On July 21, 2024, bowing to the increasing pressure from both leading members of his party as well as many of his most important donors, President Joe Biden withdrew his candidacy for re-election. His decision to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race could well change the prospects for America’s relations with Europe after his term comes to an end.
Biden had been a weak candidate; his halting and at times confused performance in his debate with Trump on June 27 convinced all but his immediate family and closest advisors that he was an aging figure who lacked the stamina to compete with Donald Trump, though Trump was only a few years younger than the 81-year old president. If Biden were to remain in the race, he was certain to lose. As soon as Biden bowed out, the democrats coalesced around vice-president Kamala Harris and anointed her as his successor, much to Trump’s chagrin. The former president had not seriously considered that he might be opposed by a considerably younger and far more vigorous candidate who could unite the disparate and often conflicting elements on the Democratic Party in a manner that Biden simply could not.
Whereas Biden is a long-time internationalist in general, and Europeanist in particular, Trump demonstrated during his first term in office that his approach to foreign policy was purely transactional, with no sense of commitment to America’s allies and partners and friends, or antipathy towards its adversaries, or more generally authoritarians of any stripe.
Trump’s statements in the current electoral cycle have given no hint that his approach to America’s overseas relations has changed since he left the White House in 2020. Indeed, in choosing J D Vance as his vice-presidential candidate, Trump has signaled that he is totally comfortable with American neo-isolationism, which he has long trumpeted under the “America First” slogan that he recycled from the isolationist mantra of the 1930s.
The Democratic party’s virtually unanimous decision to designate Vice President Kamala Harris as Biden’s replacement has fundamentally changed Trump’s prospects for re-election and with it, the likelihood that America would indeed continue its slow turn inward, especially with respect to Europe and NATO.
Harris certainly does not possess anything like Biden’s foreign policy expertise and experience, especially with respect to European affairs. She hails from the West Coast, whose politicians and experts traditionally and primarily have focused on Asia and the Pacific. Harris was elected to several California offices, but none of them involved foreign policy. Once she joined the Senate, she did serve on the Senate Intelligence and Homeland Security Committees but her membership of those committees does not appear to have provided her with significant foreign policy expertise.
In contrast, Biden was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee three times between 2001 and 2009, and served as its ranking member from 1997 until he became chairman and subsequently when he did not chair the committee. More particularly, Biden also was a three-time chairman of the committee’s subcommittee on European affairs and was co-chairman of the Senate’s NATO Observer Group. While serving in the Senate Biden was a strong supporter of arming the Bosnians and of NATO’s intervention in the Balkan War.
Since her election to the Vice Presidency Harris has traveled overseas widely throughout her term as Vice President to gain some foreign policy credibility. She has visited twenty-one countries and met with over 150 leaders. That, however, has not necessarily translated into foreign policy expertise.
Harris’ initial forays into American foreign policy were related to her role in the Administration’s efforts to reduce if not eliminate the immigration challenge that America faced on its southern border. Her critics claimed that she seemed disengaged from the region; in any event many observers judged her efforts a failure.
Harris made several visits to Asia during the first three years of Biden’s term. Of particular note was a comment she made in September 2022 while on a trip to the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas. Harris erroneously referred to the American alliance with “the Republic of North Korea.” And did not correct herself but continued on with her speech. Perhaps more than anything else, it was that slip in particular that rightly or wrongly saddled her with the image of a babe in the woods of foreign policy.
Harris made multiple trips to Europe; of note she was the American delegation leader to the annual Munich Security Conference, which as this audience knows well, many European and non-European leaders attend. For that reason, the venue tends to be a stage for major policy statements, whether by Americans, Europeans, or leaders of other nations. In that regard it is worth recalling that Vladimir Putin essentially laid out his future plans for Russia in his 2007 speech to the conference, which also was marked by his bitterness towards the West in general and the United States in particular. His words are worth repeating, at least in part, because they foreshadowed Russia’s growing antagonism for nearly the next two decades. “I consider that the unipolar model is not only unacceptable but also impossible in today’s world…I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernisation of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust.”
