Now that the U.S. presidential debate is behind us—thank goodness—the press gaggle following the Harris and Trump campaigns will presumably resume their normal activities. In the weeks ahead, a few lucky reporters may get the chance to ask the two candidates some questions about foreign policy. I’m not a journalist or media expert, but I like to think I know something about world politics and the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. Here are some thoughts on what the press should (and should not) do if they get the chance to probe either candidate’s views on how the United States should deal with the outside world.
Now that the U.S. presidential debate is behind us—thank goodness—the press gaggle following the Harris and Trump campaigns will presumably resume their normal activities. In the weeks ahead, a few lucky reporters may get the chance to ask the two candidates some questions about foreign policy. I’m not a journalist or media expert, but I like to think I know something about world politics and the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. Here are some thoughts on what the press should (and should not) do if they get the chance to probe either candidate’s views on how the United States should deal with the outside world.
Eliciting interesting insights in the closing weeks of the campaign won’t be easy. Vice President Kamala Harris is in the unenviable position of having to defend—or at least not depart too much from—President Joe Biden’s handling of Ukraine and Gaza, neither of which looks like a success story at the moment. To do so will require some skillful bobbing and weaving, and the temptation to stick to safe sound bites and vague cliches will be hard for her to resist. As for former President Donald Trump, asking him anything can be a waste of time, because you may get an incoherent word salad that wouldn’t pass a casual fact-check. But as Maggie Haberman and David Sanger showed back in 2016, in-depth interviews sometimes reveal how a candidate thinks about key foreign-policy issues and reveal what they believe, what they have correctly intuited, and what they clearly do not understand.
Given that reality, here’s what I’d do if I got the chance to pose a few questions.
First, I’d skip the usual “gotcha” questions whose main purpose is to embarrass a candidate by (supposedly) revealing how little they know about the world. Asking a presidential candidate to name the foreign minister of Tajikistan or the head of the Asian Development Bank, or asking them to describe how the Bank for International Settlements works is silly: I study world politics for a living and neither I nor most of my colleagues would do well in a trivia contest of that sort. More importantly, being able to recall the names of hundreds of global leaders or other arcane details doesn’t tell you anything about a candidate’s basic views on how the world works, what U.S. interests are today, or the policies that they believe would advance those interests.
Instead of playing the foreign-policy version of Trivial Pursuit, I’d ask each candidate to identify the foreign leader they most admire, and why. If they couldn’t come up with at least one name, that would suggest either a worrisome level of ignorance or an excessively American-centric view of the world. The second part of the question matters, too: Finding out what qualities or achievements led them to admire a particular leader can give us a better sense of what their own priorities and values might be.
Similarly, I wouldn’t ask how they would respond to the notorious “3 a.m. phone call” and the usual array of crisis scenarios. The plain truth is that no one running for president knows how they would handle a sudden Chinese attack on Taiwan, an all-out war in the Middle East, a massive cyberattack on the United States, the violent overthrow of a friendly foreign government, or any number of other scary possibilities. Why? Because what they would ultimately decide to do in nearly every situation would depend on a host of details that can’t be specified in advance. Anybody who is smart enough to be president shouldn’t even try to answer a question like that.
Instead of asking what they’d do in some hypothetical scenario, I’d be more interested in probing how they would think their way through the problem. If China imposed a blockade on Taiwan, for example, what do they think the United States would try to achieve when devising a response? What are our interests in the situation, and what are the opportunities or risks that would immediately arise? What questions would they ask the intelligence community, the U.S. ambassador in Beijing, the senior director for China and Taiwan affairs on the National Security Council, or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs? What options would they want to consider, and what criteria would they use to choose between different alternatives? What other factors (e.g., allied opinion, competing commitments, etc.) might influence their decision? I don’t need to know exactly what either candidate would do in any of the difficult situations one might dream up, but I’d love to have some idea how they would go about choosing a response that advanced U.S. interests.
