Let's take a look at Kamala Harris and foreign policy

On foreign policy, we don’t have a particularly clear sense of what Kamala Harris would do differently than President Biden. Stacy Swanson of Squire Patton Boggs summarized it succinctly in 2020, declaring, “Foreign policy has never been a primary interest of Harris.” Harris didn’t mention Russia or Ukraine in any of her first 13 stump speeches as the nominee. The Economist noticed that she didn’t mention China once on the stump in her first month as the nominee. The vice president made only cursory and vague comments on foreign policy in her convention address, her lone televised interview since becoming the nominee, and likely her lone presidential-debate appearance.

Everyone assumes a President Harris would be a continuation of the Biden status quo. There’s no reason to think Harris had any objection to the Afghanistan withdrawal, she’s only a bit more publicly critical of Israel than Biden is, we saw how she managed the border and migration from Central America, and when she criticizes China on the stump, it’s an attempt to flank Trump.

In her issued written statement responding to Hamas’ execution of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Harris said, “The threat Hamas poses to the people of Israel — and American citizens in Israel — must be eliminated and Hamas cannot control Gaza.”

Hamas occasionally makes noises about agreeing to a “Palestinian unity government,” but it’s not willing to disarm, which means it would still effectively run the place because it has all the guns. Harris’s declaration that Hamas cannot control the Gaza Strip is akin to calling for regime change, which is a bit ironic considering a recent book by her chief national-security adviser.

Philip Gordon has been the vice president’s national-security adviser since March 2022. Before that, he was her deputy national-security adviser, and in the Obama administration, he was special assistant to the president and coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa, and the Gulf Region at the National Security Council. Between the Obama years and the Biden years, Gordon was a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

If Harris wins the election, Gordon is likely to be the next U.S. national-security adviser.

To get a real perspective on the man who is likely to have the ear of a President Harris, read Gordon’s 2020 book, Losing the Long Game: The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East.

The title gives you a good sense of what you’re in for; one of Gordon’s chapters is titled, “Why Regime Change in the Middle East Always Goes Wrong.” And for a Democratic foreign-policy thinker, this is almost standard-issue doctrine; it’s not like anyone expects Kamala Harris to invade any country in the Middle East, aiming to change its regime.

And Lord knows, after watching the Taliban retake Afghanistan and parade around in some of the $7 billion worth of abandoned U.S. weapons, it’s hard to begrudge any American for thinking that we should never bother attempting to topple a hostile regime again, either through military force or other, more surreptitious means.

Gordon scores Iraq as an American failure, even though the government that country currently has is way better than the house of horrors that was Saddam Hussein’s regime (an extremely low bar to clear, no doubt). But Gordon is a man who also scores the Obama-era “Arab Spring” uprising that toppled Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, the toppling of Moammar Qaddafi in Libya, and the U.S. operations against Syria’s Bashar al-Assad as failures as well.

Gordon points to Bosnia and Kosovo as success stories, but that’s because the U.S. never explicitly said it wanted to drive those genocidal leaders out of power:

“In both cases, the intervening [NATO] powers explicitly eschewed regime change and in fact went so far as to work with the very leaders who were responsible for the conflict — [Slobodon] Milosevic in Belgrade, President Franjo Tudmman in Zagreb, and even the Bosnian Serb leadership in the self-declared Republika Srpska, which was granted significant autonomy as part of the peace settlement. Working with these leaders — whose ethnic nationalism was responsible for the war in the first place — was certainly distasteful, but it was the recipe for ending a war that had led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and refugees.”

I had to go look it up; Ratko Mladić, the commander of the Army of Republika Srpska, was responsible for the Srebrenica massacre, ethnic-cleansing campaigns, mortar attacks against the Sarajevo city center, establishing concentration camps, and mass executions. He wasn’t arrested until 2011. He was later convicted on charges of war crimes and genocide in the Hague.

If “distasteful” agreements with brutal autocrats who have blood dripping from their hands is the best possible outcome that the U.S. can hope for, then I guess we can expect more Democratic administration officials dining with the likes of Bashar al-Assad.

Gordon continues:

In most cases, however, a mix of containment, deterrence, diplomatic engagement, support for partners, selective military actions, arms control, economic investment, and the restoration of the United States as a respected, prosperous and democratic alternative will produce better results than the pursuit of costly, quixotic, and unrealistic campaigns to overthrow regimes. While there are no easy fixes to the massive challenges the United States faces in the region, the global track record of engagement, diplomacy, and containment is simply better than the track record of regime change, whether in places where regime change was achieved in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya or in places where dictators held on to power such as Syria, Cuba, and North Korea.

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, living with the Assad regime in the first place might have been the worst possible policy, except for all the others.

Toward the end, Gordon concludes:

Do these lessons mean regime change — in the Middle East or anywhere else — is never warranted and can never succeed? Should the United States, based upon this depressing track record, resolve never to adopt regime change as policy? It is impossible to rule out that there could be cases where the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation or use, mass terrorism, genocide, or a direct attack on the United States would be such that the benefits of removing a threatening regime would exceed the costs of doing so. But if history is any guide, such cases will be rare to nonexistent, and even where they may exist, they demand far more caution, humility, and honesty about the likely costs and consequences than has been the case.”