Because of the conference’s importance as a venue for national leaders, planeload of Senators and Congressmen attend each year. Biden himself spoke at the event multiple times, both as senator and then as Vice-President Harris’ performances at the conference, at least until earlier this year, were most notable for their absence of an impact. When the recently elected Joe Biden addressed the conference in 2021, doing so virtually due to Covid, he proclaimed that “America is back,” a phrase that became almost a mantra for his administration. Attending the conference in person the following year, Harris committed no vice-presidential blunders, but it appears that she did not make much of an impression on her audience. Instead, it was Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who accompanied her to the conference, who played a more consequential role interacting with the foreign leaders in attendance, many of whom he had dealt with for some time while serving as then-Senator Biden’s senior foreign policy staffer.
Harris did repeatedly voice the Administration’s support for Ukraine, and met with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a half dozen times, both in Europe, including at the Munich Conference, and in Washington. Nevertheless, unlike Biden and many world leaders, she never traveled to Ukraine; she thus did not have the on-the-ground experience that she could share with her European counterparts.
Though she does not appear to have had a major impact on Biden Administration policy toward Ukraine, Harris has maintained, if not intensified, her vocal support for Ukraine. In her remarks to this year’s Munich Conference that offer a strong indication of what her position on Ukraine would be should she be elected president, she emphasized that:
I will make clear President Joe Biden and I stand with Ukraine. In partnership with supportive, bipartisan majorities in both houses of the United States Congress, we will work to secure critical weapons and resources that Ukraine so badly needs. And let me be clear: The failure to do so would be a gift to Vladimir Putin.
Despite her strong remarks, it is far from clear whether Harris will continue the Biden Administration’s current policy of cautious support for Kyiv tempered by fear of a Russian nuclear response, or, especially given Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk, which did not provoke that response—at least not yet—would she would support a more aggressive policy. She could permit, indeed, encourage, allies such as the UK, France, Poland, the Czech Republic, Sweden and Finland, to take an even more aggressive stance in their shipment of weapons to Kyiv. She could authorize the dispatch of longer range ATACMs, allowing Ukraine to hit targets deep into Russia. She could also accelerate F-16 training of Ukrainian pilots, and indeed, dispatch F-16s directly from the United States. Should she be elected in November, she will have at least two months to review the current Administration’s Ukraine policy; indeed, she is unlikely to make any changes to that policy until well into 2025.
As with Ukraine, Harris has echoed the Biden line on NATO. Again, she has not taken the lead on NATO policy; that has been the president’s domain, given his long and deep ties to Europe. She does not appear to have played a substantive role in the process that led to Finnish entry into NATO. Nor was she assigned the task of convincing Turkey’s Recep Tayyib Erdogan and Hungary’s Viktor Orban to lift their respective holds on Swedish entry into the alliance. Nevertheless, as with Ukraine, her pronouncements on NATO offer an indication of how she will relate to the Alliance if she is elected. As she told this year’s Munich Conference: “For President Biden and me, our sacred commitment to NATO remains ironclad.”
As her remarks this year in Munich would indicate, by all accounts, Harris has become much more visible and outspoken on foreign and national security issues beginning in 2023. Foreign leaders reportedly claim that she has displayed much more gravitas in their dealings with her than was the case in the first years of the Biden Administration. In addition to her remarks in Munich this year, she has strongly criticized China’s aggressiveness in the South China Sea.
Most significantly, she has veered somewhat from Biden’s full-throated support for Israel, and moved closer to the views held by most European states, including those with close ties to the Jewish state. She has voiced more sympathy for Palestinian suffering in Gaza than has the president. Indeed, her views on the war may have contributed to her decision to choose Minnesota governor Tim Walz over Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro as her running mate. Shapiro has been an outspoken advocate of Israel and a critic of pro-Palestinian demonstrations on college campuses. Walz, while, like Harris, a supporter of close Israeli-American ties, has been far more reticent on both issues.
