Kamala Harris and foreign policy

Other than Biden, Americans must go way back to 1989 to find a president who would take office with more experience

COMMENT | HEATHER HURLBURT | Freshman U.S. senators, presidential candidates, and sitting vice presidents are frequently advised to say as little as possible about foreign affairs, in order not to distract an American public that supposedly cares little for them.

This has left reporters, think tankers and foreign diplomats alike scrambling to discern where presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris may differ from President Joe Biden.

A few things are certain: Harris represents significant generational change. She embraces the globalised outlook one might expect of a daughter of immigrants who spent part of her childhood in Canada. 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.

Harris speaks and writes frequently about her immigrant parents, invoking her mother’s South Asian folk sayings on the campaign trail and retracing family trips to Africa on her official travel.

Harris shares this experience not just with former president Barack Obama but with a large and growing share of the U.S. population. As of 2019, more than one in ten U.S. citizens – and a quarter of American children – have at least one immigrant parent.

This is a change for a world that is used to American presidents invoking their Irishness – Biden and Obama, and Clinton, Reagan and Kennedy before them – though we are only 65 years from a Democratic party that worried Kennedy was too Irish to be elected.

Biden’s deep emotional commitments to the NATO alliance and the state of Israel reflect the American preoccupations of his youth. But Harris connects with a population for whom those responsibilities are two among many, with claims on U.S. attention and resources that are undoubtedly strategic but not necessarily sacred. Notably, concern with threats posed by specific other countries peaks among the oldest Americans and declines steadily among younger ones; concern with climate change and human rights does the reverse.

Harris may be unlike her predecessors in being as comfortable with young artists in Ghana as at the Munich Security Conference. But she checks all the boxes of experience a presidential candidate should have – and then some.

As a senator, she served on the Intelligence and Homeland Security Committees, overseeing some of the most highly classified and controversial aspects of U.S. national security policy. She was noted for arriving prepared to hearings and offering challenging cross-examinations of witnesses, as would be expected from an accomplished federal prosecutor.

She did not take up any signature international issues during her time in Congress – but any political adviser would tell a White House hopeful that is a plus, not a minus, in the U.S. media environment.

As vice president, Harris made 17 foreign trips in three-and-a-half years, reflecting both President Biden’s view of her role and his own limited travel. Some of those assignments were the highest profile. Harris attended the Munich Security Conference shortly after Russia launched its full-scale war on Ukraine in 2022, as well as the APEC and ASEAN Summits and the 2023 COP climate summit in Dubai.

Other engagements were the diplomacy that consumes senior officials’ calendars – trips to Mexico and Central America as part of her migration agenda, and a three-country trip to Africa fulfilling a White House pledge.

Attending a meeting is not, of course, the same as being the final decider on U.S. foreign policy. But that experience – and the hours of meetings and study that go with it – sets Harris apart from the new presidents of the last three-plus decades.

Donald Trump had never represented his country to a foreign government before being elected. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush led international trade missions as governors. Barack Obama, like Harris, travelled occasionally during his four years in the Senate. But one would have to go all the way back to George H.W. Bush, who served as vice president, CIA director and a member of Congress, to find a president before Biden who began their first term with more experience than Harris.

Harris has a stable and well-respected foreign policy team in her role as vice president. Her national security adviser, Phil Gordon, and his deputy, Rebecca Lissner, are both experienced Washington hands who served in previous administrations. Both have published books that suggest a subtle shift away from an America that leads the world aggressively and alone.

As the Council on Foreign Relations’ Jim Lindsay notes, Harris’s foreign policy platform during her 2020 campaign for the Democratic nomination was unremarkably within the party mainstream. While vice president she has strenuously supported Ukraine and led attacks on former President Trump’s threats not to defend NATO allies.

While she has been less outspoken on Indo-Pacific affairs, she has met with Chinese Xi Jinping, and her itineraries in Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines stress her commitment to Biden’s security and economic agendas in the region.

She will also inherit Biden’s challenge of supporting deep economic engagement in the region while keeping faith with domestic organised labour and activists who are deeply sceptical of traditional free trade approaches there – a view she validated by opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership. (During the Trump administration, Harris also voted against USMCA, the successor trade agreement to NAFTA, saying it lacked sufficient environmental provisions. The Biden administration has used USMCA aggressively to address competition, worker rights and environmental concerns.)

Harris’s circumspection makes it all the more conspicuous that she has let her differences with Biden be known publicly on exactly one issue – the Gaza war.

As early as last December, there were leaks from the usually tight-lipped White House that the vice president wanted a tougher line on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct of the war. In public appearances in December and March, she took a harder line. She has also publicly recognised the human costs of the conflict for Palestinian civilians in ways Biden has struggled to do.

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Heather Hurlburt is Associate Fellow, U.S. and the Americas Programme

Source: Chatham House first published this article on July 25, 2024