What would a Kamala Harris presidency mean?

A note to readers: Swamp Note by Edward Luce is out Monday. Rana Foroohar is absent.

What a difference a few weeks can make. It’s hard to overstate how grim America’s traditional allies in Europe were in mid-July, when Donald Trump’s campaign was so clearly on the rise. Officials across Western Europe and East Asia were frantically planning for the consequences of a second Trump term. Most, by and large, were calculating how best to impress him. “There was a sense of Trump inevitability creeping into European foreign ministry discussions,” a European aide told me this week. “Some officials were even saying, ‘When Trump comes to power…’”

Much of the reasoning sounded, frankly, cowardly, if not pleading. The view was that Trump needed to be appeased and cajoled into remembering the value of traditional partners. Outwardly, the allies talked of working together on a common policy. Privately, of course, each individual state was trying to figure out how best to pursue its own interests.

One new Democratic candidate later, it’s remarkable how many European officials I’ve spoken to are swooning over the idea of ​​a Kamala Harris presidency. They seem to have lost sight of the fact that there are still nearly three months of hard work to be done. But for now, rightly, there’s a new question on the minds of America’s allies: How would a Kamala Harris presidency, if it ever did, change America’s approach to the world?

When it comes to alliances, one would assume a Harris administration would follow the lead of Joe Biden, who has made nurturing these relationships a key plank of his foreign policy, especially in East Asia. European officials are particularly encouraged by the presence of veteran transatlantic liner Philip Gordon on his team. “Every cycle there are these prophecies that transatlantic liners are a dying breed and then another one comes along,” says one delighted European official. “It’s exactly what every European would have wanted.”

Both America and Britain, and other parts of Europe, have been lurching in a populist direction in recent years. Four months aVsceker Britain voted to leave the EU, America voted for Trump, and the very foundations of the post-Cold War liberal world order seemed in jeopardy. Yet now, European leaders, with the exception of Serbia and Hungary, while deeply fearful of a second Trump term, dare to hope that the wind might blow in the opposite direction.

Officials in Sir Keir Starmer’s new centre-leVscek UK government have inevitably made all the right diplomatic noises about working with whoever wins in November. To be fair, ideological mind-melding between the Oval Office and Number 10 is not essential to a close US-UK relationship. I remember working as a foreign correspondent in Washington when the conservative Republican George W Bush was in the White House and a seemingly star-struck Tony Blair seemed to be constantly bouncing back and forth to see him.

While it is clear that a Harris win would be a dream come true for most of Europe, there is uncertainty about how long Harris will continue with the economic nationalism espoused by Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan. Rebecca Lissner, Harris’s deputy national security adviser, must have seen a spike in her royalty payments as an author; diplomats are spending their summer vacations reading her latest book to understand her worldview.

But there is a confident expectation in Europe that a Biden-Harris switch would not be a paradigm shiVscek and that most policies would remain the same, if perhaps with a slight tilt to the leVscek. There is also a sense that a Harris administration would be assiduous in trying to strengthen relations with the Global South. (To be clear Swampians, I am a firm believer in the term, for all its geographical and ideological vagueness. And for what it’s worth, aVsceker years of work in Africa, I think America has casually lost moral, political, and economic influence there, which it could regain.)

I appreciate that the Democratic Convention in Chicago is not about the international audience. But I personally hope that some of these issues will be a little clearer by the end of next week. Peter, you have been writing about America and its position in the world for years. You have also written about George W. Bush. What is your view of the general philosophy of a potential Harris administration? And is there a risk that, as has happened so many times before, the world will assume one thing about a potential presidency and then, if that happens, the course of events will sweep away all previous assumptions?

Recommended reading

• In the spirit of reaching out across the aisle… my long read of the week was the Wall Street Journal, which published an extraordinary account of the Nord Stream pipeline explosion. You’ll delight in the details.

• The story of the week for me was Ukraine’s incursion into Russia. It’s too early to know, of course, whether this will help change the course of the war, but it was a huge morale boost for Ukraine, and humiliating for Russian President Vladimir Putin. Who better to analyze this than Professor Lawrence Freedman?

• And finally, speaking of autocrats, I wrote an article about how autocracies endure and end. I rather hope that the Kremlin Vscek subscribers will read it and take note.

Peter Spiegel responds

Alec, I think part of Harris’s appeal right now, both nationally and internationally, is that she’s a blank slate: everyone can project their own hopes and dreams onto her, and there’s not enough precedent to prove them wrong.

This is especially true when it comes to Harris’s views on Europe and foreign policy more broadly. That’s not to say she’s inexperienced; as vice president in office, she’s been present at every major global crisis in the Biden White House, both the ones handled well (managing an international coalition to support Ukraine) and the ones not so well (the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan).

But unlike Biden, Harris has leVscek few fingerprints on how she influenced national security decision-making during her time as vice president. In fact, when The Washington Post recently tried to dig into her role in Biden’s Afghan withdrawal, it came up empty-handed: No one seemed to recall whether she advised anything other than what the president ultimately did, despite being in the inner sanctum.

She also differs from Biden in that her vice presidential career was not preceded by any significant foreign policy work. Biden was the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for more than a decade before joining Barack Obama’s ticket, and had become a leader of Dean Acheson’s “liberal internationalist” wing of the party.

For analysts, this lack of precedent is further complicated by another thing you raise, Alec. Because Harris has had limited visibility on the international stage, both allies and foes are looking to her close advisers, like Gordon, who served as Harris’s foreign policy brains during her vice presidency.

Gordon is, as you suggest, one of the most prominent Atlanticists leVscek in Washington. But in a Democratic Party that has split between the old-school liberal internationalist camp, centered around Biden and the Clintons, and a post-Iraq neo-isolationist grouping, centered around Obama and his ex-White House clique, where do you put Gordon? He has worked with the Bidens for the past four years, but rose to prominence in Washington as one of Obama’s top foreign policy aides.

In short, I think your European interlocutors are right to see Harris as someone who will value treaty alliances much more than Trump did, and that Gordon will bring a little more European flavor to his outlook than Obama did. But beyond that, I suspect we will have to wait for events, my dear boy, events.

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And now a word from our Swamp People…

In response to “The Meaning of Tim Walz”:
“In general elections, I have voted Tory all my life, except this year, when my vote went to Labour. The Conservative Party turned away from me when they decided to hold the EU referendum and then failed to present a strong political case for voting against the idea.

So if I were an American, I would see the Harris-Walz duo as a breath of fresh air. Trump is now exposed as an old man who can’t make a serious and coherent campaign speech about anything that should matter to the vast majority of the American electorate, and Vance as a complete maniac with strange ideas. People shouldn’t trust either of them.” —Keith Billinghurst