The Observer view on US presidential election: Kamala Harris has set out her global vision. But can it work?

Most Americans pay scant attention to foreign policy and national security issues when voting for president – or so pollsters say. Yet how Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, the two possible White House successors to Joe Biden, view the world is of considerable interest to foreign audiences, not least people in Britain who hope, for example, that Keir Starmer’s government will not be faced with collapsing US support for Ukraine, a Russian victory and an existential crisis within Nato.
Such destabilising, dangerous outcomes appear entirely possible should Trump, a neo-isolationist ultranationalist Republican and appeaser of dictators, secure a second term. But how does Harris, who accepted the Democratic party’s nominationin Chicago last week, view the world and its many problems and challenges? If, as we hope, she prevails on 5 November, what Harris thinks and does as leader of the foremost global democracy, economy and military power will have profound, far-reaching impacts.
Anyone glancing at the Democrat’s CV might be forgiven for thinking this former Californian prosecutor and one-term US senator lacks requisite experience and knowledge. In barely disguised misogynistic terms, Trump is already querying her fitness to be commander-in-chief, calling her a “lightweight” with a “low IQ”. Such characterisations are insulting – and plain wrong. Harris used her time in the Senate wisely. As a member of the intelligence committee, she gained expertise in the foreign policy challenges of the future such as AI, cyber-security and space. As vice-president, she led from the front at events such as the Global Summit on AI Safety and the Cop28 climate conference.
In some ways, Harris is a continuity candidate, a bright apprentice who received her foreign policy schooling from the experienced Biden. Yet precisely because she still broadly adheres, for now at least, to his approach to many key global issues, a Harris presidency could yet disappoint the progressive left. This is already true of Gaza. Her public support for Palestinian self-determination last week, while welcome, lacked substance, detail or a time-frame. In contrast, her solidarity with Israel was unconditional and unflinching. Likewise, questions hang over how forcefully she will pursue the climate goals so important to younger voters.
Harris regressed into too-familiar, ultra-patriotic rhetoric in her Chicago speech, insisting, somewhat chauvinistically, on America’s unparalleled greatness. She vowed to ensure the US, not China, ruled the 21st century roost – an echo not only of Biden but also of Trump’s confrontational zero summery. And she regurgitated easy talk about the triumph of “freedom”, undefined, and the menace posed by the autocrats and tyrants so admired by Trump.
Speaking at the Munich Security Conference earlier this year, long before she was catapulted into the presidential race, Harris offered a candid insight into her global outlook. The US faced fundamental questions about its engagement with the world, she said – about “whether it is in America’s interest to fight for democracy or to accept the rise of dictators, to continue to work in lockstep with our allies and partners or go it alone”. Her answer was clear. “I believe it is in the fundamental interest of the American people for the US to fulfil our longstanding role of global leadership.”
That position, if sustained, will come as a relief to Britain, the EU and east European countries worried that the transatlantic alliance and dependable American backing are unravelling. It is a comfort to Ukraine, which has reason to fear Trump almost as much as it loathes Vladimir Putin. But will she back it up? And will she jettison, in time, Biden’s simplistic overall narrative of a world divided between democracies and autocracies, good guys and bad guys? That offers no hope to people and countries in the middle, to reformers in Iran, for example, who want rapprochement with the west.
How then might Harris make a positive difference, should she win? Michael Hirsh, a Foreign Policy columnist, observed last week that in distinct areas of future foreign policy importance, Harris was ahead of the game – thanks to her work on the Senate intelligence committee and her exposure to the classified details of Russia’s 2016 US election interference. “Harris represents the next generation of national security experts steeped in newer, hi-tech threats that the Cold War generation represented by Biden is less familiar with,” Hirsh wrote. “These encompass an array of cyber threats, including election hacking and surveillance from abroad, allegedly including from state-run companies such as China’s Huawei; threats from space, such as reported Russian or Chinese plots to disable GPS systems; and over-the-horizon risks from AI and quantum computing.”
These emerging threats add new dimensions to pre-existing struggles – principally the ongoing challenge to American hegemony posed by China, Russia and likeminded states. These challenges are unlikely to abate during a Harris presidency, and neither will bipartisan domestic pressure to adopt less ambitious, less costly international profiles. Among those rethinking America’s post-1945 mission to “make the world safe for democracy” is veteran diplomat Philip Gordon, Harris’s national security adviser and a probable key figure in a Harris administration.
In his 2020 book, Losing the Long Game, Gordon argued that decades of American regime change policies in the Middle East and elsewhere had been an abysmal failure. He and other top advisers are said to want a “less messianic”, humbler approach in future. Whether America continues to pull back internationally is the big 21st century question. Yet whatever else Harris may do in office, the world is probably safe from another Iraq-style catastrophe.