It is worth noting that despite her increasingly sharp foreign policy profile, Harris does not appear to have negotiated any substantive agreements or even coordinated joint activities with any foreign leader, as, for example, did Vice President Al Gore. During the Clinton presidency Gore jointly led a commission with Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin to improve American-Russian cooperation.
Nor was Harris responsible for any successful overseas initiative, such as Vice President George W. Bush’s coordination of support for the successful airlift of Ethiopian Jews to Israel in 1984. Nor does she appear to have had the same degree of overall influence over key foreign policy decisions, as did Vice President Dick Cheney, a former Secretary of Defense, who had years of experience with foreign officials.
Harris appears to have no close relationships with any foreign leader. One-off meetings, or even multiple meetings that do not lead to initiatives of any kind, simply do not develop the depth of relationships that American policy leaders, whether presidents or senators such as John McCain, or for that matter, Senator Joe Biden, were able to forge over the years.
Harris’ choice for vice-president, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, adds at least some national security heft to the Democratic ticket. From all accounts, Walz appears to have been chosen not only because he shares Harris’ progressive views, but also because he comes across as a common sense mid-Westerner. He certainly had the early and vocal support of the far-left Congressional “squad” and of Pramila Jayapal leader of left-wing progressive caucus in the House of Representatives, in which he had served for six terms (i.e. twelve years).
While serving in Congress Walz posted a moderate-to-Left voting record. He voted to repeal the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) that was the basis for continuing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but nevertheless supported funding for those wars, a position that became increasingly controversial as the two wars dragged on. Walz was a member of the House Armed Services Committee, which, like its Senate counterpart, sets national security policy as well as pay increases for the military. That committee often favors increases in defense spending above the Administration’s request, and is usually bi-partisan in doing so. For his part, Walz fit well into the committee’s bipartisan ethos.
Walz also was a member of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, which focuses on human rights abuses in China, maintains a political prisoner database, and, more recently, tracks what it terms “Chinese transnational oppression” of Chinese minorities in the United States and elsewhere. Walz is certainly a Sinophile; he speaks Mandarin, though not fluently. Nevertheless, he has been a strong critic of the PRC’s human rights record, as his membership of the commission indicates. His interest in Chinese human rights stemmed from his years as a young teacher in both Hong Kong and the PRC.
Walz also was a member of the House Veterans affairs Committee and briefly served as its minority ranking member. He held leadership positions in both the Congressional Veterans Jobs Caucus, and the bipartisan House National Guard and Reserve Caucus. The latter seeks to ensure that Guard and Reserve “have the proper inputs on policy, procurement, force structure and utilization within the Department of Defense.”
Walz’ membership of the two committees and of the veterans’ caucuses, as well as his voting record on national security, reflect his own military experience. He is a decorated veteran of the National Guard, in which he enlisted at the age of seventeen and served for twenty-four years, at one point reaching the rank of Command Sergeant Major and retiring as a Master Sergeant.
Walz’ service included a six-month deployment to Europe after 9/11 in support of Operation Enduring Freedom (the war in Afghanistan). He did not see combat, and his retirement two months before his unit was to deploy to Iraq has been the subject of some controversy. In fact, he could have been ordered to deploy to Afghanistan and Iraq any time after 2001 until his retirement, had Washington chosen to “federalize” his unit as it did other National Guard units during those conflicts, as I recall from my days as Under Secretary of Defense. By the time he retired he was the highest-ranking enlisted soldier ever to serve in the Congress.
Apart from his early years in the Far East, and his military deployment to Europe, Walz’ travels outside the United States have been relatively limited, however. As Governor he has led business delegations to Canada, and in June 2024 was part of the American delegation to France to commemorate the 80th anniversary of D-Day. But, like Harris, Walz does not appear to have developed close relationships with foreign leaders, nor has he negotiated any national security agreements with foreign officials.
