Kamala Harris Is Not a Foreign Policy Ingenue

If she wins, Harris would be the second-most experienced foreign policy president in this century.

Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash

Hey, remember that media weirdness that I was talking about yesterday? A recent Politico story by Eric Bazail-Eimil on Kamala Harrris’ foreign policy experience provides another example. The larger point it is making — that “the White House has increasingly touted Vice President Kamala Harris’ role in foreign policy since President Joe Biden’s decision that he wouldn’t run for reelection” — is interesting and perfectly appropriate for reportage. It was when I got to this paragraph, however, that I came up short:

Name-checking Harris — or any vice president, for that matter — is unusual and suggests an attempt to buttress her credentials as she faces questions about her ability to manage international affairs and confronts an experienced opponent in former President Donald Trump.

There were two ways this paragraph tripped me up. The first is the description of Donald Trump as “an experienced opponent.” The description ain’t wrong — being president for four years is pretty significant foreign policy experience! Looking over Trump’s foreign policy record, however, his actual accomplishments are… let’s be generous and use the word “meager.” But still, Bazail-Eimil’s use of “experienced” is fair.

More interesting, and more puzzling, is the assertion that Harris needs, “to buttress her credentials as she faces questions about her ability to manage international affairs.” Bazail-Eimil doubled down on that claim later in the piece:

It now appears that the White House is trying to puff up a relatively limited foreign policy resume, argues John Hannah, a foreign policy aide in both Democratic and Republican administrations who served as Vice President Dick Cheney’s national security adviser.

“The flurry of announcements to highlight her deepened involvement in several recent events is clearly of a piece with that effort to play catch up and do the best they can to plug what is obviously a potential weakness,” said Hannah, who is now a senior fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America.

Before becoming vice president, Harris had only some foreign policy experience as a member of the Senate Intelligence and Homeland Security committees and wasn’t seen as a major foreign policy player on Capitol Hill.

Hannah’s critique of Harris is standard partisan politics. Bazail-Eimil’s placid acceptance of that critique is baffling. There is both general and specific evidence that Kamala Harris should not be facing any serious questions about her ability to conduct foreign policy.

Let’s start with the general evidence. Harris’ foreign policy and national security experience to date primarily comes from her four years as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and her subsequent four years as Vice President. I’ll get into the details of those stints in a second. Just on the surface, however, Harris has way more foreign policy experience than any post-Cold War president other than Joe Biden. Consider:

• Bill Clinton: Governor of Arkansas, no substantive foreign policy experience;

• George W. Bush: Governor of Texas; see above;

• Barack Obama: Four years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee;

• Donald Trump: Zero, nada, no, repeat, no foreign policy experience;

• Joe Biden: Decades on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee followed by eight years as vice president.

Of course, as noted above, it is not like Trump’s four years as president demonstrate that he is actually qualified to oversee foreign policy, so it is worth looking a little deeper at Harris’ time in the Senate and as Vice President to assess her performance.

Fortunately, she has acquitted herself quite well in both stints.

This BuzzFeed story from five years ago contains nothing but praise for Harris’ service on the Senate Intelligence Committee — including from her Republican colleagues:

The two years Harris has spent on the Senate Intelligence Committee have earned her the praise of her colleagues — Republicans included. They also shed light on some of the qualities that might define her presidency.

Harris, who has used her skills as a prosecutor to climb the ranks of the establishment, has used those same skills to great effect on the committee, according to her Senate colleagues — setting herself apart as an incisive interrogator. Behind the closed doors of the committee, she is mostly a bipartisan actor, focused on information gathering rather than scoring political points, senators told BuzzFeed News….

Senators from both parties say that Harris, who has shaped much of her presidential campaign around her image as a sharp-tongued prosecutor, is the same person behind closed doors as she is in front of the television cameras at public hearings. She is a smart colleague and a skilled questioner, they said, who largely steers away from partisan posturing during their private hearings….

“She’s been actively engaged since day one,” said Warner, who has yet to endorse a Democratic presidential candidate. “There was no kind of warm-up period for her. She jumped right in.” Republicans might disagree with her at times, Warner said, but "know she's whip smart."

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a Republican on the committee who ran for his party’s presidential nomination in 2016, echoed Burr’s comments about Harris’s work ethic, saying she’s “engaged and active,” and “absolutely” comes to the briefings well-prepared.

