Kamala Harris’ world vision: Encouraging to allies, vague on details

The passage ran for a brief 480 words, it was short on detail, and constituted a mere sliver of the 38-minute speech Kamala Harris delivered at last week’s Democratic National Convention.

Yet it drove home a message heard round the world – and gratefully received by America’s closest allies overseas.

For Vice President Harris used the occasion to make an explicit commitment to a brand of American strength, international engagement, and leadership that allies worry has been on the wane, eroded by a tighter focus on domestic politics.

For the allies, her message was doubly impactful because it was not meant mainly for them.

It was directed at her domestic audience – to the voters who will decide whether she wins in November.

Her foreign policy remarks seemed in part a bid for support from so-called Nikki Haley Republicans – shorthand for the minority inside Donald Trump’s party still committed to the bipartisan consensus forged after World War II, that America’s network of alliances was central to its global interests.

Allied leaders will draw the conclusion from Ms. Harris’ remarks that she, too, remains wedded to that vision.

That’s in stark contrast to Mr. Trump, who as president often downplayed the importance of U.S. alliances, favoring more unilateral, transactional, and unpredictable arrangements with friend and foe alike.

Still, even if Ms. Harris does win, the practical policy implications of her broad vision remain unclear.

Her speech provided only hints, to be pored over in allied capitals from now until election day.

In Europe, where Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has provoked the most serious conflict since the Second World War, Ms. Harris vowed to “stand strong with Ukraine and our NATO allies.”

But with what level of military support? For how long? With what diplomatic endgame in mind?

In the Middle East, where Israel’s military response to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israeli civilians is still raging, she paired a pledge of unflagging support for Israel’s right to defend itself with a call for a cease-fire to relieve the plight of Palestinian civilians.

The aim, she said, was to ensure that “Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination.”

But how would she wield U.S. power to reach that goal? What would America do, along with its allies in the region and beyond, to secure calm, stability, and reconstruction in Gaza?

And critically, how deeply and for how long would Washington remain committed to that task when its principal geopolitical rival lies many thousands of miles eastward: Xi Jinping’s China?

China came first in her convention remarks but merited only a couple of dozen words. “I will make sure that we lead the world into the future on space and artificial intelligence,” she said. “That America, not China, wins the competition for the 21st century.”

The brevity of the reference, and the narrowness of its focus, appeared to convey a message in themselves. She seemed to be committing herself to President Joe Biden’s targeted tariff and regulatory curbs on Chinese high-tech while also seeking to avoid an all-out rupture with Beijing, and to retain communication, even some scope for cooperation.

But as allied analysts parse each sentence, they know that many of these policy choices will depend on America’s domestic political landscape following the November election.

Top of their minds, of course, remains who wins the presidency.

But who controls the two chambers of the U.S. Congress will also matter, especially if Ms. Harris wins. Will Republican legislators echo Mr. Trump’s worldview and, for instance, press to end U.S. military support for Ukraine?

The core of policy advisers around a new President Harris would also hold considerable sway. All of them seem certain to share her broad view of the need for a leading U.S. international role.

Yet her national security adviser at the moment is Phillip Gordon, a former Clinton and Obama administration foreign policy expert whose involvement in policy decisions during the Syrian civil war taught him the practical limits of U.S. power.

It is that sense of limits, borne out in America’s retreat, under successive administrations, from involvement in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, that has fueled the belief among a number of allies that Washington is reorienting its policy priorities away from assertive world leadership, and toward domestic policy challenges.

And that helps to explain the importance being attached to Ms. Harris’ convention comments, brief though they were.

Because when it came to the importance of America’s involvement in the wider world, she could hardly have made herself clearer.

Not just because she committed herself to retaining the “strongest, most lethal fighting force” in the world, nor her pledge of support for America’s allies, nor even her impassioned vow never to waver in placing America on what she called the right side of the “enduring struggle between democracy and tyranny.”

It was a simpler, yet even broader, commitment: that as president she would ensure that “we strengthen, not abdicate, our global leadership.”