PARIS — The man who could steer the United States’ security policy under a Kamala Harris presidency speaks four European languages, wrote his thesis on Charles de Gaulle and even translated a book by the notoriously irascible former French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
Transitions of power in the U.S. are always a tense moment for European diplomats, who fear the Old Continent will be left out in the cold if Washington fully pivots to focus on Asia. That’s why they now hope there will be a top-level foreign or security policy job for Phil Gordon, the “Europeanist,” who acts as Vice President Harris’ national security adviser.
Europeans lost a steady ally when U.S. President Joe Biden dropped out of the race for the White House earlier this month, as Harris — a West Coast native who was first elected senator nearly three decades after the Cold War ended — doesn’t share his life-long experience with Europe.
Gordon does. With his fondness for Europe, the 61-year-old career diplomat is an increasingly rare breed in Washington.
He has written on the nuclear and defense policies of French wartime leader de Gaulle, founded the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institute in Washington and went on to become assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs in the first Obama administration. He also served on the staff of the National Security Council under Bill Clinton.
“Phil Gordon is reassuring for Europeans because he knows them, they know him and he’s interested in European affairs, even if he recognizes that it’s no longer the alpha and omega of America’s foreign policy,” said Camille Grand, a former NATO assistant secretary general and French defense ministry official who has crossed paths with Gordon for more than two decades.
For the European Union, the stakes of the U.S. election in November are especially high as war rages in Ukraine. A victory of the Donald Trump/JD Vance ticket would likely lead to a more isolationist policy in Washington — a prospect described as a “disaster” by a senior EU official.
Countries closer to Russia such as Poland have warned that Europeans will have to prepare for “change” in the transatlantic relationship regardless of who’s the next U.S. president.
But having Gordon hold a top national security job — perhaps even succeeding Jake Sullivan as national security adviser — leaves some hope that neither Europe nor Ukraine would be disregarded in Harris’ international agenda. In late July, Gordon said on X that “U.S. support for the Ukrainian people is enduring.”
According to Daniel Fried, who preceded Gordon as undersecretary for European and Eurasian affairs, Harris’ adviser is “in the mold of American foreign policy experts that the Europeans have known for two generations. He’s intrinsically appreciative of what the EU has done, doesn’t regard them as competitors or free loaders.”
Gordon declined to comment for this story.
Old-school Europeanist (and football fan)
Gordon’s interest in Europe isn’t just policy driven. He even loves the sport that ignites passion in Europe, but not so much in America: Football.
Justin Vaïsse, a French diplomat and founder of the Paris Peace Forum, recalls playing friendly football matches with Gordon in Georgetown in 2003, alongside current U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Robert Malley, a former U.S. special envoy for Iran.
“Americans don’t play football … It’s only girls who play soccer, Latinos, foreigners, and Americans who have a singular education,” he reminisced. These informal moments between foreign diplomats and U.S. officials weren’t just about the game, but also opportunities to talk about the big issues of the day. “At half-time, we’d discuss the war in Iraq,” Vaïsse said.
In June 2012, Gordon even took then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to see a UEFA Euro championship semi-finals in a bar filled with Germans, after a dinner in St. Petersburg with Sullivan and then-U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul.
“We were walking back to the hotel, and he said there was some European soccer match we had to go watch. It was pretty late at night,” recalled McFaul, who worked closely with Gordon on the 2008 Obama campaign. “That was his European-ness.”
Gordon’s ties to the Old Continent date all the way back to his student years. He learned French at university (he also speaks German, Italian and some Spanish) and went to the medieval city of Tours on a student exchange in the 1980s, where he caught the French bug, according to people who’ve known him.
The American diplomat, who’s a regular at the Munich Security Conference, then spent most of his early career studying and working on Europe as an academic and think tank researcher in organizations such as Sciences Po in Paris and the DGAP in Bonn.
In the mid-2000s, he took an interest in Sarkozy, then France’s interior minister.
David Martinon, France’s current ambassador to South Africa who worked with the former French president at the time, remembers Gordon as a good listener who came to see him in 2005 to discuss Sarkozy’s vision of European topics.
“He asked me lots of questions without any trace of prejudices in his approach. Basically he was in the opposition and preparing the future” for the Democrats, he recalled.
Gordon — himself a prolific author of books on France, Germany, Turkey and the Middle East — eventually went on to translate Sarkozy’s 2007 book called “Testimony: France, Europe, and the World in the Twenty-First Century.”
At the time, two people who know him said, Gordon wanted to introduce to the American foreign policy crowd the ideas of one of the most transatlanticist French presidents — the man who eventually made France reintegrate NATO’s integrated command.
Now, Gordon is among the U.S. officials who don’t see French President Emmanuel Macron’s push for a more autonomous Europe as a threat. “He understands quite well the logic of strategic autonomy that can appear directed against the U.S.,” Vaïsse said.
Overall, he “believes that a strong Europe is in the interest of the U.S.,” the French diplomat added.
China rising, Europe in the rearview
Europeans would be mistaken, however, if they think Gordon would focus on Europe and Europe only. In the past decade, he has increasingly looked to the Middle East.
“He’s shied away from French topics because it’s not necessarily a very promising niche in Washington,” Grand, the former French defense ministry official, said. “He has also understood that it was important not to be locked into a relationship bubble with the Europeans.”
From 2013 to 2015, Gordon served as special assistant to then-President Barack Obama and White House coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa, and the Gulf Region during Syria’s civil war and the rise of the Islamic State group (IS).
According to people who’ve worked with him, Gordon remained the Europeans’ main point person in Washington on one of the most daunting issues at the time: How to deal with IS. To this day, he’s in regular contact with the European Commission.
Norbert Röttgen, a Christian Democrat member of the German Bundestag, trusts that Harris’ adviser still thinks “European security is the cornerstone of U.S. global power” and welcomes that he shares his “criticism” of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz for not sending long-range Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine.
But Gordon is “part of a tradition of European affairs specialists that’s a bit on the wane,” Grand added, as Europe experts in Washington are being increasingly “marginalized” by China specialists.
And when asked about the big challenges facing the U.S. at a conference in May, his first words were about China, before stressing the potential consequences of the war in Ukraine.
“We are facing the country, the only country that frankly has the intent and the capability of overthrowing and challenging the U.S. international order, that’s a big deal, beyond what the [former] Soviet Union can do,” he said, adding that the Russia invasion of Ukraine presents “tremendous geopolitical consequences threatening other close allies.”
McFaul, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, conceded that “we’re not training enough people on Europe.”
Gordon’s career path used to be a very traditional track during the Cold War, McFaul said, but “we’ve lost that bench.”
If Gordon becomes the next U.S. president’s national security adviser, McFaul added: “Europe will have an ally.”
Nicholas Vinocur, Barbara Moens, Nahal Toosi and Cory Bennett contributed reporting.
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