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Kamala Harris Has Been Much More Involved in Foreign Policy Than We Realize [1]
['Fred Kaplan']
Date: 2024-08-06 09:30:00+00:00
What does Kamala Harris know about foreign policy? More than that, what has she done as vice president in an administration that’s brimming with foreign-policy heavyweights, not least President Joe Biden himself, who has spent his entire political career—nearly half a century—immersed in global politics?
It’s a legitimate question. But it turns out she knows, and has actively been involved in, a lot more than has been reported during her three and a half years in office.
The White House press office has not served as her most avid publicist. Spokesmen now reel off some statistics—she has visited 21 countries on 17 foreign trips, met with more than 150 leaders, and led the U.S. delegation at three Munich Security Conferences—but this doesn’t mean much. Did she shake hands and read a speech, or did she engage in substantive diplomacy?
Some of her trips amounted to rote bits of protocol, but according to several knowledgeable sources, some of them among her entourage but also a number of independent close observers, quite a few of these foreign visits broke ground and even made impact.
And though most of the positions that she has formed on foreign policy match those of Biden’s (news reports frequently say that there’s “no space between them”), her slant is distinctive enough in some respects that the policies of a Harris presidency—on climate, on human rights, and in areas such as Africa and the Middle East—could be quite different.
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One crucial fact: According to several officials, Harris has attended almost every National Security Council meeting and, more important still, almost every President’s Daily Brief, during which a senior intelligence officer lays out, both in writing and in an oral presentation, the threats and other developments affecting U.S. interests across the world. Biden receives four or five PDBs a week. These are not passive exercises; they often last an hour or more, with Biden, Harris, and other officials asking follow-up questions; sometimes the president calls in senior Cabinet secretaries or military advisers to discuss these issues at still greater length.
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Even if Harris had remained quiet at these meetings, her mere presence would have exposed her to more information—to a fuller picture of the world in its broadest dimensions and its most granular detail—than any newly elected president has ever had, coming in to office, in more than half a century.
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And in fact, several officials say, Harris has actively engaged in these meetings. Nancy McEldowney, her national security adviser for the first year and a half of the Biden–Harris term, says Harris has been “a leading voice in the discussions during the briefings as well as subsequent deliberations both in the Oval [Office] and the [Situation Room] that focused on our responses to the intelligence. She has engaged on every issue and every part of the world.”
Other officials, speaking on background, confirm this account and say that this has remained the case in the two years since McEldowney left.
In February 2022, when the PDB revealed new, highly reliable intelligence that Russian President Vladimir Putin was about to invade Ukraine, officials who were present say that it was Harris who suggested that the intel be shown to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a face-to-face meeting—then made the trip to do so herself. One official recalls, “This was some of the most detailed intelligence sharing, outside of intelligence channels, that I have been party to. And her presentation of it, along with options of what we could do about it, was compelling.” Harris has since met with Zelensky five more times.
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A few months earlier, U.S.–French relations were on the verge of rupturing because the Biden administration sold a nuclear-powered submarine to Australia, thus preempting a submarine deal that Australia had signed with France. Harris proposed a face-to-face meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron, made the trip, and smoothed over the tensions. (The press coverage of the trip focused more on her spending $500 on cookware at E. Dehillerin, a leading kitchen-supply store.)
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She also held crucial meetings with Philippines President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. around the time that he was moving back into America’s orbit and away from China’s, and she helped coordinate the renewed diplomacy between Marcos and Japan.
Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, who has observed Harris in public speeches and behind the scenes at several international forums, told me, “She’s smart and high-powered. She’s not a foreign-policy wonk, but there’s no question she has played an active role on a bunch of foreign-policy issues.” Asked if she seems capable of having a lengthy, high-level conversation with a fellow world leader or someone who is a “foreign-policy wonk,” Bremmer replied, “Absolutely.”
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Vice presidents have their own foreign-policy advisers, and if the veep moves up, the team sometimes moves with them. (During the Obama administration, Vice President Biden’s national security adviser was Antony Blinken, who is now President Biden’s secretary of state.)
Harris has attracted very professional advisers, and while much has been made of heavy turnover among some of her staff (though most of those in the first year), the national-security team has endured. McEldowney was a career diplomat and former director of the Foreign Service Institute. When she left, for personal reasons, her deputy, Philip Gordon, rose to take her place and has stayed ever since. Rebecca Lissner, a former professor at the Naval War College who oversaw Biden’s National Security Strategy, took Gordon’s place as deputy and has also remained in that job.
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Gordon had been the top Europe specialist in President Obama’s State Department and on President Clinton’s NSC staff. He went on to create a center for U.S.–Europe relations at the Brookings Institution. Michael McFaul, Obama’s ambassador to Moscow, who now teaches at Stanford, has written, “No one in the entire Biden administration knows more about Europe than Gordon,” except maybe Biden himself. Gordon has also written an acclaimed book, Losing the Long Game: The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East.
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If Gordon is a senior official in a Harris presidency, the heads of Europe, including Ukraine, will breathe a deep sigh of relief. Not only will they have dodged the bullet of a reelected President Trump, who has expressed hostility toward alliances in general and NATO in particular, but they will be greeted at summits and conference calls by an American team simpatico with their interests. They, as well as other leaders, could also rest fairly assured that President Harris wouldn’t be tempted by fantastic visions of simple regime change in, say, Iran.
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In short, Harris has been guided by specialists whose views are mainly traditional and international, with a focus on allies and preserving the peace, not embarking on unrealistic adventures to change the world—a view very much like Biden’s.
She differs from Biden in a few ways. She privately disagrees with the formulation of world politics as a contest between democracy and autocracy, the sources close to her noted, and sees that as oversimplifying and even misleading, given the kinds of allies that we’re sometimes forced to choose. She also seems more sensitive to the emerging centrality of issues such as climate change and A.I., as well as to humanitarian issues—the plight of masses of people in the “global south,” especially Africa and the Middle East.
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Her stance on the Middle East has raised eyebrows in recent months. Some have exaggerated her differences with Biden. Early on in the Israel-Hamas war, Harris called for an “immediate ceasefire,” which some saw as a break from the administration; but, in fact, she also said the ceasefire could happen only if Hamas freed the hostages. She is also genuinely committed to helping defend Israel from an attack.
Still, officials familiar with her views say she is more intensely concerned about civilian casualties and suffering in Gaza. In the speech where she called for a ceasefire in language no different from Biden’s, she also described Gaza as a “humanitarian catastrophe” and the treatment of civilians as “inhumane”—terms that Biden had never invoked.
“If Harris had been president the last nine months,” Ian Bremmer speculates, “she would have been much less likely to give [Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu] blank checks.”
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[1] Url:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/08/kamala-harris-foreign-policy-2024-presidential-election.html
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