Kamala Harris is all but telling Americans they’ll have to elect her to find out what she really believes, as the Vice President ducks interviews and the media give her a free ride.
This is bad enough on domestic issues, but on foreign policy it could be perilous. The world is more dangerous than it’s been in decades, and Americans deserve to know how the woman aiming to be Commander in Chief Harris would confront these threats.
Ms Harris this week tweeted a photo of her sitting next to President Joe Biden in the White House situation room discussing the Middle East. The point is to suggest she’s a co-pilot on Biden foreign policy.
This isn’t the credential the Harris campaign thinks it is, and the voters should hear directly from her what she thinks about the 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal, the failure to deter Russia in Ukraine, the Iranian nuclear program, China’s island grabs in the South China Sea, and more. The matter is all the more important because Ms Harris conspicuously declined to choose a running mate who might lend foreign policy experience to the ticket.
Ms Harris has given a few hints about her own views on the Middle East, and those aren’t encouraging. Her team spent much of Thursday walking back whether she told an anti-Israel group she’d be willing to ponder an arms embargo against Israel.
She skipped Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to congress when our main Middle East ally is under siege. Did she pass over Josh Shapiro as her running mate because he would have enraged the anti-Israel wing of the Democratic Party?
To the extent she has revealed a larger instinct on national security, it’s been wrong. She told the Council on Foreign Relations in 2019 that she’d rejoin the Iran nuclear deal as long as “Iran also returned to verifiable compliance”. But Iran didn’t comply and is now on the brink of a nuclear breakout.
Her 2018 Senate vote to “end US involvement in the Saudi-led air campaign in Yemen”, as Ms Harris put it in a tweet, also hasn’t aged well. The Houthis the Saudis were fighting are now targeting commercial ships in the Red Sea almost daily and putting US naval assets at risk. Does she think this status quo can persist – and what would she do differently?
Ms Harris will surely argue that she and Mr Biden reinvigorated the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation after Vladimir Putin’s invasion in Ukraine. But absent a change in US political will, the war in Ukraine isn’t on track to end on terms favourable to American interests. Her past enthusiasm for banning fracking – which her campaign is trying to walk back – also suggests she isn’t serious about checking Mr Putin’s main source of war financing.
Ms Harris would no doubt also tout the diplomatic progress the Biden administration has made in Asia with Japan, the Philippines and others. Yet she whiffed on one of the single most important diplomatic questions in Asia: She opposed Barack Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal that would have excluded China and boosted America as the region’s premiere trading partner.
Most important, will Ms Harris build up the hard military assets required to deter China’s Xi Jinping and a consolidating axis of US adversaries? “I unequivocally agree with the goal of reducing the defence budget,” Ms Harris said as a senator in 2020 after voting against a Bernie Sanders proposal to slash the Pentagon by 10 per cent.
That vote needed no explanation, but Ms Harris wanted to make sure the left knew she was sympathetic. Does she still want to slash the defence budget?
Donald Trump often shoots from the hip on these subjects, and his favourable comments about dictators are witless. But his first-term record, especially on Iran and the Middle East, is far stronger than the Biden-Harris performance. Americans shouldn’t have to read tea leaves to figure out if Ms Harris would keep the country safe in a treacherous world.
The Wall Street Journal
More Coverage
‘Not in the clear yet’: Los Angeles braces for resurgent winds
Powerful winds have threatened to slow the containment of blazes that left 24 people dead, and officials anticipate the death toll will rise as searches continue.
Hamas has another Sinwar. And he’s rebuilding the terror group
Under Yahya Sinwar’s younger and more brutal brother, Hamas is recruiting more fighters in Gaza, drawing Israel into a war of attrition.