The Democratic ticket’s relative lack of deep foreign policy experience need not necessarily prove a hindrance to a successful Harris Administration’s foreign and national security policy. Much will depend on the quality of Harris‘ advisors. It is worth recalling that Harry Truman had virtually no foreign affairs background and had only been overseas as an artillery officer in World War I. Yet he successfully brought the war with Japan to an end; blocked Soviet efforts to destabilize Greece and Turkey; and launched the reconstruction of Western Europe in the form of the Marshall Plan. It also was during his administration and with its leadership that both NATO and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade came into being. What underpinned Truman’s success was the quality of his leading advisors, most notably Secretary of State Dean Acheson and General George C. Marshall, who announced his eponymous plan and who served Truman as Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense and Special Envoy to China.
Harris may not have a Marshall or an Acheson to support her, but she does have a long list of former Obama and Biden Administration officials to choose from as well as from her own vice-presidential staff and from those who served her, or knew her, in the Senate. In particular, Philip Gordon, her current national security advisor, as well as assistant to the president, likely would have an important role in a Harris Administration. During the first Obama Administration, Gordon was Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, while during the second Obama Administration he was White House Coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa and the Persian Gulf Region with the rank of Special Assistant to the President.
Other veterans of the current as well as previous Administrations who might have leading national security positions in a Harris Administration include Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, Deputy Secretary of Defense Katherine Hicks, Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell, Secretary of the Army and former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Christine Wormuth and former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy.
Finally, she has named Yohannes Abraham, currently U S Ambassador to ASEAN and a former chief of staff of the National Security Council, to lead her transition team. Eric Holder, who served as Attorney General under Barack Obama and also has been involved in transitions, will again play a similar role.
In contrast to Harris’ foreign policy background, there is little that is not known about Donald Trump’s foreign and national security policy orientation. He is fundamentally transactional, and primarily concerned with his personal, and some allege, financial, self-interest. His relationship with Vladimir Putin is puzzling, to say the least. He claims that had he been president, Putin would never have invaded Ukraine; his assertion, like so many others, ranges between unverifiable and downright fanciful. Trump’s negative attitude toward NATO and the NATO allies likewise reflects his isolationist impulses, as well as his strong belief that the allies should pay the United States for the protection it affords them. He claims that it was his threats that led many of the European NATO allies to increase their defense spending. While there is some truth to that particular claim, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was an equal, if not greater contributing factor in waking Europe up to the need to bolster its defenses.
Trump’s views regarding Europe, and for that matter, China and other countries in Asia, do not appear to have changed since he last served as president. Whether his views regarding the Middle East have changed is unknowable. During his term of office, Trump displayed unflinching support for Israel, though that may have been due to the outsized influence of his daughter Ivanka, a convert to Judaism, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, both of whom served as his senior advisors. Neither are playing a prominent role in the current presidential campaign.
It is noteworthy that Trump also maintained close ties with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, due to both Kushner’s relationship with the Crown Prince and his own business prospects in the oil-rich kingdom. Trump evinced little interest in Saudi Arabia’s human rights record and likewise tended to ignore Egypt’s alleged human rights violations. He continues to remain silent regarding both, likely because he invariably tends to ignore human rights concerns.
JD Vance, Trump’s choice for his vice-presidential running mate, has less than two years’ service in the Senate and no prior governmental experience. He enlisted in the Marine Corps spent four years in the service and was deployed to Iraq for six months. He did not see any combat and was assigned as a what he termed a “combat journalist;” he actually was a public affairs official. He retired from the Marine Corps with the rank of Corporal; he does not serve in the Reserves.
Because Trump is so transactional as well as self-centered, it is not at all clear whether Vance would have any influence over him should Trump win the election. The same uncertainty applies to whomever Trump chooses as his national security team. Several veterans of his previous administration could return in a second Trump Administration. Among them are Robert O’Brien, who was Trump’s fourth national security advisor; Mike Pompeo, who served as both CIA Director and Secretary of State; Nadia Schadlow, who worked in the White House as deputy National Security Advisor; and, in a somewhat lesser position, Elbridge Colby, who as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense coordinated the department’s defense strategy. None of these people have broken with Trump, or publicly criticized him, as have two of his secretaries of defense, Jim Mattis and Mark Esper.
