What Awaits a Harris Presidency

Kamala Harris may well become the 47th president of the United States. If she does, it is virtually certain that she, like most of her predecessors in the past 100 years, will enter office focused on a domestic agenda, only to find herself consumed by problems of foreign policy and national security. How will she meet them? No one knows, including her. Like many candidates before her, she has not been tested in this field, and in any case, nothing really fully prepares a politician for the presidency.

But the problems that she will face are knowable. The question is whether she and those around her will have the courage to see them clearly, accept that they differ from the challenges of the recent past, and act accordingly.

The first of these is the global security crisis caused by the growing alignment of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea in opposition to the United States and its allies. The next generation of American policy makers must begin with a conceptual leap, from focusing on regional problems to global ones. Peaceful competition for trade and influence with China occurs everywhere, including in Latin America. Now national-security challenges from China in the form of bases and military deployments, as well as the undermining of American alliances and partnerships, are present as well.

[Jonathan Rauch: The world is realigning]

Russia is also not limited in its reach while its war of conquest in Ukraine is sustained by Iranian and North Korean weapons and munitions and the Chinese supply of ingredients for indigenous arms production. Iran and its clients and cat’s paws have a reach far beyond the Persian Gulf. The Beijing-Moscow-Tehran-Pyongyang axis is not yet a full-fledged oppositional alliance, but it has gone well beyond being a purely transactional and temporary set of relationships. The United States has not faced the like since the end of the Cold War, and in some ways, not since its early phases.

The second, and even more serious, threat the United States will face is that of war—not the remote and isolated Iraq and Afghan Wars of this century’s first two decades, or the precision wars waged against Islamists with commando raids and individual assassinations, but large-scale conventional war. China has put its military industry on a war footing. In quality, too, its military technologies are comparable to America’s and, in some cases—in its deployment of hypersonic weapons, in particular—ahead of ours and everyone else’s.

China’s capabilities, including its growing nuclear arsenal, are not in doubt. Neither is its trajectory for the continued production of very large numbers of sophisticated weapons and platforms, with a defense industrial base that is now both much larger and more fully mobilized than that of the United States. The rhetoric of the Chinese government, particularly regarding Taiwan, suggests a willingness to use force, and increasing confidence that it can outmatch the United States. That, and the domination of Chinese policy by an aging Maoist autocrat with an eye on his place in history, means that by intention or through some unforeseen chain of events, the United States could very well face “a kind of war we have no modern experience with,” in the words of Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall.

A war that began over Taiwan would not end there, in the same way that the war that began at Pearl Harbor was not confined to the seas around Hawaii. And the American strategic challenge will be exacerbated by a Russia that, no matter how the Ukraine war ends, will seethe for many years with anger against the United States and will seek revenge. Americans may think Russia is waging war against Ukraine. Moscow believes that NATO, led by the United States, has waged war against Russia, and, under President Vladimir Putin or a successor, it will seek payback.

[Eliot A. Cohen: The awfulness of war can’t be avoided]

To meet these daunting problems, unprecedented since World War II, a President Harris will turn to the Democratic foreign-policy elite—predominately the cadre of 30-to-50-year-olds who staffed Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

These officials are, to begin with, shaped by a preoccupation with the Iraq War and contempt for George W. Bush’s administration, which launched it—no matter that many Democrats, including Biden and Hillary Clinton, supported it. That attitude is captured in the “Don’t do stupid stuff” injunction of Obama, and it pervades the writings of those who have served in supporting roles since 2008.

But a supercilious sneer derived from the debates of two decades ago is not the basis for a sound foreign policy. The assessment that both the Iraq and Afghan Wars were botched, and that an assertive American stance would be folly, helps account for the disasters of Obama’s Syria policy and Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. It has led to a policy of patching rather than shaping—visible in the deal that attempted only to delay (and not end) Iran’s nuclear program while doing nothing to address the core of the problem: Iran’s drive for hegemony in the Persian Gulf and Middle East and its inveterate hostility toward Israel and the United States. In its inclination for caution, if not indeed timidity, this approach accounts for some of Biden’s hesitation about arming Ukraine to the fullest, with maximum quality and speed.

Add to fear a complacency about international politics that has produced a defense budget that, as a percentage of GDP, has flatlined or even modestly shrunk. Vapid bureaucratic platitudes such as “integrated deterrence” have substituted for strengthening the sinews of military power. The United States spends less than 3 percent of its GDP on defense, comparable to the percentage we spent in 1999 in a far more benign world, and way below the nearly 5 percent we spent in 1979 (under a Democratic president, no less). The defense budget needs to be put on a path to substantial growth, but instead is projected to stagnate or even decline. And this at a time when the bipartisan Commission on the National Defense Strategy, led by a former Democratic member of Congress, began its most recent report this way: “The threats the United States faces are the most serious and most challenging the nation has encountered since 1945 and include the potential for near-term major war.”

As vice president, Harris has made the case for American global leadership, which is good. I hope that she, and those around her, will realize that what we call “the rules-based international order” is really an American-made and American-led international order, something that will not exist without American strength. In the world of foreign-policy speeches, cant and clichés mask the need for genuine strategic choices.

Of the decisions she would need to make as president, none will be more important than her choice of subordinates. President Biden had the putative advantages of 50 years of experience in the Senate and a wide array of former staffers at his disposal. In reality, these were as much weaknesses as strengths. His instincts, shaped by the Cold War, led him to be too cautious in confronting Putin, too willing to speak openly about fears of escalation, and too willing to limit the aid that Kyiv desperately needs. The result has been an unnecessarily prolonged war that may still end disastrously for Ukraine.

[Read: Ukraine has changed too much to compromise with Russia]

Biden’s self-confidence and large pool of staffers have meant that he has not recruited figures with the independent stature and distinctive visions of national security advisers such as Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Brent Scowcroft; secretaries of state such as Cyrus Vance Sr., George Shultz, and Madeleine Albright; and secretaries of defense such as Harold Brown, William Perry, and Robert Gates. Harris will need to look for men and women with that independence and quality to appoint to her Cabinet, and then, unlike President Obama, let them exercise leadership under her direction instead of centralizing control in the White House. Like any president, she needs formidable subordinates who have the courage, while sitting in the Oval Office, to say, “With respect, Madam President, I think you are mistaken.”

Past administrations of both parties understood the need in a time of peril to tap expertise from across the aisle. Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush appointed Democrats of the ilk of Paul Nitze and Max Kampelman as ambassadors, senior State and Defense Department officials, and special negotiators, not to mention to Cabinet positions. John F. Kennedy’s director of central intelligence was a Republican, John McCone; Franklin D. Roosevelt famously picked two distinguished Republicans, Henry Stimson and Frank Knox, to serve as secretary of war and of the Navy, respectively. Obama had the good sense to keep Gates on the job at the Pentagon. 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.

Whatever awaits the United States under a President Harris, a continuation of the uneasy present is the least likely scenario. Rather, a thunderous wave of crisis may break on her administration. Whether she chooses to prepare for that, rather than for the more moderate and navigable surf of the past four years, will be the first, and not the least important, test of her leadership.