WASHINGTON — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the White House last week presented an opportunity for newly minted presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
It was only days after President Joe Biden announced he would not seek re-election when the White House decided that after the vice president met with Netanyahu, she would give the administration’s public response to his visit. The result was a moment designed to give Harris the foreign policy spotlight and a chance to reset with Democrats who had turned on Biden over the war in Gaza.
“We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering” of Palestinians, Harris said after meeting with Netanyahu, “and I will not be silent.”
Her words were nearly identical to remarks Biden has delivered in the past, including the assertion that “Israel has a right to defend itself, and how it does so matters.” They also reflect the overarching posture Harris has struck as vice president — aligning closely with Biden’s agenda, differing more on tone than on substance.
With Harris set to clinch the Democratic nomination, how she would lead the country as commander in chief remains an open question. Interviews with nearly three dozen current and former U.S. officials who have worked with Harris and her team on foreign policy issues, as well as a review of her voting record in the Senate and her public comments, offer limited clues to how she would respond to some high-stakes national security challenges facing the U.S.
Biden has an extensive foreign policy record from his decades as a senator, vice president and president, and Trump has his own record from serving four years as commander in chief. Harris’ lack of a clear record on foreign policy issues — and no definitive doctrine — is a marked difference and potentially opens a front in the battle over voters’ national security concerns in the 2024 campaign.
Critics say Harris’ reticence is a sign that she lacks both a foreign policy vision and deep expertise. Supporters say that she treaded carefully because she did not want to disagree openly with Biden and his aides, and that she gained a great deal of foreign policy experience as vice president. One senior aide to the vice president said that instead of having a foreign policy doctrine, the vice president is focused on future challenges like artificial intelligence, climate change and global competition in space.
Harris has kept her views closely held during Situation Room meetings and policy debates, according to more than a dozen current and former administration officials. Her approach was shaped early in her tenure as vice president by what these officials saw as a lack of confidence in her foreign policy chops, particularly when stacked against Biden’s résumé and hardened positions on key issues. Administration officials — from the Pentagon to the State Department and the White House — have at times tried to decipher Harris’ positions based on questions she asks on specific topics.
Five current and former officials said they believed that distrust of Biden’s inner national security circle left Harris concerned that the president’s aides would leak details of her comments if she expressed any dissent. Early in the administration she had regular lunches with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, according to a senior administration official, but the State Department declined to say how long the meetings continued, pointing instead to their consistent engagement at the White House, in the Situation Room and on diplomatic trips overseas. In remarks last month, Blinken referred to Harris as a “very strong, very effective and effective and deeply respected voice for our country around the world.”
Officials close to Harris acknowledge that she was not confident in her knowledge of foreign policy at the beginning of the Biden administration.
This was evident in her early speeches when she often depended on teleprompters and, when pressed by reporters, didn’t seem comfortable with the material. But Biden administration officials who worked closely with Harris said she has worked to turn that around and tried to use Biden’s foreign policy experience to her advantage, seeing it as an opportunity to learn from him.
“Anytime you do a job for multiple years, you get better and better at it,” one official said, adding, “nothing else prepares you for this job than doing it.”
One of Harris’ first high-profile assignments from Biden was to address the root causes of the influx of migrants at the southern border, which Trump is already making a key issue in the campaign. Biden tasked Harris in 2021 with focusing on diplomacy in the region, as she chafed at the idea of being tasked with the politically volatile assignment of broadly overseeing the U.S. border policy. In a new TV ad, the Trump campaign is highlighting Harris’ widely criticized response to a question from NBC’s Lester Holt in a 2021 interview about her not having visited the border yet. “And I haven’t been to Europe,” Harris responded.
Harris’ chief role on the world stage in the Biden administration has been to help advance the president’s policies, which she has largely done with caution and precision. Her public comments are carefully worded and routinely vetted by Biden’s top aides. During her remarks on Thursday after meeting with Netanyahu, for instance, Harris mentioned the names of American hostages, a move that had been cleared beforehand with the White House, according to one current and one former official.
The minimal differences between Harris and Biden on foreign policy have played out privately over the president’s decision to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan and, more recently, in public over the war in Gaza. When discussing both conflicts, Harris has emphasized their humanitarian challenges first, then affirmed the overarching U.S. policy — on Gaza it’s a commitment to Israel’s right to defend itself, and on Afghanistan it was a decision to end the war — while Biden has been inclined to do the reverse.
“The vice president has shown empathy on issues related to women and kids, but while she may have a different tone and emphasis, the message and policy is the same as the president’s,” a former administration official said.
While Harris aides say she strongly supported Biden’s decision to end the war in Afghanistan, pointing out she said publicly that he had “made the courageous and right decision,” privately she had stressed concerns about what the withdrawal would mean for Afghan women and children. She has raised similar questions about the dire humanitarian situation for Palestinians in Gaza.
But she hasn’t approached either issue in a dissenting way, according to officials.
On Israel, officials said she was quicker than Biden to strike a balance between firmly backing Israel and expressing concerns about the deaths of Palestinians. In a speech in December in Dubai, Harris said Israel needed to do more to safeguard civilians in Gaza, the sharpest and highest-level criticism of Israel from the administration at that point.
In March during remarks at a church in Selma, Alabama, Harris delivered the same message Biden had two days earlier — calling for an immediate cease-fire in exchange for the release of hostages held by Hamas and describing the suffering of Palestinians as unacceptable. But her emphasis was first on the Palestinians and her tone was more impassioned than the president had been. She also had a lively audience, whereas Biden delivered his statement in monotone remarks in the Oval Office.