NOTUS’ Byron Tau and John T. Seward wrote on this topic last month, and their reportage matches the older BuzzFeed story:

Behind closed doors, [Harris] played a pivotal role in pushing the Republican majority panel to conduct an aggressive and thorough investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, according to staff and members who served with her. She also got a whirlwind national security education that has had a lasting impact on the worldview she now holds as the Democratic presidential nominee, those who worked with her tell NOTUS….

It was also Harris, a newcomer to the panel and to Washington writ large, who prodded her fellow committee members to conduct an aggressive investigation that would stand up to public scrutiny, according to two people who were in the room at the time and two other congressional staffers briefed later on closed-door deliberations of the panel.

“It’s a committee that we always prided ourselves with bipartisanship, particularly back when we were doing the Russia investigation,” Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the panel, told NOTUS. “She fit very much into that mold, or, you know, had the committee work together on items, but she also was not at all intimidated about asking hard and tough questions.”

Three people said it was Harris, drawing on her experience as a prosecutor, who laid out expectations for what senators and staff should be doing and how they should divvy up responsibilities. And one person said that when other senators hesitated at the possibility of authorizing certain investigative steps like interviewing Trump’s family, it was Harris who pushed them to follow every investigative thread to its conclusion. (And indeed, the GOP-led panel would end up subpoenaing Donald Trump Jr. and interviewing Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, twice.)

“They came out of there saying, ‘Wow, she fucking knows what she’s doing,’” recalled one former Democratic Senate aide whose boss was in the 2017 closed-door meeting.

What about her time as Vice President? Slate’s Fred Kaplan wrote an illuminating column on this topic last month that is worth excerpting:

It turns out [Harris] knows, and has actively been involved in, a lot more than has been reported during her three and a half years in office….

One crucial fact: According to several officials, Harris has attended almost every National Security Council meeting and, more important still, almost every President’s Daily Brief, during which a senior intelligence officer lays out, both in writing and in an oral presentation, the threats and other developments affecting U.S. interests across the world. Biden receives four or five PDBs a week. These are not passive exercises; they often last an hour or more, with Biden, Harris, and other officials asking follow-up questions; sometimes the president calls in senior Cabinet secretaries or military advisers to discuss these issues at still greater length….

Harris has actively engaged in these meetings. Nancy McEldowney, her national security adviser for the first year and a half of the Biden–Harris term, says Harris has been “a leading voice in the discussions during the briefings as well as subsequent deliberations both in the Oval [Office] and the [Situation Room] that focused on our responses to the intelligence. She has engaged on every issue and every part of the world.”

Other officials, speaking on background, confirm this account and say that this has remained the case in the two years since McEldowney left.

In February 2022, when the PDB revealed new, highly reliable intelligence that Russian President Vladimir Putin was about to invade Ukraine, officials who were present say that it was Harris who suggested that the intel be shown to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a face-to-face meeting—then made the trip to do so herself. One official recalls, “This was some of the most detailed intelligence sharing, outside of intelligence channels, that I have been party to. And her presentation of it, along with options of what we could do about it, was compelling.” Harris has since met with Zelensky five more times.

Kaplan goes on to highlight Harris’ role in smoothing over Franco-American relations, wooing the Philippines away from China’s orbit, and developing U.S. policy on the regulation of artificial intelligence.

Even Harris’ supposed Achilles’ heel — her remit to lead diplomatic efforts in Central America to reduce cross-border migration — look pretty good in retrospect. The Washington Post’s Toluse Olorunnipa and Maria Sacchetti took a close look at what Harris was tasked to do in that portfolio: “Her immigration role for the Biden administration has included boosting U.S. aid to Central America, traveling to the region and discouraging potential migrants from making the dangerous journey to the United States…. Migration from the three Central American countries during the Biden administration has fallen 35 percent, from about 683,890 to 447,270 in 2023, lower than it was in 2019 under Trump.” To be sure, Harris’ efforts may not be directly responsible for that decline. But if the thing that is supposed be her biggest albatross and that was the outcome, it does not seem like that big of an albatross.

This is a pretty substantive record for a vice president! It’s not, as Hannah claimed, “a relatively limited foreign policy resume.” Furthermore, Harris’ two key foreign policy advisors, Phil Gordon and Rebecca Lissner, are also seasoned professionals. A Harris administration would likely be better prepared to conduct foreign policy on day one than former president Trump.

To sum up: Kamala Harris possesses far more foreign policy experience than most other post-Cold War presidents. Her track record in her foreign policy forays is pretty impressive. And her foreign policy team is better prepared to take over on January 20th than Trump’s D-listers. And the media coverage of this particular angle of the 2024 campaign remains… odd.