When it comes to foreign policy, Vice President Kamala Harris is an unknown quantity. To be sure, she does not lack foreign policy experience: As vice president, she has visited more than 20 countries and met over 150 foreign leaders. Nevertheless, her episodic remarks on foreign policy and national security issues, including those during the Sept. 10 presidential debate, do not add up to a well-defined philosophy or an integrated point of view.
This is particularly true of her views on Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia. She has had little to say about those matters, other than at fora, such as the Munich Security Conference, for the past three years or, more recently, at the Ukraine peace summit in June, where she subbed for President Joe Biden. As was to be expected, she delivered prepared speeches advocating administration policy. Such remarks offer limited insight into her own personal views. What principles would guide her decision-making, and what issues would she prioritize, if elected president? On those and related questions she has offered little grist for reflection.
Normally, a candidate would be compelled to lay out a foreign-policy vision during the long, grueling presidential contest in debates, town-hall meetings and extended media interviews. But Harris did not have to run that gauntlet: She gained her party’s nomination uncontested after Biden abandoned the race on July 21. The short time remaining before the election on Nov. 5 almost guarantees that her foreign policy views will not be scrutinized; domestic issues, as usual, are likely to dominate the campaign. Moreover, her strategy appears aimed at turning the election into a referendum on Trump and his character, contrasting her “joy” with his dark view of America. She wants the election to be a matter of character and mood, not policy detail. She put that approach on vivid display during the recent presidential debate.
In these circumstances, the temptation is to fall back on the assumption that Harris would in the main continue the Biden administration’s approach to Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia, even if by all accounts she played only a minor role in formulating it. This is the assumption that most leaders of the West and global powers are operating on, and with good reason. Famously, the Democratic Party saw no need to amend its platform to reflect the fact that Harris had taken over from Biden at the head of the ticket. Moreover, Harris will likely draw largely on the same pool of experts and party leaders Biden did in staffing her national security apparatus.
At least at the declaratory level, we can thus expect Harris to remain committed to helping Ukraine defend its sovereignty, maintaining and strengthening transatlantic unity and preventing escalation to direct conflict with Russia and the risk of a nuclear cataclysm that would entail, as the party platform indicates. If elected, Harris would also call for countering Russia’s disruptive actions across the globe, in part by seeking to disrupt its growing strategic alignment with China, Iran and North Korea. As has been true for Biden since he took office, a reset with Russia would be out of the question.
These declarations, while necessary, are not sufficient, however. The crucial question is how much energy a President Harris would devote to advancing those goals. Take the war in Ukraine, for example. In the past year, the Biden administration has devoted exponentially more high-level attention to the Israel-Palestine issue than to Ukraine. It is directly involved in seeking a ceasefire in Gaza. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has visited Israel nine times since Hamas’s horrific terrorist attack on Oct. 7, 2023.
By contrast, Blinken has traveled to Kyiv once since then. Meanwhile, Biden decided to skip the Ukraine peace summit in favor of a Hollywood fundraiser, sending Harris instead. And the administration let the supplemental funding bill for Ukraine languish in Congress for months, while the situation on the battlefield in Ukraine grew increasingly dire. Until the last minute, it was unwilling to expend the political capital to help a Republican speaker overcome resistance in his own party to bring the bill to a floor vote, which revealed strong bipartisan support for Ukraine. So far, at least, Harris has given little indication that she will devote more attention to Ukraine, although her vice presidential pick, Gov. Tim Walz, who has long been a strong supporter of Ukraine, could influence her thinking.
Would such a posture be sustainable in a Harris first term? In a way, Biden has been lucky. The inherent tension among the pillars of his approach to the war in Ukraine has not been exposed. The Ukrainians beat back Russia’s initial assault on Kyiv, and the war quickly stalemated with Russia occupying about one-fifth of Ukraine. Biden has never faced the question of whether to go to war with Russia to save Ukraine as a sovereign state. But Harris could, if Russia proves more resilient than Ukraine (hardly a certainty, but assuredly a possibility). In such a situation, refusing to engage Russia militarily out of fear of a nuclear catastrophe could spell the end of Ukraine as an independent state and unravel transatlantic unity in the face of the Russia threat. What would Harris do? We do not know. But that is not the point. The point is that we do not know enough about Harris’s foreign policy philosophy and instincts to even be able to speculate intelligently about her response.
What is true for the war in Ukraine is true for any other foreign policy choice that Harris might have to make should she win the election. The first real inkling we will have of her foreign policy will come when she announces the individuals who will assume the critical national security posts in her administration—the Secretaries of State and Defense, the National Security Adviser and the intelligence chiefs. But that will come only after Nov. 5. If she wins, domestic issues are likely to have proved decisive—polls indicate that the economy is the top concern for voters by a wide margin. Nevertheless, foreign policy is also an important issue for voters. To the extent that matter figures in their calculations, in picking Harris, voters will have decided that the unknown quantity of Harris was the better bet than the known quantity of Donald Trump.
Find RM's compilation of Harris's views on post-Soviet Eurasia here.