There are, of course, other candidates for leading national security posts if there is a second Trump Administration. These include Republican senators Tom Cotton (Arkansas), often mentioned as a possible secretary of defense, and Marco Rubio (Florida), a potential Secretary of State, as well as Trump’s first, and short-lived, national security advisor, retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn. Unlike the others, Flynn has virtually no chance of obtaining Senate confirmation; his radical views have alienated both Democratic and Republican senators. Trump could of course, name him an acting cabinet officer; the former president has shown considerable disdain for the confirmation process. Or Flynn could return to his previous post, which requires no Senate confirmation. Other candidates for sub-Cabinet level posts, as well as jobs ranging down to deputy assistant secretary could be drawn from the Heritage Foundation, which published Project 2025, from members of the House of Representatives, or even from mayors of smaller towns.
Trump has also named transition leaders. Linda McMahon, former head of the Small Business Administration, made her fortune as CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment. Her transition co-chair, Howard Lutnick, is CEO if the financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald. Neither has any links to the notorious Project 2025, whose contributors include many Trump officials, but which Trump has publicly disowned.
Despite the usual speculation about who might be the winning candidate’s senior advisors and cabinet officers, presidents will not necessarily pursue policies with which they previously were identified or indeed with their stated priorities during their campaigns for the White House. Moreover, external events will influence a president’s decisions—which indeed might involve an about-face from his (or her) previous priorities. As former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has put it, “the enemy gets a vote.”
During the 2000 election campaign and indeed during the first eight months of his administration, George W. Bush’s national security concerns centered on walking away from the anti-ballistic missile treaty as well as increasing what he and his team of “Vulcans” (of which I was one) considered to be an underfunded defense budget. As I recalled in my memoir (A Vulcan’s Tale),
No one…made an issue of Iraq…In fact…the notion of going to war to unseat Saddam [Hussein, the Iraqi dictator] was never debated among the Vulcans…Instead, while all the Vulcans agreed that Saddam had to go, policy discussions relating to Iraq during the campaign and the [post-election] transition centered on toughening sanctions against Baghdad toaccelerate the economic squeeze that would lead to the regime’s collapse.
As for Afghanistan, it
commanded even less attention from the Vulcans than did Iraq. No one spoke about unseating the Taliban. No one pointed out that al Qaida was in virtual control Of pieces of the country. Afghanistan simply was not on anyone’s radar screen in 1999 or the year 2000.
In sum, the incoming George W. Bush administration did not focus at all on Afghanistan until 9/11.
It is also worth noting that presidents can and do ignore the recommendations that their senior advisors proffer to them, and at times have done so on the most critical of issues. Truman ignored George Marshall’s strong opposition to recognizing the State of Israel and instead elected to follow the advice of his political aide, Clark Clifford. Similarly, Lyndon Johnson stubbornly refused to give any weight to Under Secretary of State George Ball’s opposition to continuing, indeed, escalating, America’s operations in the Vietnam War. It was a decision that ultimately led Johnson to withdraw from the 1968 presidential campaign.
Finally, there is the reality that all not advisors to a presidential candidate ultimately will serve in a new Administration, or even if they do serve, may not occupy the positions they sought or expected. Donald Rumsfeld thought that he would be named Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, not Secretary of Defense, a position he had held a quarter century earlier. It was widely anticipated that Indiana Senator Dan Coats would win the defense job. But Coates did not interview well with president-elect Bush, and Bush instead chose Rumsfeld to be his defense secretary, while Coates was named Ambassador to Germany.
Nevertheless, whom a president chooses as his or her team of advisors does constitute an indication of the Administration’s priorities, at least at the start of its term of office. It is for that reason that America’s allies, partners, and friends make every effort to determine as best they can not only the candidate’s own statements during the campaign, but the previous writings and statements of those whom they believe are the candidate’s closest advisors. In this regard, it can be said that the Democratic job candidates appear to be more internationally oriented than their Republican counterparts. Still, given Trump’s previous track record, what he and his Administration might or might not do if he defeats Harris and returns to the White House will remain an open question that might only be answered on a day-to-day basis.
