When US president Joe Biden announced he was dropping out of the presidential race on July 21, he not only upended the race – he potentially upended America’s foreign policy, too.
Eighty-one-year-old Biden’s 59-year-old vice president Kamala Harris was the Democratic president’s obvious replacement to take on 78-year-old Republican candidate Donald Trump, who is seeking a second term following his May conviction on multiple felony charges for financial crimes.
With Biden’s endorsement, Harris quickly consolidated Democratic support. The first few polls of the new presidential contest show Harris even or slightly ahead of Trump, meaning Harris’ foreign policy may have a better than even chance of becoming America’s foreign policy starting in January. The election itself is in November.
While Harris reportedly plans to replace at least three of Biden’s top foreign policy officials – National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin – expect a lot of continuity with Biden’s policies. With one possible exception.
There’s a good chance a Harris administration would extend the Biden administration’s strong support of Ukraine in its grinding defensive war against Russia, but it’s less certain Harris would continue Biden’s strong support of Israel in its own war against Palestinian terror group Hamas.
Biden, who has been strongly pro-Israel throughout his five-decade political career, has come under fire from his party’s left flank for maintaining that stance despite the growing international opposition to Israel’s brutal campaign against Hamas. Thousands of Palestinian civilians have died in the crossfire as Israeli troops have rolled across Gaza, seeking redress for Hamas’ bloody incursion into southern Israel in October.
True, Biden has consistently demanded a ceasefire. At the same time, however, he has only briefly withheld the critical shipments of American-made munitions that have sustained Israel’s Gaza operation.
Biden is threading a foreign-policy needle. Harris could throw the needle away. She might not be so reluctant to channel the sentiments of millions of Americans who want the president to halt US aid to Israel, at least until the war ends. The latest Gallup poll has 48 per cent of Americans disapproving of Israel’s military action and 42 per cent approving.
Harris reportedly planned to meet Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in private during Netanyahu’s visit to Washington DC this week – but she declined to attend the Israeli leader’s address to the US Congress. Instead, Harris was campaigning.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Harris intends to tell Netanyahu it’s time for the war to end – and with a plan for Palestinian self-determination. Her planned absence from Netanyahu’s address underscores her demand.
Expect less distance between Biden and Harris when it comes to Ukraine. Biden’s policy, ever since Russia widened its war on Ukraine in February 2022, has been to supply Ukraine with huge amounts of weaponry while placing some limits on the Ukrainians’ authority to use those weapons against targets inside Russia – and also slow-walking Ukraine’s march toward Nato membership.
Biden’s Ukraine’s policy, in short, is strong support for the Kyiv but with measures to prevent runaway escalation that could draw Nato powers directly into the war. Nothing Harris or her national security advisor Phillip Gordon has said points to a radical departure from that policy.
But there could be tweaks along the margins. Many Ukrainians blame Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, for the US rules barring the Ukrainians from using American munitions – specifically, precision ballistic missiles – to strike Russian forces deep inside Russia.
They surely hope that Gordon, in replacing Sullivan, would loosen those rules. But Gordon hasn’t justified that hope. “We have very few restrictions on what Ukraine can do or on what we provide to Ukraine,” he said at a foreign-policy symposium in May.
It’s worth pointing out that the American rules don’t extend to Ukrainian strikes on Russian soil using Ukrainian-made – rather than American-made – weapons. Biden hasn’t tried to limit those strikes, and there’s no reason to believe Harris would, either.
“I don’t think it’s right to suggest that somehow our policy or what we are doing is preventing Ukraine from doing what it needs to do, which is to continue to stand up in the face of this Russian aggression,” Gordon said.
Strong but rule-based US support for democratic allies including Ukraine. Pressure on Israel to end its war in Gaza. A Harris foreign policy would mostly extend the Biden foreign policy – and honour decades, centuries even, of American tradition.
Now contrast this with the foreign policy Trump has promised. Describing the Gaza conflict as Israel’s “war on terror,” Trump has vowed to crush the American anti-war protest movement.
Trump is no friend to Ukraine, either. Following a failed attempt to get President Zelensky to investigate the Biden family’s business dealings in Ukraine, Trump was impeached by Congress – though he was later cleared in the resulting trial.
Trump has also made America’s Nato allies nervous. He said he would let Russians do “whatever the Hell they want” in any Nato nation that failed to spend enough on defence.
It’s the distinctions between Trump and Harris, rather than those between Harris and Biden, that should inform voters’ choices as the November election looms.
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