We already know what both candidates think of NATO (Harris is a big fan; Trump not so much), so there’s no point in asking them about that. Similarly, asking generic questions about U.S. relations with Israel aren’t going to reveal anything interesting: Anybody running for president knows to talk about their “ironclad” commitment to Israel and so forth. If I were interviewing Trump, however, I’d ask him if it was a mistake to leave the Palestinians out of the Abraham Accords, given that their exclusion is one of the reasons Hamas launched its attack on Israel in October 2023. If I were interviewing Harris, I’d ask her to explain why giving Israel billions of dollars of additional weaponry, even as it defies U.S. calls for a cease-fire, is advancing U.S. interests. Does she think this policy makes Americans more secure, prosperous, or respected around the world? How?
Next, because we’re dealing with two people who have track records (one as president, the other as veep), I’d ask each candidate to compare their own performance in office with that of their opponent’s. But instead of asking them to defend their own actions and criticize their rival (way too easy), I’d have them try to criticize their own record and find something positive to say about the person they are hoping to beat. I’d ask Trump to tell me the biggest foreign-policy mistake he made during his first term, and to identify what, if anything, he learned from it. Because he might insist his performance as president was the absolute best in all of American history and that he made no mistakes at all, I’d come prepared with a list: the tariffs on China that made the trade deficit worse, the decision to let Iran get closer to the bomb by leaving the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the reality-show summits with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un that led nowhere, his failure to end the forever war in Afghanistan, his inadvertent leaking of classified information to the Russian ambassador, or his rocky relations with other democratic leaders. And then I’d ask him to name something that Biden did in foreign policy with which he agreed.
Harris gets the same treatment: What is some aspect of foreign-policy action that Trump got right? What was his biggest success? By contrast, what was the Biden administration’s biggest foreign-policy failure? As with Trump, I’d have a handy list of possibilities to suggest in case she tried to dodge the question. Was Trump correct to get tough with China on trade, given that Biden followed a similar playbook and, in some ways, went even further? Does she think Biden’s team has handled Gaza well? Why didn’t the United States rejoin the JCPOA with Iran, as Biden promised it would during the 2020 campaign? Should Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have tried harder to reach a deal that might have prevented Russia from invading Ukraine or brought the war to a rapid end that would have spared Ukraine enormous suffering and the loss of additional territory? Is drawing a sharp distinction between democracies and autocracies the best framework for organizing U.S. foreign policy, given that Washington needs to work with plenty of dictators and sometimes has big trouble with some of its democratic allies? And so forth.
We are in an era of growing protectionism, where both political parties seem to have forgotten about the benefits of open but managed trade. This is especially true of Trump, who remains enamored of the long-discredited notion that tariffs are a way to tax other countries and an easy way to make a country richer and more productive. My question to both candidates would be: Do you know what the law of comparative advantage is, and would you base your foreign economic policy on it? (Bonus points if they mentioned David Ricardo, but I wouldn’t expect that.)
Lastly, I’d ask each candidate to tell me what their top foreign-policy priority was. If they could accomplish only one major foreign-policy goal over the next four years, what would it be? Halting climate change? Negotiating a meaningful Middle East peace agreement? Driving a wedge in the “axis of resistance”? Restarting a serious effort at strategic arms control? Getting Russia out of Ukraine or helping Mexico deal with violent drug gangs? Reforming the U.N. Security Council? There are countless possibilities, and I wouldn’t necessarily expect them to follow through in office even if they told the truth. Surprises are commonplace in foreign policy, and the best-laid plans are frequently overtaken by unexpected events. If you don’t believe me, just ask George W. Bush what happened to his foreign-policy agenda on Sept. 11, 2001. But I’d still like to know where these candidates would like to lead us if they could, and how they think they could get there.
That’s my advice. Reading it over, I think it’s safe to say that neither campaign will be calling me up and offering me some one-on-one face time with their chosen candidate. But if you’re a working journalist, podcaster, or talk show host and you get that opportunity, you’re welcome to use my suggestions. No need to say where you got them.
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