Harris' Missing Foreign Policy Vision
The level of incompetence in this campaign is staggering.
Van Jackson read the Harris campaign’s new “policy” page and he was not impressed:
It pains me to observe this because I want better, we need better, and I’m very invested in her beating Trump. But we are well and truly in the territory of HBO’s Veep and nobody wants to say it for fear of harshing the vibes that appear to be central to the current strategy.
The foreign policy section was notable for saying very little about anything. Most of the text on foreign policy issues seems to have been lifted verbatim from Harris’ acceptance speech, complete with the same hollow words on Gaza that we have seen before. Like the foreign policy remarks in the speech, this “policy” page comes across as a box-checking exercise to satisfy the party’s hawks. It talks about having “the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world” and reaffirms Harris’ willingness to bomb Iranian allies, but there is precious little about non-military policy tools and there is no mention of climate, migration or pandemics in the foreign policy section. If you didn’t know that the Harris is the Democratic nominee, there wouldn’t be much in the foreign policy section to let you know. Put another way, there is nothing in here that would make Dick Cheney uncomfortable.
Each section of the “policy” page includes a paragraph that focuses on Trump’s agenda, and the attacks on Trump’s record are not nearly as strong as they could and seem to be aimed at pleasing other people in the Biden administration. The Harris campaign repeatedly hits Trump for his unfitness for office, and that’s fair, but when it comes to criticizing what he did wrong as president they are reduced to saying that he “cozied up to dictators and turned his back on allies” and they refer to his disparaging remarks about U.S. servicemen. Like the rest of this section, it all comes across as hastily thrown together and half-baked.
No one expects a campaign website to have every policy spelled out in detail, but for a candidate with limited foreign policy experience it is important to demonstrate that she has something like a coherent foreign policy vision or agenda. As Jackson says, rattling off a list of foreign countries that you have visited as vice president doesn’t cut it. We don’t really care if she has been to the DMZ in Korea. What we want to find out is what her North Korea policy is going to look like. Is it going to be defined by knee-jerk hostility to engagement as expressed in the party platform, or will it be something else? It’s anybody’s guess at this point.
The continued failure to separate herself from Biden on Gaza is damning. Here is a once-in-a-generation test of moral leadership, and Harris doesn’t seem interested in trying to pass it. If Harris wants voters to perceive her foreign policy as being different from Biden’s in any way, she has to take positions that put some distance between them. For that matter, if she wants to embrace Biden’s foreign policy agenda and run on that record, she still needs to do more than string together some boilerplate phrases.
Different surveys at the national and state levels keep finding that more voters prefer Trump to Harris on foreign policy. According to a new Cato survey of swing state voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, Trump incredibly enjoys a slightly positive approval rating on his foreign policy record (51% approval in each state), and he has an edge in each of the three states surveyed when voters are asked which candidate they trust more to make decisions based on American interests first. When asked which candidate would handle foreign policy better as president, Trump consistently has at least a 4-point lead in all three states.
One reason why Harris may be lagging behind Trump on this question is that she is being weighed down by Biden’s bad policies, especially on Gaza. Another reason may be that her own foreign policy views are not well-known because she has made so little effort to articulate them. Yet another reason might be that she seems determined to run on a defense of the foreign policy status quo at a time when many Americans have little confidence in the current direction of our foreign policy. A lot of voters are hungry for a foreign policy that is different and better than what they have been getting, and so far Harris isn’t even throwing them a bone.
Harris is not incompetent at all. Harris is simply The Will To Power personified. Whatever people of influence and authority want from her, that is what she will do, if that is the price of power. Her foreign policy reflects precisely this.
As a sociopath, The Will To Power is in fact all that Harris is. Pull back the mask on Harris and you will stare into the abyss, as there literally is nothing else there.
Ever since Robby Mook was not defenestrated for blowing Hillary's 2016 campaign, the Dems have raised incompetence to an art form. So it's not at all surprising that the same out-of-touch ignoramuses who ran Biden's failed campaign are running Harris's failing campaign. And Harris doesn't have the wit, wisdom or will to change any of it which is not at all surprising. After all, she left a mess in the SF DA's office and a mess in the Calif AG's office. She ran an embarrassingly bad 2020 campaign. She has never shown any interest in governing. She has negative management skills and W's lack of curiosity. Until she was sworn in as V.P., Harris had never left the country. The only reason she has risen this high is due to her appearance because the Dem party has gone all in for identity politics to distract us from their rotten policies. Harris has no opinions. She is not clever. And she will probably lose to a dangerous idiot.