“People in Gaza are starving. The conditions are inhumane. And our common humanity compels us to act,” Harris said at the time, later adding that “Israel has a right to defend itself. And President Joe Biden and I are unwavering in our commitment to Israel’s security.”
Still, the impression Harris has left is that she would be less inclined to embrace Israel as closely as Biden has.
“It’s a very big generational difference,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street, a left-of-center political advocacy group that calls itself “pro-Israel” and “pro-peace.”
“She brings a perspective that is much more in line with where most of the Democratic Party and up-and-coming policymakers and officials are,” Ben-Ami said.
After Harris, who had met Netanyahu only once before on a visit to Israel as a senator in 2017, delivered remarks last Thursday on the war in Gaza, a senior Israeli official criticized her to reporters, accusing her of overly stressing the importance of ending the war.
In Congress
The start of Harris’ Senate career in January 2017 coincided with the bombshell revelation from the U.S. intelligence community that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election in a bid to help Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton. Trump publicly rejected the intelligence community’s assessment and refused to criticize Russian President Vladimir Putin.
As a new member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Harris for the next three years was immersed in the committee’s closed-door, high-stakes investigation into Russia’s attempts to influence the 2016 election. The experience offered her a crash course in foreign policy, Russian espionage tactics, the potential vulnerabilities of America’s democracy and the workings of the U.S. intelligence community.
Her tenure on the committee also served as crucial preparation for her eventual role as vice president, when the Biden administration had to grapple with the fallout from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol and then the consequences of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which sparked a major war in Europe for the first time in more than 75 years.
“It shaped her worldview in terms of the primacy of defending democracy at home and abroad, as well as the importance of multilateralism and alliances,” said Halie Soifer, who served as Harris’ national security adviser in the Senate.
Harris got high marks from intelligence committee members in both parties, and her time as a prosecutor in California proved to be useful training for synthesizing reams of information, investigating adversaries and questioning witnesses, according to Soifer, who is now CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America.
After becoming vice president, Harris was not outspoken about her opinions in meetings with Biden’s national security team, according to five current and former officials present for various meetings, but she showed up prepared and would ask a barrage of questions that could be skeptical while still aligned with or in support of Biden’s positions. Her style is that of a prosecutor, effectively cross-examining national security officials and reserving judgment until she has looked at every angle and examined the evidence.
“She is very deliberative in her work. She immerses herself in the facts and then makes her own informed decisions,” Soifer said. “She will prepare extensively for every discussion, whether it’s public facing or not.”
Multiple people directly involved with the U.S. response to attacks on American forces by Iranian-backed Houthi militia group said Harris was outspoken about the need to respond, though that was the widely held view across the administration. She has also taken a rule-of-law approach to the war in Ukraine, stressing the administration’s policy that Russia pay a price for its invasion and seizure of territory.
Some officials said Harris’ views could be reflected in those of her national security adviser, Phil Gordon, a former Obama administration national security aide whose views, particularly on Israel, are closer to former President Barack Obama’s than Biden’s.
If she wins
If she wins in November, Harris is expected to put her own team in national security and foreign policy jobs throughout the government.
Her policies would likely for the most part be an extension of the Biden administration’s approach to foreign policy, officials said. Harris has been a loyal deputy to Biden on foreign policy, delivering warnings to adversaries and public and private messages to foreign leaders to underscore America’s commitment to allies in Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
One former senior administration official described her approach as “less debating in the Situation Room and more helping execute the play.”
Harris has made at least 17 trips to 21 countries during her time in office, from Europe to Africa to the Indo Pacific, according to a vice presidential aide. A senior administration official said she has used that time to develop relationships with foreign leaders meeting most frequently with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine, President Emmanuel Macron of France and President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines.
Yet it is still unclear how she would operate as president or how she would respond to some critical challenges that could arise during the next president’s term.
Unanswered questions include whether Harris agrees with Biden’s promise to defend Taiwan if it came under attack, or would stick to a more vague stance preferred by previous presidents. It’s not clear if Harris favors expanding export controls to block China’s access to advanced U.S. technology or would ease some of the tariffs that are hurting industries in the U.S. Biden has refused to further lift restrictions on Ukraine’s use of American weapons to allow them to strike deeper into Russian territory, and it’s unclear where Harris would stand on that. Similarly, if Israel was prepared to strike Iran’s nuclear program, there’s no clarity on how Harris would position the U.S.
An aide to the vice president said Harris “was deeply engaged in the policy decision-making in early 2021 and strongly supported President Biden’s decision to end America’s longest war. As she has said, President Biden ‘made the courageous and right decision to end this war because we had achieved what we went there to do.’ She has been a critical partner to President Biden as they have countered terrorist threats, as seen by their work together to eliminate leaders of al Qaeda and ISIS.”
The aide would not provide details of Harris’ private advice to the president.
One possible area of focus for Harris if elected is the Global South, and she could bring more attention to human rights.
After the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman, in custody in 2022 sparked nationwide protests in Iran, Harris pushed for the international community to unite in support of Iranian women and amplify their message, according to one senior U.S. official. She was the leading voice on the U.S. effort to remove Iran from the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, the official said.
“To all of those protesting I say again, we see you and we hear you,” Harris said in a statement announcing the U.S. intention to work to remove Iran from the commission. “I am inspired by your bravery, as are people around the world.”
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