Walzing into a Saner Foreign Policy?
Plus: Iran’s Napoleon strategy, Big Tech goes to war in Gaza, one weird trick to beat climate change, nuclear battle of the sexes, and AI bears and bulls.
This week brought new grounds for hope that a President Kamala Harris would pursue a foreign policy that appeals to “restrainers”—the left-right coalition that wants US foreign policy to rely more on diplomatic and economic engagement and less on military force.
Two weeks ago, NZN highlighted one cause for such hope—some not-very-blobbish views held by Philip Gordon, Harris’s current national security adviser. This week, Harris selected a running mate with a long history of promoting restraint.
Tim Walz has “real antiwar credentials,” writes Daniel Larison in Responsible Statecraft. Before becoming Minnesota’s governor, Walz spent more than a decade in the House of Representatives, where he tended to favor diplomacy over militarism in the Middle East—and vocally opposed new military action in the region even when that meant breaking ranks with President and fellow Democrat Barack Obama.
Walz’s penchant for engagement with would-be adversaries also stretches farther east. He’s long been an advocate of constructive relations with China, Washington’s current bête noire. In a 2016 interview, after criticizing Chinese military assertiveness in the South China Sea, he added: “I don't fall into the category that China necessarily needs to be an adversarial relationship. I totally disagree… When we’re on the same sheet of music—two of the world’s great superpowers—there’s many collaborative things we can do together.” And, while serving as governor, he slammed Donald Trump’s trade war with China for “hindering our economy’s growth and weakening our country’s prosperity.”
This made political sense for Walz. China responded to Trump’s tariffs with steep tariffs on pork, and Minnesota is a leading pork producer. But there is reason to think Walz’s interest in trans-Pacific concord isn’t just a matter of political calculation. As the Washington Post recounted this week, the folksy midwesterner has a surprisingly extensive history of personal engagement with China.
In 1989, after graduating from college, Walz moved to Guangdong province, where he taught high school for a year. A few years later, he returned to China with his wife for their honeymoon. The couple went on to found a company that coordinated summer trips to China for American high school students.
This week hawkish conservatives, citing Walz’s personal history and his moderate views on China, cast him as dangerously “pro-China,” if not a Manchurian candidate. Fox News host Jesse Watters devoted a segment of his show to the dark implications of Walz’s “deep Chinese ties.” Former Trump official Ric Grenell said Walz is “the pick of Communist China.”
Chinese analysts were less confident in their government’s ability to control Walz. Shen Dingli, a political scientist at Fudan University in Shanghai, noted Walz’s past criticisms of Beijing’s policy toward Hong Kong and said that his deep knowledge of China might “make him more difficult for the Chinese government to deal with.” As a congressman, Walz supported bills drawing attention to Beijing’s human rights abuses, and as governor he called China out for backing Russia’s war on Ukraine. Still, Tang Xiaoyang of Tsinghua University told the Post that Walz could help a future Harris administration “make more pragmatic China-related policies instead of relying on ideology, stereotypical views and pure ignorance.”
There is one big asterisk here. Most of Walz’s pro-engagement comments about Beijing came before 2019, when he left Congress. In the intervening years, many once-dovish politicians have started talking tougher on China, whether because of a change of heart or because they read the political winds. It remains possible that Walz will follow suit.
However, he does seem to possess something that could help him resist the prevailing winds: a penchant for cognitive empathy, a skill often extolled here at NZN. As we sometimes note in the course of this extolling, cognitive empathy isn’t about feeling your adversary’s pain or otherwise identifying with the feelings of other actors. (That’s emotional empathy.) It’s about working to understand the perspective of other actors and trying to grasp the interests and motivations that shape their behavior. This understanding can help policymakers avoid unnecessary antagonism and, when possible, reach win-win outcomes to non-zero-sum games.
Walz has evinced such an understanding in various contexts and, perhaps as important, has an earthy and accessible way of expressing it.
Iran offers a good example. Walz was an early supporter of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which Trump withdrew from in 2018. Before Trump dumped it, the accord had been keeping Iran’s nuclear energy program in check, in part by subjecting Tehran to an intrusive monitoring regime. In August 2015, Walz explained why the agreement was a good deal for America, and he did so in a way that the average American could understand, complete with a reference to the Dallas Cowboys:
I'm really struggling with the folks on the other side. Of course you don't trust Iran, that's why you need inspectors on the ground. I don't know of a better deal. The ideal situation is Iran says ‘we're totally sorry, you guys are right, here's all our stuff, we'll never say anything bad about you again and we love the Cowboys.’ I think that's what people think. They're not going to do that.
Of course, vice presidents don’t always have much influence on foreign policy. But sometimes they do (with Dick Cheney, for better or worse, being an example). In any event, in a fractured world that seems to be descending into Cold War II, it couldn’t hurt to have a vice president who views diplomacy positively and realistically—and who knows a few words of Mandarin.