordon perhaps goes farther than the prototypical progressive establishment type. For example, according to The Free Press, Gordon argues that not only did we not need to intervene in Syria—unlike many other progressive interventionists and realists—but “that the US would have been better off never calling for the Arab despot’s [Assad’s] removal in the first place.”
But Gordon’s restraint has limits. Alarmingly, those limits include Russia and China. In 2018, in a piece for the Council on Foreign Relations entitled “Containing Russia,” coauthored with Robert D. Blackwill, Gordon argued that we were already in a second Cold War with Russia, which warranted a Cold War-like containment policy. As he put it:
...just as it did during the Cold War, Washington should continue to interact with Moscow, and it should not refrain from practical cooperation or arms-control agreements with Russia whenever such cooperation is in US interests. But Washington also cannot stand by if a foreign adversary not only adopts an agenda of countering US influence throughout the world but also continues to directly strike at the heart of the US political system and society.
According to Gordon and Blackwill, both Presidents Obama and Trump failed to “adequately elevate[] Russia’s intervention in the United States to the national priority that it is, or responded to it in a way sufficient to deter Russia.” “Russia,” they stated, “will need to conclude that it is paying a major price in matters important to it,” which tit-for-tat will fail to do. Additionally, they disparaged President Trump’s “suggest[ion] it would be ‘nice if we could just get along.’” However, they urge, this is a fool’s errand because “[n]o matter how adroit US diplomacy, it is now clear no benign deal is to be had with Putin.”
Among the policy prescriptions Gordon and Blackwill recommended include “additional sanctions.” Apparently, sanctions are good and effective only against true enemies of the U.S., unlike Iran. They also recommended “a full-scale reinvigoration of US. European security Policy,” i.e., maintaining US troop levels, increasing funding, and arming Eastern Europe. Even in 2018, they advocated “[p]rovid[ing] additional defensive support to Ukraine,” though admitting that “Ukraine should not be encouraged to seek a military victory over Russia, which it cannot achieve.” Finally, they recommended withdrawing from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty if Russia fails to “move back into compliance” with the treaty. The Trump Administration would heed this advice, withdrawing from the INF Treaty in 2019.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine, this played out as you might have expected. Gordon has repeatedly touted Harris’s support for aid to Ukraine and condemnation against Russian aggression. Put simply, we can expect more of the same from a future Harris administration in its policy toward Ukraine and Russia.
The same goes for China. While Harris has been less than forthcoming, her statements align well with China hawkishness, though less so on trade. Harris was concerned about Chinese aggression in the South China Sea and emphasized the importance of securing Taiwan, while criticizing President Trump’s trade war with China. (Gordon, too, has spoken favorably “of ending a trade war that has done far more harm than good to American farmers, consumers and taxpayers”). While Harris’s comparative silence on China may provide hope to some, the reality is that hawkishness on Russia equates to hawkishness on China. Every Russia hawk thinks “support for Ukraine helps defend Taiwan.” Harris will be no exception.
What is the end result? A Harris presidency could be modestly more restrained in certain areas, such as the Middle East, compared to President Biden. However, Harris would likely continue the disastrous establishment policies toward Russia and China, which unnecessarily court nuclear war. Real restraint requires recognizing that war and antagonism only bring death and destruction. If Kamala Harris becomes president real restraint, unfortunately, is not in the cards.
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