Jonathan Harounoff
NY Post, July 27, 2024
“Nowhere would Trump and Harris diverge more than on addressing Tehran’s nuclear weapons program. A Harris administration, notes Jason Brodsky of the United Against Nuclear Iran watchdog, would focus on perpetuating a Biden-esque policy of concessionary soft diplomacy while attempting to revive a nuclear deal.”
Kamala Harris is the presumptive Democratic frontrunner — despite garnering zero votes from the electorate, a failed 2020 presidential bid and difficulties articulating what policy decisions, if any, marked her vice presidency.
But the 47th president will be tasked with navigating a slate of global quagmires involving China, Russia, Iran and Israel-Palestine. So how would Harris’s foreign policy stand up against Trump’s?
The VP’s first foreign policy moves since becoming the likely nominee have been characterized more by her absences rather than actions.
She was missing from Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech to Congress on Wednesday — an event typically convened by the vice president. Instead, Harrris addressed a historically Black sorority event in Indiana.
Harris also failed to outline any foreign policy objectives in her first campaign rally in the battleground state of Wisconsin on Tuesday, instead paying homage to her octogenarian boss, while vowing to prosecute Trump’s criminal record.
It was a sharp contrast to Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, where he vowed to “end every single international crisis that the current administration had created,” including the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, adding that when he was president “Iran was broke [and] had no money. Now Iran has $250 billion.”
A lawyer by training, Harris’s foreign policy portfolio is razor thin, marked by record illegal crossings at the US-Mexico border during her tenure as Biden’s unofficial “border czar.”
If Harris were to win the 2024 election, she would mostly stick to Biden’s foreign policy playbook on Iran, China and Russia, while striking a less sympathetic approach toward Israel to appease her party’s progressive bloc. Also dictating Harris’s foreign policy agenda would be her chief foreign policy adviser, Philip Gordon, a former Obama State Department official who helped negotiate Iran’s conciliatory nuclear deal back in 2015.
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