The administrations of Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden have all shared one widespread foreign-policy need: to get out of the quagmire of the Center East and focus American consideration on the doubtless epoch-making rivalry with China. Even in fiendishly polarized Washington, foreign-policy fingers in each the Republican and Democratic Events largely agree that the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq was an unmitigated catastrophe, and that the US ought to scale back its involvement within the area’s squabbles.
However just like the Lodge California, the Center East doesn’t allow you to depart, even after you try. Obama and Trump each made historic offers purportedly to extend stability within the area and permit the US to pivot elsewhere. However surprising occasions popped up for each in addition to for Biden, pulling them again in and main them to expend a lot of their vitality there.
Kamala Harris can count on no completely different if she wins the presidency in November. However the strategy she’s prone to take to the area isn’t apparent. On the whole, Harris is tough to pin down—a politically versatile operator, which has labored to her profit up to now, permitting all wings of the Democratic Occasion to see in her what they like. Critics of Biden’s staunch help for Israel hope she’ll be extra amenable to strain from the left on this concern, whereas centrists discover her reliably pro-Israel monitor report within the Senate reassuring.
Harris doesn’t come with out expertise within the Center East, however a recap of her encounters isn’t particularly illuminating. Her first-ever overseas journey as a senator was to Jordan in April 2017: She visited Zaatari, the world’s largest camp for Syrian refugees, and known as on then-President Trump to “articulate an in depth technique” on Syria’s civil warfare, during which President Bashar al-Assad had simply carried out a ugly chemical assault on civilians. Shortly afterward, she went to Israel and met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Her legislative report on the Center East gives just a few bread crumbs. In 2017, a United Nations Safety Council decision condemned Israel’s settlement-building within the West Financial institution. The Obama administration selected to not veto that decision. Harris co-sponsored laws objecting to that call, on the grounds that the UN decision was one-sided and wouldn’t advance progress towards a two-state answer, higher achieved via bilateral talks. A yr later, she deplored Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, which she mentioned was “the perfect present device now we have to forestall Iran from growing nuclear weapons and keep away from a disastrous army battle within the Center East.” She later really helpful reviving that settlement and lengthening it to cowl Iran’s ballistic missiles. She voted to chop off U.S. assist for Saudi Arabia in its warfare in Yemen, even whereas acknowledging Riyadh as an essential associate for Washington.
All of those factors, taken collectively, are extra suggestive than definitive. And so those that search to know Harris’s future overseas coverage are inclined to look to the way more elaborated worldview of Philip Gordon, the vp’s closest adviser on Center East affairs and her nationwide safety adviser since 2022. Now 62, Gordon served below President Invoice Clinton in addition to Obama and has written dozens of articles and books. The late Martin Indyk, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, famous final yr that Harris “relies upon closely on Phil’s recommendation given his deep expertise and data of all of the gamers.”
Instantly after Harris emerged because the seemingly Democratic nominee, some supporters on the left eagerly seized on Gordon’s ebook Shedding the Lengthy Sport: The False Promise of Regime Change within the Center East as a probable indicator of his, and subsequently her, opposition to deposing unfriendly regimes by drive. On the similar time, Iran hawks started attacking Gordon as a previous advocate of the Iran deal, which he helped result in as Obama’s Center East coordinator from 2013 to 2015. Republicans in Congress have already written to Harris inquiring about Gordon’s ties to Rob Malley, Biden’s former Iran envoy who was placed on depart final yr due to an investigation into his dealing with of categorized info (Gordon, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Malley have been soccer buddies within the late Nineties).
However Gordon isn’t any secret Beltway radical. He’s a coverage wonk who attracts respect from many quarters. A Europeanist who fell in love with France at an early age, he received his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins, the place he wrote his dissertation on Gaullism; he as soon as translated into English a ebook by former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, most likely that nation’s most Atlanticist chief in trendy historical past. Gordon’s early pursuits have reassured some in Europe who initially feared that Harris’s West Coast origins would incline her extra towards Asia.
Gordon has served solely in Democratic administrations and spent the George W. Bush and Trump years outdoors authorities, usually sharply critiquing Republican overseas coverage. When Israel fought Lebanon’s Hezbollah in 2006, Gordon co-wrote a Monetary Occasions op-ed that known as Washington’s help for the warfare “a catastrophe.” A yr later, he printed Profitable the Proper Struggle, a book-length critique of Bush’s Center East coverage that advocated withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan, partaking Iran with a mixture of sanctions and talks, and bringing about an Arab-Israeli peace. The ebook anticipated the principle foreign-policy targets that each Obama and Trump would pursue within the area—however Gordon’s recommended Arab-Israeli peace included a Palestinian component that Trump’s Abraham Accords didn’t.
In fact, a President Harris would haven’t one foreign-policy adviser however a full array of them, spanning the army, diplomatic, and intelligence communities. And yet another title has emerged previously week: Ilan Goldenberg, an Israeli American Center East hand who has suggested Harris on the area all through her vice presidency. Harris has appointed him her liaison to the Jewish group and tasked him with advising her marketing campaign on Israel, the warfare in Gaza, and the broader Center East.
Goldenberg’s profile is much like Gordon’s, in that he’s not an ideologue a lot as a coverage skilled who served the Obama administration in prime Center East–associated positions within the Pentagon and State Division. He has lengthy advocated for a two-state answer to the Israeli-Palestinian battle. He supported the Obama administration’s Iran coverage, however after the nuclear deal was signed, Goldenberg additionally known as for smoothing relations with Saudi Arabia and different Persian Gulf states that had been unnerved by the administration’s deal with Iran. This concern wasn’t shared by many Democrats on the time.
Harris’s lack of a grand imaginative and prescient for the Center East may show to be a blessing. In spite of everything, America’s final “visionary” foreign-policy president was George W. Bush, whose massive concepts concerning the Center East produced the Iraq Struggle. When Bush’s father first thought of operating for president, in 1988, he famously gestured on the want for “the imaginative and prescient factor.” However George H. W. Bush, in distinction to his son, would go down in historical past as a considerate choice maker who listened rigorously to sharply conflicting recommendation from his Cupboard. Lower than a yr into his time period, he confronted a number of the most dramatic occasions in current historical past, with the autumn of the Berlin Wall after which the Soviet Union. He stays a broadly praised foreign-policy president amongst each Democrats and Republicans due to the outcomes he helped safe—together with a united and democratic Europe and a sovereign Kuwait.
Up to now, little is thought about who else Harris would draw into shaping her overseas coverage, and even whether or not Harris is prone to assemble a various crew or one which resides comfortably in a single political camp. Nonetheless, Gordon’s and Goldenberg’s lengthy and severe engagement with Center East affairs recommend that Harris will resist the temptation to easily wash America’s fingers of a seemingly troublesome area. Maybe they’re the beginning of a foreign-policy crew that acknowledges coping with the Center East as unavoidable, and that integrates it with insurance policies specializing in different areas, somewhat than viewing it as a rival to them.
