When not vague or entirely mum, she has promised to continue Biden’s foreign policy. In other words, failure on an international scale
Predicting that Joe Biden’s presidency would be a disaster on the world stage was a rare political forecast that did not cause me painful spasms of self-doubt. By the time of his election in 2020, Barack Obama’s vice president had established for himself an unrivaled record of bad judgment predicated on faulty assumptions. All that was open to debate was the scale of the debacle over which Biden would preside, and it’s hard to say he underperformed.
From engineering a national humiliation in Afghanistan, to overseeing the eruption of two hot wars on as many continents (and he has managed both wars schizophrenically), to calling into question the longevity of American primacy on the high seas, Biden has set a new standard for failure.
It’s harder to foresee how Harris would manage U.S. interests abroad. After all, she’s done her utmost to avoid stating any of her thoughts on foreign affairs.
There’s an assumption abroad, for instance, that Harris would be a strong supporter of Ukraine merely because she has run on a platform of “continuity” with Biden’s approach to the Russia–Ukraine conflict. But if Harris only mimicked Biden’s inconstancy when it comes to Ukraine, we would expect to see the West’s position in Europe continue to deteriorate.
Biden did little to discourage Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine. Indeed, he mused publicly about the inconsequence of a “minor incursion” into Ukrainian territory and rewarded Vladmir Putin’s military buildups along the Ukrainian border with a bilateral summit. When war broke out (again), Biden and his advisers were so afraid of antagonizing Russia that they sacrificed opportunities to capitalize on Kyiv’s early successes (successes this White House could neither foresee nor recognize as durable successes when it mattered). It balked at providing Ukraine with long-range missiles, cluster munitions, tanks, and fixed-wing aircraft, and it gave in only after the point at which the provision of those weapons would have had maximum battlefield efficacy.
Kyiv’s fear that Biden would throw Ukraine under the bus in a negotiated cease-fire that would freeze the current lines of contact in place (until Russia decides to thaw them out again) likely contributed to its decision to capture a chunk of Russian territory. And now, North Korean soldiers are entering the war on the Russian side, giving this continental war a global feel and imperiling U.S. interests on the Korean Peninsula as much as they are now compromised in Europe. It is hardly comforting to know that Harris would do her best to continue Biden’s approach to containing Russian aggression. Biden’s approach has failed.
We have a better idea of how Harris would handle Iran and its terrorist proxies. Rather than passively mismanage that situation, she’d probably take a more active approach to sacrificing U.S. interests in the Middle East.
The same way that Biden talks a good game when it comes to Russia but fails to act, Harris can identify why the U.S. should take a more active role in punishing Iranian aggression and restoring deterrence. “Iran has American blood on its hands,” she said when asked which foreign power is America’s greatest adversary. But when it comes to Israel and its righteous war against the Iranian proxies that attacked it on October 7, Harris has shown little stomach for the fight.
Yes, progressives have been disappointed by Harris insofar as they thought she would be a dutiful anti-Israel radical on the campaign trail. Instead, she has tried to make everyone happy by alternatingly accusing Israel of psychopathic violence against Palestinians and thanking Israel for advancing American national-security objectives that Washington either would not or could not pursue. Harris joined her Biden administration colleagues in insisting that Israel could not evacuate civilians from Rafah absent a humanitarian catastrophe (it did successfully evacuate civilians), and that it would gain nothing from an operation inside that city (it exfiltrated some 10/7 hostages and neutralized Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar there). In sum, when it comes to Israel, she offers only empty pablum.
Iran is believed to possess enough weapons-grade fissionable material to produce a nuclear weapon. We know that Iran has the capacity to deliver such a device to Israel via ballistic missile, and we know it has the will to execute a genocidal attack on the world’s lone Jewish state. The Islamic Republic and its proxies demonstrated both motive and opportunity over the past 13 months. But Iran’s missile attacks on Israeli territory presented the West with a clear-cut casus belli that would have provided the Biden White House with cover to support an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear sites, and the Biden team balked at it. It’s unlikely that Harris would summon the gumption to support, much less participate in, that sort of attack, since her campaign has mostly given a rhetorical pass to Israel’s pathological detractors.
It’s frustrating that we are forced to read the tea leaves to assess Harris’s outlook on today’s most pressing geostrategic crises. But we have volumes of information about her thinking on Russia and Iran compared with the paucity of what we know about her approach to China.
Harris opposes “unilateral change to the status quo” in the region and will “continue to support Taiwan’s self-defense, consistent with our longstanding policy.” At least, that’s what she says in public. But would she observe Biden’s pledge to commit the U.S. to Taiwan’s defense in the event of hostilities? Would she honor U.S. mutual-defense obligations to its front-line allies in the Pacific — like, say, the Philippines — if they were attacked? When pressed on these and other matters relating to security policy in East Asia, Harris sidesteps the issue by insisting that she will not “get into any hypotheticals.”
But these aren’t wild-eyed “hypotheticals.” They’re threats fueled by aggressive Chinese actions in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait, as well as congressional testimony from U.S. defense-sector personnel saying on the record that China will be in a position to engage in expansionist aggression in the next president’s first term. If Harris were prepared to meet that challenge, she wouldn’t be shy about letting us know.
The combo of a truncated general-election campaign and a shamefully pliant press has allowed Harris to get away with imprecision, at best, or silence. When it comes to her thinking on vital national-security matters, we are forced to speculate. Harris has tried to reassure voters that she would not depart substantially from Biden’s record overseas. But it’s a record of abject failure — so it’s wise to take her at her word.
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