Gordon argues that if Americans knew what would follow, they would likely have let the Soviets stay in Afghanistan.

And on page 268, we get what is the likely “Kamala Doctrine” in a nutshell:

Even in these hard cases there were usually better options than intervening to oust and replace — by whatever method — the regime. In virtually every case, more modest aims and measures — from efforts to assist civilian populations, deterrence of external aggression, targeted sanctions, diplomatic pressure, humanitarian relief, or in some cases even doing nothing [emphasis in original] would have worked out better for the United States and the local populations than what often turned out to be hugely ambitious, expensive, unsuccessful, and counterproductive regime change operations.

Now, when it comes to hostile and aggressive states, which of those options Gordon lists strike you as effective?

“Assisting civilian populations”? That’s noble, but it’s also effectively making Americans pay to take care of the humanitarian needs of the civilian populations living under callous autocrats. That’s just making life easier for the autocrats.

Deterrence? Hard to do without a credible threat of military force.

Targeted sanctions? Either they don’t work, or they take years to work; look at Russia. Between the Indians buying their oil and access to China and much of the global south, along with lax enforcement of sanctions, a hostile regime like Putin’s can stay in business for a long time.

Diplomatic pressure? Get real. In July, Russia launched a missile into a children’s hospital in central Kyiv. Regimes like these don’t care about being unpopular with other countries.

Humanitarian relief? Again, noble, but doesn’t address the cause of the problem.

Now, which option on that list do you think the gravitational pull of the status quo and risk aversion will steer a Harris administration toward?

“Doing nothing.”

This is a prescription for a U.S. foreign policy that is all carrot and few if any sticks.

The U.S. doesn’t have to run around threatening regime change toward every state that hates our guts and functions as part of the axis of the devils. But we do need those countries to think that if they piss us off enough, they might look up and see “shock and awe” coming their way. Even if we never really want to launch another campaign of regime change, we need the world’s worst leaders and governments to believe that the wrong provocation could have the CIA’s Special Activities Division knocking on their door by dinnertime.

That’s deterrence.

If Gordon becomes the U.S. national-security adviser, the message will be clear from Tehran to Pyongyang to Caracas: President Harris will be extremely reluctant to ever send in U.S. troops to attack you.

Every once in a while, Gordon will allow for a minimalist approach to using military force — “no fly zones to protect local populations; selective air strikes to degrade and deter potential WMD use or development; the maintenance of U.S. forces in the region to deter regional war and ensure the free flow of energy; direct military interventions such as the campaign pursued by both Obama and Trump against the Islamic State.” But the overwhelming conclusion of Losing the Long Game is that Gordon sees every U.S. action against hostile regimes as backfiring in the long run, and that “diplomacy” and “engagement” are always the better option. As if we haven’t tried that with any of these states over the past three decades.

There are very few Americans who are calling for regime change in places like Russia or China. Sure, we’d love to see the Russian people overthrow Vladimir Putin and his gang of thugs, and the same with the Chinese people and Xi Jinping.

(Note that regime change means change in the form of government in the country, not just the particular leader. If Putin or Xi keel over tomorrow, their replacements are not likely to be dramatically better for our interests. While there are occasional exceptions, paranoia, aggression, brinksmanship, shamelessness, and a hunger for territorial expansion seem baked into the cake of leadership in those countries. You just don’t climb to the top in a place like Moscow or Beijing by being a conciliatory, agreeable nice guy.)

You don’t see huge appetite for U.S.-led regime change in Iran, North Korea, Syria, or Venezuela, either. What we really need is leverage.

The “Axis of the Devils” that I periodically refer to is a loose affiliation of hostile states and proxy groups with overlapping interests who are willing to work together to screw us over whenever the opportunity arises. This is why Hamas uses a patchwork of weapons from Iran, China, Russia, and North Korea. This is why the Houthis don’t hit Chinese or Russian tankers or carrier ships in the Red Sea, the North Koreans are sending more missiles to the Russians, and the Russians are helping the Venezuelan regime. These countries all help one another out when there’s a chance to kneecap Uncle Sam.

Leverage doesn’t mean attempting to topple all these regimes. But it does require creative and wide-ranging efforts to screw them over whenever the opportunity arises, and minimize their leverage against us, our allies, and the rest of the world. This can involve espionage, sabotage, cyberwarfare, strategic leaks of their dirty secrets, arming and training proxy groups who make these regimes’ lives miserable, the occasional “unfortunate accident” enabled by like-minded third-parties that damages critical infrastructure, and whatever else the most devious minds in our national-security community can imagine and implement. We need a commander in chief who gets up every morning and asks himself or herself, “How can I ruin some autocrat’s day today?”

Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and Philip Gordon are not the team to do it.