The US Election and Europe

One of the many paradoxes of this year’s confounding presidential race is that Vice President Kamala Harris may be more difficult to read on questions of foreign policy than her famously erratic opponent, former president Donald Trump. Whereas Trump’s approach can be summarized as transactional and bullying in roughly equal measure, Harris herself appears to be more of a blank slate. 

Why is that?

An inexperienced candidate

Harris is not a complete novice. As vice president, she has sat in on principals meetings alongside Biden for four years, and has been exposed to how policy is made at the highest levels. But her resumé is thin, and her core convictions appear underdeveloped.

Harris became Joe Biden’s vice president after only one term in the Senate. Most of the foreign policy experience she acquired during that time did concern Europe, albeit refracted through a domestic policy lens. For three years she served on the Select Committee on Intelligence, which occupied itself for much of that period with investigating Russian meddling in the US elections of 2016. Regardless of the context, it is obvious that Harris sees Russia as an implacable adversary of the United States.

As vice president, her most prominent foreign policy engagements have been in the European context. For three years running she was a keynote speaker at the annual Munich Security Conference. 

During the current presidential campaign, she has repeatedly burnished her 2022 debut in Munich, which took place mere days before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. On the sidelines of the conference, she reportedly met and shared intelligence with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, and also spent time briefing allies and forging a consensus on how to respond to Vladimir Putin’s aggression.

Her three Munich speeches broadly reflected the priorities of the Biden administration at the time. There are reports that Zelensky and his team were frustrated with her rigidity in 2022, but this was quite likely due to the fact that she was not deputized by her boss to do much more than deliver information. In any case, her public speech was nothing more than a rote account of Biden’s read of the situation ahead of Russia’s invasion. 

In 2023 she gave a speech calling out Russia’s increasingly brazen war crimes, and in a stretched rhetorical flourish cited her experience as a prosecutor in California as one reason why she is so committed to a rules-based international order. 

And in 2024 her Munich address was a stump speech for Biden, who was still running at the time. She excoriated the isolationist tendencies of Republicans and tried to reassure the audience that the ‘foreign policy for the middle class’ approach adopted by her administration was vanquishing populism at home.

Harris’ portfolio has not been limited to Europe. She has also represented the Biden administration in Asia, traveling to the region four times and meeting with various heads of state. As in Europe, she has been competent but has yet to articulate a foreign policy vision that is convincingly her own. At an ASEAN summit last year, for example, she once again referred to her legal career in explaining her commitment to upholding international norms and order. 

But inexperience is not the whole story.

A truncated campaign

Harris officially became the candidate at the Democratic National Convention. This time, however, there was no primary process preceding the coronation. During primaries, candidates usually form various working groups to develop policy ideas. This is particularly pronounced in foreign policy, where campaigns usually deputize experts to come up with both regional and functional whitepapers. 

Harris is therefore not only short on fresh-sounding policy; she is short a team of her own experts that can brief her – and whom she could interrogate to form a stronger worldview of her own.

Furthermore, it appears likely that even if Harris wins the presidency, the Democrats will still lose the Senate. This could mean that she will face additional obstacles to getting her preferred cabinet confirmed. Given her shallow bench of trusted outside experts, Harris will therefore be looking hard at existing Biden appointees (who would not need to be re-confirmed to serve in her administration) and calculating which among them she would trust staying on.

All of these factors have led most analysts to conclude that Harris is likely continue in Joe Biden’s foreign policy footsteps. But what exactly does that constitute?

More of the same?

Looking back over the past four years, a ‘Biden doctrine’ is discernible. The president’s main goal has been to rationalize American foreign policy for the post-unipolar moment – to put in place a framework for American ‘leadership without hegemony’.

If Donald Trump’s term represented an unconstrained irruption of latent American resentments about providing security and order for the global commons since the end of the Cold War – a task that, admittedly, was becoming less and less sustainable – Biden’s team sought to put their predecessor’s disruptions to more productive use. 

