Now that U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris has seemingly all but locked up the Democratic nomination for the 2024 presidential race, one of the biggest questions swirling around Washington and foreign capitals is what a Harris foreign-policy doctrine would look like if she is elected in November.
Now that U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris has seemingly all but locked up the Democratic nomination for the 2024 presidential race, one of the biggest questions swirling around Washington and foreign capitals is what a Harris foreign-policy doctrine would look like if she is elected in November.
Pinpointing the distinctions between U.S. President Joe Biden’s foreign-policy views and Harris’s is no easy task, given that the two have sought to present themselves as being in total lockstep on foreign-policy and national security issues for nearly four years. But she has run for president once before, albeit briefly, and she served as a U.S. senator from 2017 to 2021, so she’s not a blank slate, either.
In addition to reviewing her record and past statements, Foreign Policy spoke to over a dozen current and former U.S. officials, congressional staffers, experts, and former aides to Harris to learn more about where she stands on the key regions and foreign-policy issues in which the United States is involved—from China to the Russia-Ukraine war to the Middle East and beyond. Here’s what we found out.
Kamala Harris puts her hand to her chest as she speaks surrounded my members of the media holding microphones, phones and cameras. They stand on board a ship with the ocean in the background.
U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris speaks to members of the media after delivering remarks on a Philippine Coast Guard ship at Puerto Princesa Port on Nov. 22, 2022. Haiyun Jiang/AFP via Getty Images
Harris’s China track record is relatively limited compared to Biden, who even as a candidate in 2020 could boast that he’d spent extensive time with Chinese President Xi Jinping as vice president. Harris has only a brief moment of face time with the Chinese leader on record, when she “greeted President Xi” heading into the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Bangkok in 2022.
Harris’s strongest China experience may be the time she has spent trying to shore up U.S. alliances in the broader Indo-Pacific region as vice president. She has traveled three times to Southeast Asia as VP, visiting Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia. Her visit to the Philippines included a stop in Palawan, an archipelago in the South China Sea; during the trip she underscored the United States’ “unwavering commitment” to its ally in a meeting with President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. She has often stood in for Biden at meetings in the region as well, including at the U.S.-Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit in Jakarta last September.
The position she put forward on China as a 2020 presidential candidate aligns closely with White House policy over the past four years—pursuing competition and cooperation simultaneously. In a September 2019 primary debate, she said of China, “They steal our products, including our intellectual property. They dump substandard products into our economy. They need to be held accountable,” while adding that the United States should cooperate with China on key issues like climate change.
However, her vision did differ from current policy in one respect: She criticized then-President Donald Trump’s China tariffs and had previously said she wasn’t a “protectionist Democrat.” However, the Biden administration has largely maintained the Trump tariffs, and many Democrats who were previously anti-tariff, including Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, have supported them in the wake of the pandemic and rising competition with China.
Human rights stand out as an area of focus for Harris both as a senator and a presidential candidate. She and 55 other senators co-sponsored the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, which imposed sanctions on officials for violating human rights in Hong Kong during the mass protests against a controversial extradition bill.
The following year she co-sponsored a law applying a similar playbook to China’s human rights abuses in Xinjiang. She also called for then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to take further action in a subsequent letter after reports came out detailing the Chinese government’s efforts to restrict birth rates in Xinjiang. Her views have been reflected in the Biden administration’s policies, which have been tough on human rights issues in China.
Overall, experts said, her approach to China policy is unlikely to diverge significantly from Biden’s.
“Biden’s China policy in a way is a reflection of Democratic consensus,” said Rick Waters, managing director of Eurasia Group’s China practice who formerly served as the first head of the Office of China Coordination at the State Department. “I don’t expect dramatically different China policies out of Kamala Harris. I really do think that the architecture is pretty much set.”
Harris (center) waring a dark suit shakes hands with Modi, wearing glasses and a blue tunic. At right is Biden in a blue suit. Emhoff and Sullivan wear dark suits behind her. All smile in greeting.
Harris shakes hands with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi as he arrives with U.S. President Joe Biden at the White House in Washington, D.C., on June 22, 2023. Behind her are her husband, Doug Emhoff (left), and national security advisor Jake Sullivan. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
India has been one of the brightest spots in the Biden administration’s bilateral relationships, with Washington increasingly seeing it as a pivotal counterbalance to China and a key partner in the United States’ wider Indo-Pacific strategy. Defense and technology have been particularly strong pillars of the U.S.-India relationship, with several deals and initiatives announced during Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s state visit to Washington, D.C., last year.
As with other partnerships and regions, experts said Harris’s India policy is unlikely to diverge significantly from Biden’s. The U.S.-India relationship has had reliably bipartisan support for decades, including under Trump, and remains too important on both sides to significantly shake up.
