How Kamala Harris Sees the World

Vice President Kamala Harris met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week, a kind of debut on the international stage as the de facto Democratic presidential nominee.

Of all the leaders you might pick for a premiere meet-and-greet during the peak of your brat summer, one wanted for war crimes, who is at the center of one of the most fraught U.S. foreign and domestic policy issues of this century, and who doesn’t even try to conceal that he’s gunning for the other guy, is probably not it. But Israel and Gaza are two issues Harris cannot avoid, as candidate and if she becomes president. So she took the meeting, even as she skipped presiding over Netanyahu’s address to Congress.

At the end of it, Harris didn’t offer a different course for U.S. on Israel policy – and even if she sought to, she is still Joe Biden’s vice president. But she diverged in tone, or at least her delivery made it seem so. She pushed Israel to take a ceasefire deal to end the war and release the remaining hostages, reading aloud the names of the American-Israeli captives still being held. She condemned Hamas’s October 7th attack, and she also denounced the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. “We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering, and I will not be silent,” Harris said, of Palestinians. She also urged people to see the complexity in the conflict, asserting that Gaza is not a “binary” issue.

Harris’s more pointed rhetoric does not totally help decode her foreign policy as a possible future president. But it may be the start of defining how she sees America in the world – and how she might shape her international agenda if she wins in November. 

Harris came to the vice presidency without a robust international record. After four years in the White House, she gets the benefit of experience by being close to major foreign policy moments – from Afghanistan to Gaza to Ukraine – but without being wholly linked to any of them. Her vice-presidential foreign policy portfolio included going to the Munich Security Conference, fostering partnerships in Asia as part of the administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy, and the impossibly huge task of tackling the root causes of migration from Central America.

As veep, she has been an emissary for Biden’s agenda – strengthening NATO, standing with Ukraine, backing Israel and deterring the challenge from China. She goes on the second-tier foreign trips and smooths over diplomatic snafus when necessary. All of which, to be fair, is exactly her job.

Harris is expected to pursue a degree of continuity with the Biden administration, especially on big-ticket items like Russia, China, trade, and climate change. As a candidate in 2020 she echoed Biden’s support of allies and global institutions, the kind of “liberal international order” talking points that sometimes look meaningful – e.g. NATO’s response to Ukraine – and sometimes look meaningless – e.g. a lot of what we’ve done and are doing in the Middle East.

But even as Harris’s worldview may reflect Biden’s, it’s a bit too premature to say that she will replicate his foreign policy. As The Wall Street Journal reported, Harris is unlikely to keep the core of Biden’s national security team, including National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Her current national security advisor is Phil Gordon, a Europe and Middle East expert who served in the Obama administration. He helped negotiate the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and wrote a book about U.S. regime change failures in the Middle East. As key advisor to Harris in recent years, it seems likely that he’ll continue to play a role. 

Harris also comes to the presidency with substantively different experience than Biden, who formed and hardened his views over decades working on foreign relations in the U.S. Senate and as vice president. He has tended to emphasize personal relationships in his diplomatic style. 

As former aides have pointed out, Harris may have a different approach, one more in line with her prosecutorial background, which emphasizes fact-finding and stress-testing scenarios. “She thinks it is important to challenge assumed truths and established patterns in trying to find new and better solutions,” Nancy McEldowne, Harris’s first national security advisor, told the Washington Post.  

Haile Soifer, who served as Harris’s national security advisor in the Senate, told NBC News that Harris is “very deliberative in her work.”

“She immerses herself in the facts and then makes her own informed decisions,” Soifer said. “She will prepare extensively for every discussion, whether it’s public facing or not.”

Harris, as the Democratic presidential nominee, will have to begin to show the public how she might make those foreign-policy decisions. There is still some optimism, especially among critics of the administration’s Gaza policy, that Harris might seek more distance from Biden. She will also need to draw a contrast with Trump, who is trying to frame himself (not quite accurately) as a peace president.

Whoever wins the presidency will inherit Russia’s war in Ukraine and Israel’s spiraling war in Gaza. Tensions remain with China over trade, Taiwan, and advanced tech. Iran is getting even closer to the bomb. The U.S. still has troops deployed in a volatile Middle East. Crises in Sudan or Venezuela could escalate, and those are just obvious hotspots. A catastrophe will happen that no one is talking about right now. More than any precise international agenda, Harris will need to make the case she will be the best steward of American interests and security when it does. 

How Harris’s Veep Tenure Indicates How She’ll Lead

Harris’s international reputation as veep, rightly or wrongly, sometimes echoed her domestic persona. Critics didn’t see her as a major player, and she sometimes struggled to stand out in public engagements abroad, especially if you asked a bunch of anonymous European diplomats who attended the Munich Security Conference. But behind closed doors, Harris apparently succeeded in balancing the business of diplomacy with a personal touch. The New York Times spoke to about 30 diplomats and world leaders who have interacted with her. They described her as “witty” and “warm.” Someone who could be authoritative, but also bond over cooking.

​​“She wasn’t trying to lecture us about anything, but rather truly listen to what we had to say,” Odile Cortés, an entrepreneur who met with Harris at the Women Economic Forum in Mexico, told the Times. 

Foreign officials may be a bit more inclined to be generous to Harris in the press right now, as many U.S. allies in Europe and Asia still prefer her to Trump. She’s seen as someone who will honor and invest in alliances, who will collaborate with partners, and who will share her current boss’s internationalist bent. During the 2020 Democratic primary, Harris told the Council on Foreign Relations that the United States’s greatest accomplishment “has been the post-war community of international institutions, laws, and democratic nations we helped to build.”

