The Daily - Alliance vs. Isolation: Harris and Trump’s Competing Views on Foreign Policy

Episode Date: September 30, 2024

As wars in Ukraine and the Middle East deepen, the U.S. presidential campaign is raising a crucial question: Whose idea of American foreign policy will the world get next?Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for The Times, walks us through the plans put forward by Kamala Harris and by Donald J. Trump.Guest: Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times.Background reading: Ms. Harris met with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, signaling that the White House was preparing her to take over a thorny diplomatic relationship.Mr. Zelensky also met with Mr. Trump as concerns mount in Kyiv that a second Trump administration could spell the end of American support against Russia.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Soon, you’ll need a subscription to keep full access to this show and to other New York Times podcasts on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Don’t miss out on exploring all our shows, covering politics, pop culture and much more. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts.

From the New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernese, and this is The Daily. As the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East deepen, the U.S., under President Joe Biden, has taken a leading role in both. But now the presidential campaign is raising a new and consequential question. Whose foreign policy will the world get next? Today, my colleague Peter Baker explains. It's Monday, September 30th. So Peter, we're just weeks away from election day and the United States is deeply involved

in protracted wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. These will be issues for whoever is the next president. So we wanted to talk to you about how the two candidates might approach these conflicts in foreign policy more broadly. Just this weekend we saw the killing of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Lebanese militia group Hezbollah, by Israel. And I really want you first to start with just what the stakes are here. Yeah, I don't think the stakes could be higher for the Middle East to erupt into a wider war which is the fear in Washington right now in the thick of a presidential campaign just reminds us of how important America still is in the world, right?

That we are not in fact behind an ocean where we can not care about what happens across the globe. But where it's going to go at this point in the Middle East, we don't know. The fear is that the killing of Nasrallah, who was mourned by nobody in the United States, he has blood on his hands after decades of leading a terrorist organization, but his killing could inflame the region in a way that President Biden has been trying to avoid for almost 12 months now. And the idea of a wider, more expansive war in the Middle East, one that not only escalates

with Hezbollah itself, but possibly brings in its patron, Iran, that is a huge challenge. And therefore, of course, it's extremely important to know who's going to take over in just a few weeks. And the difference between these two candidates in their outlook, in their vision, in their approach to the world could hardly be bigger. So let's go to the candidates themselves. Tell me how you see Donald Trump and Kamala Harris in terms of how they would steer America

in the world, like high level. Well, Kamala Harris, of course, hasn't had a lot of experience in foreign policy, but she's learned a lot at the side of President Biden as his vice president. So we're sort of guessing a little bit about her vision and her views. I think our general assumption is that she's pretty close to where Biden is. And I think it's safe to assume that she is basically a pretty conventional center left, democratic foreign policy thinker. I mean, to the extent that she brings her own individual perspective, it probably comes from her time as a prosecutor and a lawyer,

that she believes in the international rules based order. So she looks at foreign policy in the sense of who is following the rules in effect in terms of whether it be trade, security, or economics. Peter, tell me about Trump. How would you describe him high level? Well, high level, he is the opposite, right? He is a disruptive force when it comes to international affairs, proudly so. If there's anything he believes, it's this idea that other countries are Shafting the United States often our own friends our friends in Europe our friends in Asia

That they are getting one over on the United States when it comes to trade and economics When it comes to security arrangements and so on and so he's often been much harder on America's allies Then he has been on America's adversaries Right. He's drawn to these strongmen in a way, and it's a real break with what came before when it comes to the Republican Party and really just Washington consensus generally. So on the face of it, Peter, these are two very different candidates. Let's talk about how they would actually be on the issues though. Maybe let's start with this killing of Hassan Nasrallah, which plunges us directly into the unknown when it comes to Israel and Iran, which is

of course the big backer and power behind Hezbollah. Right. So over the last few days, what we've seen is Israel escalating the war in Lebanon in a major way after a year of trading cross-border fire. And on Friday, Israel struck a densely packed neighborhood just south of Beirut, killing Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah. And he, of course, has been such a remarkably powerful and dangerous force in the Middle East now for decades. It was such a shock, right, Peter? Like this guy was a fixture and now suddenly he's gone. It just felt like I didn't even know what world we were living in. It's a paradigm changing moment,

