Eliot Cohen’s foreign policy advice for a possible Harris administration is as bad as you would expect. Among other things, he recommends appointing a Republican to one of the top Cabinet positions:
Selecting a Republican secretary of state or secretary of defense, chosen possibly from the Senate or the saner parts of the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives, would be an act of statesmanship—and one which, encouragingly, she recently pledged to take.
Harris hasn’t given us many reasons to expect much improvement from her foreign policy, but putting a Republican in charge of State or Defense would be a serious mistake right out of the gate. Republicans have been coasting for decades on their earlier reputation for foreign policy competence that they haven’t deserved for at least thirty years.
The Bush era should have killed off the idea that Republicans are capable stewards of foreign policy once and for all, but somehow this assumption survived one of the worst presidencies in modern American history. The post-Bush years just confirmed that the GOP could not be trusted to steer the U.S. responsibly with their unhinged bellicosity and hostility to diplomacy. The advent of Trump gave us the worst of both worlds: a very hawkish foreign policy and even more incompetence. Why should she reward a party with such a terrible record?
Even if there are Republicans that could do either job well, it makes no sense for the side that lost the presidential election to have a major Cabinet slot. Assuming that Harris wins, why would she want to give a plum appointment to the party that she defeated? When presidents want to make a token bipartisan appointment, that’s what the Department of Transportation is for.
There is really no good reason why a new president should be expected to include someone from the other party in the Cabinet. It isn’t statesmanship. It is a silly concession to the bipartisanship fetish in Washington that prizes the appearance of comity over sound decisions. It’s also safe to say that Cohen isn’t really interested in Harris’ statesmanship. He wants a Republican in one or both of these positions because he takes for granted that this would make it more likely that Harris delivers the sort of dreadful hawkish foreign policy that Cohen wants.
The Democratic Party has been in a defensive crouch on foreign policy for as long as I can remember. That has usually led to party leaders rolling over for horrible Republican policies or implementing stupid policies of their own in an attempt to prove how hawkish and “tough” they are. As a party, Democrats have been so desperately afraid of being criticized for “weakness” on foreign policy for so long that many of them tend to overcompensate by becoming little more than clones of their would-be partisan opponents.
A significant part of Clinton’s foreign policy involved frequent unnecessary uses of force to show how comfortable a Democratic president was with bombing other countries. Most prominent national Democrats foolishly fell in line behind Bush’s drive to invade Iraq. Obama’s worst foreign policy errors in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and Yemen were the result of listening to the hawks in his party that urged him to escalate and intervene when his own instincts were usually to withdraw or stay out. Democratic politicians and foreign policy professionals spent most of the last thirty years turning themselves into a watered-down version of Republican hawks to show how “serious” they were on foreign policy, and all they did was prove how bad their political and policy judgment was. Biden’s foreign policy has been a cautionary tale about how disastrous being stuck in the defensive crouch can be.
If Harris wants to have a more successful foreign policy, she will have to find a way to get out of the defensive crouch. I don’t know if she can, and I don’t know if she wants to try. Regardless, picking a Republican to run State or Defense would take her in the wrong direction.