“For generations, presidents from both parties established a network of stalwart partners,” Harris added. “These countries have contributed to our prosperity and worked with us in war and peace to deal with some of the toughest international crises and to confront a number of generational challenges.”

Harris is likely to track Biden’s alliance-forward approach, especially when it comes to the U.S.’s biggest competitors in Russia and China. She will maintain military and humanitarian support for Ukraine. As one Ukrainian official told Reuters: “We believe that two words best describe her potential foreign policy toward Ukraine and Europe as a whole — if she gets elected — continuity and predictability.”

Harris is also likely to follow a similar tack in the Indo-Pacific, where she has already invested time, especially in Southeast Asia, as part of the Biden administration’s regional strategy to counter China. She made four trips to Asia during her vice presidency, and her first official foreign trip as vice president was to Vietnam and Singapore. That global debut was overshadowed by the U.S.’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, and some watchers of the region gave mixed reviews on her and the administration’s efforts. But observers also pointed out that changed as Harris got more experience. “She didn’t knock it out of the park. It’s clear she was new to the issues. But she’s put in the work,” Gregory B. Poling, who directs the Southeast Asia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies told the Associated Press last year, after Harris’s most recent trip.  

Harris has built relationships with key U.S. partners in the region. She’s met with Japan’s Prime Minister five times, and she’s met with Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. six times since he became president, developing a close relationship, according to Politico. Much of Harris’s diplomacy happened out of the spotlight because it often involved granular, slow-burn work – think trade deal discussions with Indonesia on critical minerals. Yet Harris very much saw the value in these efforts. “If you just look down the path of the next couple decades and think about what’s going to be important right now to do, strengthening relationships in this part of the world is going to be a big part of that,” Harris told the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin last year. 

The other big foreign-policy project in Harris’s veep portfolio is one that is most likely going to be used against her. Harris was tasked with addressing the “root causes” of migration, specifically in the Northern Triangle countries of Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. As border crossings have soared during the Biden administration, Republicans have used this as proof of Harris’s failures on migration. 

Most of Harris’s job was getting companies to invest in the region, with the goal of creating jobs there. On that, Harris did help raise some $5 billion in public and private funds. “Not a huge amount, but it ain’t chicken feed and that links to jobs,” Mark Schneider, a former USAID administration official for the region told the New York Times. 

Of course, such investments take time, and the region’s problems are multifaceted and complicated; the economy is a piece of it, but so is corruption and violence and democratic backsliding. People who worked with Harris say she put real effort into engaging with the region. Anti-corruption activists in Guatemala told the Times that Harris made a point to meet and learn from them, and Harris was directly involved in pressuring Guatemalan prosecutors to honor election results and ensure a peaceful transition of power, which they ultimately did. She did not solve a region’s problems, but did use her influence there in meaningful ways. Plus, per presidential tradition, she will now get the chance to just give this job to her own vice president.

On other big issues, like trade, Harris will again likely reflect Biden’s approach. As Todd Tucker, director of the industrial policy and trade program at the Roosevelt Forward, pointed out, Harris “really distinguished herself in her Senate years by being very forward looking on integrating trade and climate policy.” She was one of the few senators who voted against the USMCA, Trump’s revised NAFTA, because she said it didn’t go far enough to address climate change. Tucker said Harris might have a window to pursue a new generation of trade deals that are tougher on climate and decarbonization, going further than even the Biden administration.

What We Don’t Know May Define Her Foreign Policy – And the Election

As a Senator, in 2019, Harris voted to block arms sales to Saudi Arabia over its murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and its human rights abuses in Yemen. During the 2020 campaign, in comments to the Council of Foreign Relations, she said the U.S. still had mutual areas of interest with Riyadh, but “we need to fundamentally reevaluate our relationship with Saudi Arabia.” 

During that same 2020 primary campaign, Biden called Saudi Arabia a “pariah” state. But in 2022, he scheduled a trip to Riyadh, effectively abandoning that stance in an effort to isolate Russia and avoid even higher gas prices after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Since then, the White House has kept that engagement, including pursuing an Israel-Saudi normalization deal.

Biden is not the U.S. first president to compromise on things that America says it values – human rights, democracy – if those values stand in the way of Washington’s perceived interests. He will not be the last. But which compromises America makes does matter. 

Harris has to confront this dilemma immediately because of Gaza, which may be the biggest foreign policy and political challenge of her campaign. Harris has a long-standing relationship with Israel and its politicians. She previously described bonds between the U.S. and Israel as “unbreakable,” and has reiterated her commitment to Israel in the wake of the October 7th attacks. 

Yet Harris is also seen as the one in the administration most directly speaking about the suffering of Palestinians, but rhetoric is likely insufficient for those who believe the U.S. is complicit in Israeli’s bombardment of Gaza, and its refusal, so far, to condition military aid. 

So the question for Harris will be where she seeks to rebalance or break with past policies, both ideologically and tactically – and what that might mean for U.S. foreign policy and America’s standing in the world. 

In November 2019, Harris said during a Democratic primary debate that Trump failed to understand “the most important responsibility of the commander-in-chief is to concern herself with the security of our nation and homeland.”

For her, she said, “part of the strength of who we are as a nation — and therefore, an extension of our ability to be secure — is not only that we have a vibrant military, but that when we walk in any room around the globe, we are respected because we keep to our word, we are consistent, we speak truth, and we are loyal.”