right? And at the same time, Israel has continued to strike Hezbollah targets around Lebanon and it's causing, you know, deep chaos within the country. According to the government, there as many as a million people could be displaced. And so far, more than a thousand have been killed since this ramped up offensive began, including civilians, women and children. And now all eyes are really on Iran and whether they will, in effect, enter the war in a much bigger way than they already have. They've been fighting Israel really for years through these proxy groups, a kind of shadow war, but now the fear is it could be an

actual all-out regional war, and that might bring in the United States too. Lyle Ornstein What has Washington said about this? David Shieh So Biden and Harris both released statements pretty similar to each other, saying that this wasn't a measure of justice for the victims of Hezbollah. At the same time, they also talked about the need for diplomacy to de-escalate the conflict. They're called on the parties, the combatants to agree to the ceasefire proposals that are out there to end the fighting, at least temporarily. Now, on the Republican side, the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, and his leadership team put out their own statement,

praising, of course, Israel's killing of Nasrallah, but also attacking the Biden administration for not doing enough in their view to support Israel. The one person we haven't heard from, ironically, is Donald Trump. He had a whole long rally yesterday and said not one word about Hezbollah and the killing of Nasrallah, and gave no clue, therefore, into his thinking about what this means and what the United States

Should be doing at this point and we know of course about Trump that he does have an antagonistic Relationship with the Iranians. He pulled out of the Iran nuclear agreement Which was brokered under President Obama and put sanctions back on Tehran when we're're looking at the candidates here, how do each see Iran? Well, definitely Trump sees Iran as the main malign force, not only in the Middle East, but one of the main enemies around the world, right? He's willing to say nice things about Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un and North Korea. Not one good word, obviously, for Iran. I think Harris obviously sees Iran as a malign force as well, but she has been part of an administration that was willing to at least

try to restart negotiations over their nuclear program. Now that didn't go anywhere. That ended up fizzling. And right now we are at odds with Iran. We have sanctioned Iran. We are not part of an agreement with Iran. And it doesn't look like one is happening anytime soon. So where Harris wants to take the policy with Iran right now is a little unclear. She obviously will talk about being tough on Iran, but she is not trying to raise the temperature and use the same kind of language

that former President Trump does. So Peter, let's go to Israel, which is of course at the center of all of this, and Israel's relationship with the United States, that former president Trump does. So Peter, let's go to Israel, which is of course at the center of all of this and Israel's relationship with the United States, which is under a lot of strain right now as it wages its war against Hamas in Gaza almost a year after Hamas attacked on October 7th.

This conflict is top of mind, I think for a lot of voters. And I'm curious how the candidates are talking about it. Maybe start with Trump. Well, one way it comes up on the campaign trail for Trump is the way he tries to persuade Jewish American voters to support him. He likes to boast of being Israel's great friend during his first term, but so much so he's taken it to the point of saying that if you're Jewish and you vote against him, you somehow are betraying Israel or betraying

Judaism, which by the way is a concept that's very offensive to a lot of people. But that's where he is framing it right now. Now, it's fair to say there's probably never been a president who's been more willing to give Israeli leadership what it wanted than Donald Trump, right? He moved the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which is something that the previous presidents had all declined to do. He recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which again, no president had done up until that point. He closed the Palestinian office in Washington and cut off aid, and he wasn't even on speaking terms with Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian authorities. So in Trump, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was getting an awful lot of what he wanted.

But when it comes to the war in Gaza itself, Trump has been relatively quiet. He really hasn't given any kind of extended analysis or interview to explain how he sees the war in Gaza. And in fact, if anything, when he has talked about it, he has said things that Israel supporters are uncomfortable with, like Israel needs to get this over with. You got gotta get it done quickly because they are getting decimated with this publicity. There's too much killing, not that he is expressing concern for those who are being killed, but because he says it's hurting Israel's reputation in the world. Israel has to handle their public relations. Their public relations are not good.