In economic terms, Biden’s aforementioned ‘foreign policy for the middle class’ continued but refined Trump’s use of tariff barriers, coupled with a robust set of investments targeted at strategically significant domestic sectors. For Europe, that has meant keeping Trump’s steel and aluminium tariffs in place (albeit in suspension), and the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which heavily subsidized a number of emerging green tech sectors. In geostrategic terms, Biden sought to reverse Trump’s aggressive abandonment of alliances – mostly by reassuring NATO allies – while curtailing America’s direct military involvement abroad.

Vice president Harris’ closest national security advisors, Phillip Gordon and Rebecca Lissner, do not appear to dissent very much from Biden’s overall approach. They will, however, have to continue to adapt it to an increasingly violent and unstable world. 

Two bloody and seemingly intractable proxy wars – in Ukraine and in the Middle East – have replaced the ‘forever war’ in Afghanistan that Biden abruptly ended in 2021. The United States may not have any boots on the ground, but its clients – Ukraine and Israel – are putting a strain on America’s military readiness by chewing through kit and armaments. And diplomatically, managing two unpredictable proxies has become an all-consuming task. Gordon, a possible pick to head Harris’ National Security Council and a transatlanticist who is also well known for his thoroughgoing scepticism of American intervention in the Middle East, may find it difficult to shift as much attention to Europe as he might like.

For their part, Europeans encountering a Harris administration ought to avoid repeating the mistakes they made when Biden first arrived in office. Biden sought to repair the damage Trump had inflicted on the transatlantic alliance by declaring that ‘America is back’. Europeans breathed too deep a sigh of relief in 2021, failing to fully grasp that neither Trump nor Trumpism had been completely vanquished by Biden’s victory. While a Harris victory may finally sideline an ageing Trump, it should by now be clear that Trumpism as an ideology is entrenched in the Republican party, and will be fervently promoted by a rising generation of politicians such as JD Vance.

America’s domestic polarization is not solely driven by economics, it would seem. Biden’s attempts at a more responsible populist protectionism – keeping the tariffs around and passing the IRA and the CHIPS Act – have not yielded the political benefits he might have hoped for. Anger at credentialed elites has reshaped the Republican party, and that anger has entrenched resentment against any whiff of positive-sum global-minded thinking, for instance on trade or the climate. If a policy is not obviously transactional and if leaders are not openly speaking of putting America’s interests first, half of the country is likely to be staunchly opposed. While no Democrat will be as hostile as the Republican base demands, no American ally should count on these hostile attitudes receding from American politics for the foreseeable future.

No going back

European leaders ought to meet the Harris administration with proposals for strategic grand bargains that are transactional on the surface, even if they represent win-win gains. For example, Europeans ought to consider making a credible pledge to invest in their military capacities on a tight and verifiable schedule. They should do this with an eye to demonstrating to American voters that Europe is determined to take over responsibility for securing itself from Russian aggression in the next five to ten years. The grand bargain would entail that in exchange the United States would remain vocally committed to NATO while rolling back Trump’s protectionist policies against Europe and working in earnest with its allies to coordinate an aggressive trade policy to contain China. 

Getting to a deal that can stick will be no easy task. Working out a grand bargain on trade will require painful concessions on both sides – on tariffs and on subsidies. The one potential bright spot for Europeans might be that the Harris administration, now also keenly aware that Trumpism is here to stay, will want to put the transatlantic partnership on as solid a footing as possible. Indeed, post-Trump, Republican politicians may be content to have a freer trade relationship with allies across the Atlantic if they feel that NATO burden-sharing is being taken seriously.

Europeans ought to take note of one of Harris’ unofficial campaign slogans: ‘We are not going back!’ She didn’t mean it to reflect her foreign policy preferences, but given political realities, it is spot-on. Europeans must not be in denial – America is not coming back as Biden promised upon being elected. But that is no cause for despair. The future needs to be shaped. And given Harris’ own lack of solid priors on foreign affairs, allies may find her a partner willing to get creative in coming up with durable solutions.