Harris does have a more personal connection to India than any U.S. presidential candidate has ever had—her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, immigrated to the United States from India, and Harris has repeatedly cited her mother’s influence on her life and her views. Politically, however, it’s unlikely to play much of a role. “Certainly, Harris’s ancestral ties to India are something she would likely leverage to convey her own affinities for India,” said Michael Kugelman, director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Center and writer of Foreign Policy’s South Asia Brief. “But in terms of India policy, there really wouldn’t be any daylight between her and Biden.”
Harris has actually been tougher on India than Biden in the past, criticizing the country’s human rights record under Modi—particularly on Kashmir—when she was a senator and also in a more subtle way during multiple engagements with Modi in Washington during her vice presidential tenure. Should she become president, however, that criticism may well be tempered. “I don’t expect her to be tougher than Biden on rights, or at least not tougher than U.S. strategic interests would allow,” Kugelman said.
At the same time, Harris’s age and her younger, chronically online support base could make her more willing to have those uncomfortable conversations. “She’s also from the next generation of Democratic politicians; she’s not from President Biden’s generation,” said Aparna Pande, director of the India Initiative at the Hudson Institute, adding that younger Americans who form a large part of the party’s future base put far more stock in religious freedom and global injustices. There’s also Harris’s own political bent. “She comes from the left side of the Democratic Party to some extent, the progressive side, and so democracy matters, democratic values matter,” Pande added.
When it comes to the broader region, Harris has made multiple trips to Southeast Asia and been one of the prominent faces of the Biden administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy. But it remains to be seen how much she is weighed down during the presidential campaign by one of Biden’s lowest foreign-policy moments as president: the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan that brought the Taliban back to power. Trump repeatedly used that episode as a cudgel against Biden during their first debate, and he may do the same against Harris, though experts say it might not land with the same effect.
“I think it’s going to be difficult for Republicans to tar Kamala Harris with the Afghanistan brush,” said Lisa Curtis, a former White House, CIA, and State Department official who is now director of the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). “It was fairly clear that it was Biden’s personal decision to fully withdraw in the disastrous manner that we did,” she added.
Should Harris become president, however, Afghanistan presents her with an opportunity to really have a strong foreign-policy impact. “As a woman, hopefully we could expect Kamala Harris, if elected, to focus more on supporting Afghan women,” Curtis said. “As somebody who’s fighting for women’s rights in the United States, I think it would be hard for her to ignore what is happening to women in Afghanistan—the fact that that is the only country in the world that denies education to women and girls.”
Harris, wearing a lavender suit and heels, walks across a factory floor trailed by a man in a blue suit. Wires and equipment are seen behind them.
Harris tours LA Cleantech Incubator with President and CEO Matt Petersen in Los Angeles on March 17, 2023. Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Harris was never a trade wonk, either in the Senate or as vice president. But broadly speaking, from her time in the Senate and her 2020 presidential run, Harris has advocated for a worker-centric, green-friendly, economically literate vision of trade that fits fairly comfortably into today’s Democratic Party and contrasts evidently with the positions of Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance.
Harris consistently criticized Trump’s tariffs during his term in office, correctly identifying them as additional taxes on U.S. businesses and consumers that led to backlash from trading partners and more economic pain at home.
But Biden said much the same at the time—and went on to maintain many of Trump’s original tariffs before adding new ones of his own, even if they were more targeted and strategic duties meant to protect critical sectors. Perhaps the protectionist bug has spread far enough into both parties that even self-defeating ideas like import duties are hard for any candidate to shake off.
When it comes to trade deals, Harris is a little harder to figure out. She says she would have voted against the original North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a Reagan-Bush-era Republican brainchild that has now become a Republican bogeyman, as well as Trump’s NAFTA 2.0. She said she opposed the revised trade deal with Canada and Mexico because it did not go far enough on labor and environmental protections. She had similar objections to former President Barack Obama’s signature Trans-Pacific Partnership, which soon became toxic for both parties and was killed in Trump’s first week in office.
Like almost all U.S. politicians, Harris blasts China for stealing intellectual property and cheating on trade, but like establishment politicians for decades, she has also insisted that regional and global issues including North Korea and climate change require a working relationship with Beijing.
Harris and Zelensky smile as they shake hands in front of flags of their countries on stands behind them.
Harris shakes hands with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the Ukraine peace summit near Lucerne, Switzerland, on June 15. Alessandro Della Valle/AFP via Getty Images
Biden has sent Harris to represent him at many of the biggest international conferences, including the Munich Security Conference and the Ukraine peace summit.
Harris doesn’t have Biden’s trans-Atlantic record, but three years in a row at Munich, one of Europe’s top talking shops and a place where officials go to calm their nerves on U.S. policy, she’s hit all the expected notes as America’s reassurer-in-chief.