And so he needs to get it over with. I think another thing we could say is he probably wouldn't be as committed to humanitarian aid for the Palestinians in Gaza as the Biden administration has been. I've never heard Trump express any interest in that. And he doesn't particularly like wars. I mean, I think that's one thing he has tried about not starting any wars while he was president. And I don't know that he feels very comfortable with an extended war in the Middle East. I don't know what he would be willing to do to stop it,

or how far he would be willing to go to pressure Netanyahu, but I don't think Netanyahu can count on 100% unvarnished support like he had in the first three years of Trump's presidency. Yeah, it's interesting how, you know, Trump has this tough guy thing, but at the same time, you know, it's interesting how, you know, Trump has this tough guy thing, but at the same time, you know, it's not actually militaristic. Like, he doesn't believe in kind of using American military, like traditional Republicans have.

And it's true, he didn't start a war, which is one of the things I always think about a Trump administration and how different it was from, say, the administration of George W. Bush, which was kind of a more traditional political institutionalist guy, but did start this big war. That's just not what Trump does. Yeah, no, it's really true. He's the opposite of Teddy Roosevelt, right? Teddy Roosevelt was speak softly and carry a big stick. Trump is speak loudly, but carry a small stick. So he is actually somebody who has not been eager to pull the trigger,

even though he speaks very gruffly and threateningly, bellicose-ly, right? Exactly. And Peter, what about Harris? What do we know about how she would distinguish herself from the Biden administration's approach to Israel? Kamala Harris has stuck close to President Biden's policy, but she sounds different, right, at times. Well, let's understand how we got here. When she describes the situation there, it's a matter of emphasis. Her emphasis on the suffering of the Palestinians

sounds much more determined than when Biden says that. Then I say now, Israel has a right to defend itself. We would. She will say that Israel has every right to defend itself. She will condemn the October 7 terrorist attack by Hamas in strong terms. Because it is also true, far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. Children, mothers. When she speaks about it, you hear more empathy, it sounds like, to people for the suffering of the civilians, at least in Gaza, who are paying a price.

But we must have a two-state solution where we can rebuild Gaza, where the Palestinians have security, self-determination, and the dignity they so rightly deserve. And so people assume because of that, that she will be tougher on Netanyahu than Biden has been, that she would have less patience for Netanyahu and put more pressure on him. Okay, so let's turn to Ukraine. What would a Harris administration look like on that front? Well, I think the Harris administration would continue a lot of the policy that we've seen in the last two and a half years since Putin's full-scale invasion.

She is invested in that. I actually met with Zelensky a few days before Russia invaded. She's met with Zelensky now seven times, including the meeting they had together late last week. And so whatever she might have thought about it coming in, she's very much a part of the Biden policy and is unlikely to make large scale shifts. We brought 50 countries together to support Ukraine in its righteous defense. She believes that Russia cannot be allowed to simply win because if Russia wins, it means that

the whole international rules-based order is out the window. Because Putin's agenda is not just about Ukraine. It means that a larger country can use force to rewrite the map without any regard to the rules, without any regard to sovereignty and independence. And in fact, she took a dig at Trump when she met with Zelensky, calling what he is suggesting a proposal for surrender. So very much continuing the Biden doctrine here on Ukraine, American leadership, convening allies, NATO,

and she does this dig at Trump. Bring us to Trump. How would he be different? I think he'd be vastly different. It's very hard to see any foreign policy issue that would be more 180-degree flip. I will have that war settled in one day, 24 hours. How would you settle that war in one day? He has said that he would end the war in 24 hours.

Now, how he would do that, he doesn't exactly say. You can break that deal. 100%, it would be easy. That deal would be easy Not a single person I know who knows anything about Russia and Ukraine thinks is possible right a is not realistic and B It's just a complete and utter reversal of where the United States has Traditionally stood which is you don't reward aggression that you don't give in to

international bullies Trump has spent so much time expressing admiration of Putin that people still wonder why they're so close. What is it about Putin that makes Trump so flattering? He's not expressed any condemnation of the Russian war. I want to ask you a very simple question tonight. Do you want Ukraine to win this war? And when he's asked, as he was at the debate, whether he wants Ukraine to win... I want the war to stop. I want to save lives.

