Kamala Harris is hardly the first politician in history, or in the past three minutes, to sidestep questions she doesn’t want to answer or to seek refuge in platitudes. But on foreign policy especially, the vice president and candidate to succeed Joe Biden is showing remarkable, ahem, discipline in saying nothing compromising, and therefore nothing substantive at all. Too bad, because America’s voters, allies and adversaries would love to know, if not what she might do, at least how she thinks.
One case in point is the biggest national-security controversy of the past year: Israel’s escalating war against Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iran. In theory, Harris is aligned with Biden in pledging “ironclad” support for Israel while also urging Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu to show restraint and proportionality and to define some kind of strategy for the “day after.” In practice, the White House has proven only that it has no sway with Bibi at all.
Pressed repeatedly about the implications, Harris only reveals that diplomacy with Bibi is an “ongoing pursuit.” How reassuring, at a time when people worry about a slide into World War III. Asked whether Netanyahu is even an ally, she deflects: “The better question is: Do we have an important alliance between the American people and the Israeli people? And the answer to that question is yes.”
That part, of course, everybody already knew. The question is about how the world’s last remaining superpower, such as it is, should deal with a recalcitrant, problematic and indeed rogue ally, to avoid getting drawn into quagmires or conflagrations not in America’s interest. Her thoughts on that conundrum might also offer clues about her views on alliances in Asia and Europe. Guess not.
She’s better in talking about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but only marginally. There, she has the advantage that her opponent, Donald Trump, is over-the-top wrong in his head and his heart, preferring to flirt with or kowtow before Russian President Vladimir Putin while talking down to Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskiy. (According to Bob Woodward, Trump in 2020 even sent scarce Covid tests to Putin for personal use to ingratiate himself and has spoken privately to the dictator this year.) Absurdly, Trump keeps claiming that if he becomes president again, he’d end the war in a day.
“You know what that is?,” Harris correctly says about Trump’s boast. “It’s about surrender.” So would Harris also meet with Putin to strike a peace deal? “Not bilaterally without Ukraine, no,” she says. “Ukraine must have a say in the future of Ukraine.” So far, so good (and so obvious).
On to the next step: Would she embrace Ukraine into NATO to deter future aggression by Russia? “Those are all issues we will deal with if and when [they] arise, at that point,” she evades. Come again? This question first arose in 2008 and has been urgent and central since 2022. There are excellent reasons for a potential commander-in-chief not to commit to an answer, before peace talks have started. Then again, that’s exactly what she should explain, while offering glimpses into her analysis of the scenarios.
On America’s other big challenges across the globe she is even more vague. Of course, she also wants to compete with and contain China (does anybody in Washington not, these days?). But how, and at what cost? How does she think about Russia, China, Iran and North Korea forming a de facto “axis” against America? She offers no clue. The new nuclear arms race? Ditto. Africa and the Global South? Don’t even bother.
We could put her obfuscation down to shrewd campaign tactics against a candidate, Trump, who has no lucid answer to any world problem beyond ludicrous hallucinations that such crises would never have arisen if he had remained in the White House.
We could also blame her inexperience in international affairs (as a former prosecutor, state attorney general and senator, she earned her chops in domestic policy). Then again, she’s had more than three years as second-in-line to the Resolute Desk, during which time she received good advice from experts.
While these two explanations carry some weight, there is a third, which goes deeper. Harris, more than Biden and Trump, grasps intuitively that the world has changed. An American president in the bipolar system of the Cold War could express a foreign-policy vision and hope to achieve it. That was even more true of his successors during the “unipolar” moment after the Cold War, when the US had uncontested primacy. Nowadays, though, the international system is devolving either to multipolarity, with many powers jostling for supremacy, or worse, to no discernible polarity at all, meaning chaos.
The statesman who best describes this unraveling is Antonio Guterres, secretary general of the United Nations. Reflecting on the descent into violence in so many places at once and the shredding of the UN Charter, without anybody (meaning the US, mainly) doing anything about it, he recently said that humanity is “in a purgatory of polarity.” It’s a mixed metaphor, but I like the phrase, and not only because it has alliteration, consonance and assonance all at once; it hits the spot.
The real reason why candidate Harris won’t explain what she would try to do in foreign policy as president is that she knows she probably won’t succeed in doing it. This may make her more humble than any recent predecessor. It also turns her presidency, as well as US diplomacy and grand strategy, into a blank sheet — a sheet of paper about to get singed in the global purgatory.