America’s commitment to NATO is “unwavering” and “ironclad,” she said in a February 2022 speech in Munich, just five days before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. She also said that NATO’s Article 5 self-defense pledge—which Trump has threatened not to honor for allies who aren’t meeting the alliance’s 2 percent of GDP spending mark—is “sacrosanct.”
In 2023, she returned to Munich with similar talking points on NATO but tougher language about Russia’s invasion, then a year old. The Biden administration had concluded that Russia had committed crimes against humanity in the war, she said.
And about two weeks before the debate that would effectively end Biden’s presidential campaign, Harris filled in as Biden’s surrogate at the Ukraine peace summit in Switzerland, where she called for a “just and lasting peace.”
The Kremlin has stayed mostly quiet on Harris’s presidential bid so far, with presidential spokesperson Dmitry Peskov noting the vice president’s “unfriendly rhetoric” but adding that Russia could not yet formally assess her candidacy.
Russian state media, however, immediately began to attack the Democratic Party’s new standard-bearer. “Kamala with the nuclear button is worse than a monkey with a grenade,” said Andrei Sidorov, Moscow State University’s dean of global politics, speaking on Russian state TV’s weekly talk show.
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Harris and Emhoff, both wearing dark suits, look forward with serious faces as they sit in front of the flags of the United States and Israel.
Harris and Emhoff attend Israel’s Independence Day Reception to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., on June 6, 2023. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
Perhaps the highest-profile foreign-policy crisis Harris will inherit if she wins in November is the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, and the vice president’s track record on Israel and the war is being closely scrutinized for signs of continuity or divergence from Biden.
As with foreign-policy issues across the board, Harris’s history with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is thinner than Biden’s, who had an unusual degree of foreign-policy experience by the time he entered the Oval Office. But a close reading of Harris’s voting record and public speeches suggests that she is unlikely to preside over any significant changes in the U.S. approach to the war in Gaza or the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict.“Given what she has said, it seems like continuity,” said David Makovsky, a former senior advisor to the U.S. special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
In June 2023, Harris spoke at a reception in Washington to mark Israel’s independence day in which she touted the United States’ “unwavering” commitment to Israel and her Senate track record of voting in support of security assistance for the country as well as warned against the singling out of Israel because of anti-Jewish hatred. Harris’s husband, second gentleman Doug Emhoff, is Jewish and has played a prominent role in the administration’s efforts to address antisemitism. During her speech, Harris spoke of her pride in hosting the first-ever Passover seder at the vice presidential residence.
Since the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, Harris has largely stuck by the Biden administration’s policy, which has affirmed Israel’s right to defend itself while slowly dialing up its criticism of the unsparing nature of Israel’s military campaign and pushing for a cease-fire deal that would also secure the release of hostages. But there have been a few moments of at least rhetorical divergence. “From time to time, she has stepped out and been more critical of the Israelis than the president,” said Steven Cook, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an FP columnist.
In her public statements, Harris has placed more emphasis on—and shown more empathy toward—Palestinian suffering in Gaza. That is consistent with media reports starting late last year that she has pushed the White House to express more concern about the humanitarian crisis. The Biden administration has disputed those reports.
During a speech in Dubai in December, she revisited the brutal nature of the Hamas attacks that sparked the war, but she also urged Israel to do more to protect civilians in Gaza. In a speech in Selma, Alabama, in March, she called for an immediate cease-fire to allow for the release of hostages and for aid to flow into Gaza. Though her remarks were consistent with the administration’s diplomatic efforts to broker a cease-fire deal, they were met with thunderous applause from the crowd due to her impassioned delivery.
While her policy on the conflict is largely likely to be one of continuity, she may strike a different tone than Biden, said Frank Lowenstein, the former special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations at the State Department. This perception has been echoed by those who have spoken to her personally about the war.
During a meeting with Muslim community leaders at the White House on April 2 to discuss the administration’s Gaza policy, Zaher Sahloul, a Syrian American physician who worked in Gaza on a medical mission earlier this year, said that Harris was moved by their presentation about the impact of the war on people in Gaza and approached him after the meeting to ask for more reports from the ground about the humanitarian situation. “I felt that she projected empathy,” Sahloul said. “She clearly cared about the civilian plight in Gaza.” And while she didn’t diverge from Biden on policy, her articulation of the U.S. approach to the conflict was clearer and more detailed, he said.
In public remarks following her meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday, Harris struck a forceful tone. Although she reiterated the Biden administration’s stance that Israel has the right to defend itself, she said that how it does so matters. Speaking about Gaza, she said, “We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering and I will not be silent.”
Should Harris win the election, she won’t take office until January, and a lot could change in the war between now and then. While the situation in Gaza remains bleak, the nature of the war has already changed from one of large-scale maneuvers to more targeted—though still deadly—operations. “The war is not going to be like it was in the last nine months, so I don’t know if she would face the same kinds of choices that Biden has,” Makovsky said.