He always ducks the question. I don't think in terms of winning and losing. So even last week, while Zelensky was visiting for the United Nations General Assembly, he had a last-minute meeting with Trump in New York. And there again, Trump refused to condemn Russia for the war. Instead, he suggested that Putin wants the war to end and refused to give any assurances to Zelensky for American support. But I guess the flip side of it is still kind of confusing to me, Peter. Like, why do you

think it is that Trump is like that on Ukraine? Like, why is he so opposed to their war against Russia? Which, you know, was obviously supported by old school Republicans quite strongly. It's America first, right? That's his theory of international relations. Unless he sees it as an immediate American benefit, he doesn't want to have anything to do with it. A lot of people would argue, of course,

it is in America's interest to stop countries from invading each other, but he doesn't see it that way. In his telling of it, we have no business being involved unless we get something out of it. Okay, so Peter, say Trump wins. It's a Trump administration. What does his approach to Ukraine actually look like in practice and what would be the effect of it? Well, first off, of course, there will probably not be any more American arms and American aid. At least Ukraine shouldn't count on that.

And I think that that by itself would be a dramatic change on the ground there. American arms have been critical in helping Ukraine beat back a much stronger, much bigger opponent, an invader. Now, in theory, Europe could fill the void, but there's weariness about the war in Europe as well. And it will be very challenging for European leaders to come up with even more money to fill the gap if the United States withdraws. And I assume if there's a Harris administration, she's also not necessarily going to have an

easy time getting a lot more money for Ukraine. What about what she would actually do? Would it be different than what Biden has done? I think it would probably be roughly the same, but she will be presented with a different set of circumstances than he was, right? Biden was presented with the initial invasion. She will be coming at it later in the progress of the war when there'll be more pressure to find a resolution,

to get to some sort of a halt in the killing. I think it's fair to assume she wouldn't make concessions that Ukraine doesn't agree to. She would take her cues, presumably from Zelensky or the Ukrainian leadership. Okay, so to recap, Ukraine, these candidates are quite different. Israel, more complicated. Are there areas where they're similar?

There's not a lot of similarity between these two when it comes to foreign policy, but there is one area of the world where they actually kind of start from a similar point of view. And that's China. We'll be right back. So Peter, tell me about the two candidates in China. You said this is one area where they do actually overlap and maybe start with Trump here. I remember him coming in in 2017 and saying he was really going to take China to task. He was going

to change things with China. He did change things with China. And I think he changed things in Washington with regard to China. The old way of thinking about China in Washington had been if we bring them into the international community, if we make them a member of the WTO, if we make them part of our globalized system, they will moderate their behavior. They will not be as big an aggressive threat on the international stage and maybe even become more democratic at home.

Well, that theory failed. And in its place, Trump created a new bipartisan consensus, which is that China is in fact an adversary, not a friend. That in fact, we are too dependent on China economically and that we ought to be more skeptical of their leadership and their motivations and less assuming that we can make common cause with them. Now, how he approaches it is different

than how the Democrats would approach it. He launched really a trade war with China with massive tariffs and constantly attacking their leadership. But it was all very transactional. It's all for him about economics, about intellectual property and trade and supply chains. He didn't care at all about Taiwan and its perpetual conflict with China, which has always been at the heart of our relationship with Beijing. Didn't care about advances in the South China Sea or China's bullying of the Philippines or other neighbors. In fact, there's a really telling anecdote when he was president and he was going to be talking with Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, and Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker, who's been a long time China hawk.

Xi told him that he should raise the plight of the Uighurs. Those are the Muslim minority who are kept in camps in many cases in China, very repressed. Trump did raise it with Sheeb and then tells Pelosi that, oh, it's okay. She told me they like being in those camps. They like being in those camps. And Pelosi was astonished, right? On what planet do people like being in camps? And yet that's the way Trump saw it. Oh, okay, it's all fine. What really he cared about was economics.

Interesting. So Peter, what about Harris? I mean, presumably she does care about Uyghurs and democracy. Tell me about how she would approach China. I think Harris would come at it from the more traditional, mainly bipartisan approach, which is less confrontational, less hostile in tone and positioning. But, you know, she, like Biden,

is not going to back down on the economic measures that Trump would have placed. I mean, one of the things that Biden did was to keep the tariffs on China that he had criticized as a candidate. So he decided it was too politically costly or whatever to take them off. But his approach, and I think hers would follow,

has been more targeted since then. They have doubled down on the semiconductor industry in the United States so that we are making more of these computer chips that are central to everything in our economy rather than relying quite so much on Taiwan in particular, but China as well. And the sanctions that Biden has put in place on China have been more narrowly formulated in his view to get at the things we care about most, not to actually break all ties with China. The phrase that his national security advisor,

Jake Sullivan uses is, we are de-risking, not decoupling. And what does that mean, Peter? Well, we were trying to take away the risks of being too dependent on China, particularly when it comes to supply chains. Decoupling means we're completely cutting off. We're no longer gonna have this economic relationship.

And that's unrealistic as far as Biden is concerned. I think that Harris shares that view. So kind of a scalpel versus a hammer when it comes to trying to get tougher on China. Exactly right. But there's also the issue of Russia when it comes to China, right? Our relationship with China has changed in the last three years since Trump left office because of China's support for Russia's invasion in Ukraine. And Russia and China have aligned themselves much more closely in the last few years. And that's a very different challenge. And remind listeners, Peter, what exactly China is doing for Russia there. What's the importance of that relationship?

Well, China is propping Russia up economically right now, where the West has cut Russia off with sanctions and so forth, where Western companies have fled Russia and taken their money with them. It has been China that has filled the gap. China is buying Russian energy. China is supporting Russia economically. And the worry is that China at some point will supply weapons to them.

And China has become Russia's best friend. And Peter, what would that mean for Trump if he won? I mean, Trump, of course, as you're pointing out, so close to Putin, so admiring of Putin, and quite the opposite with China, this is an interesting nod for him then. It really is. Ironically, of course, we'd have these three countries

in effect led by strong leaders who see the world in similar terms and how that would play out. That's a really interesting question. I don't know that we know the answer to that. So Peter, I guess the thing that's really striking to me here is just how different Trump is from his party. How much he's changed in a way on Russia, on China,

even some ways on Israel. While Harris, in many ways, is very much the product of her party, is that the way this period in American foreign policy will be remembered? Is that the key takeaway here? Yeah, I think it's a very good way to put it, that he is changing his party and she is a product of hers. But it's really not so much about ideology, it's not even really about Democrats and Republicans,

it's really about predictability and unpredictability. In other words, Harris represents a much more stable way of looking at the world. And other leaders have a much better sense of where she will come out of these. And he's volatile and he's mercurial. He threatens to leave NATO one minute and has to be talked into staying in the next. That difference is the main difference between them, right? Predictability and unpredictability. And is there any argument for unpredictability as a deterrent? Like, we don't quite know where this guy's going to come out on whatever crazy thing we're trying to do, so we maybe

shouldn't try to do it? Well, that's certainly an argument here from Trump's side. Absolutely. The madman theory, if you will, of foreign policy. Now, Richard Nixon famously used this tactic. He told Kissinger to tell foreign leaders that he, Nixon, was kind of crazy and therefore they ought to do whatever Kissinger was asking because I have no idea if I can control the boss. In some ways, Trump does the same thing.

But with Nixon, it was a tactic. With Trump, it's just who he is, right? He is, in fact, somebody who will decide on the spur of the moment to do something drastically different on foreign policy without a big process and a committee meeting and so forth. So traditionally, of course, America has preferred to have predictable and stable relations

with other countries, but Trump is, again, as always, the outlier who challenges that thinking. On the other hand though, just to play this out, if Harris were to win, you know, then there's something to be said about the fact that four more years of the same, or at least a very similar foreign policy to Biden, might also be problematic considering that all of these wars

that we find ourselves pretty closely related to, and very difficult to find our way out of. Yeah, sure. Of course, the argument is that traditional foreign policy hasn't worked well enough, right? That we are in these terrible crises in Europe and the Middle East and what has our diplomacy gotten us? Now, it's hard to argue a counterfactual. Would it be worse if X than Y? But in a world where you have adversaries who have nuclear weapons, the argument from the Biden side is better to keep things from boiling over in a much worse way. Maybe a Trumpian unpredictability is a deterrent on some level, but it's better from their

point of view anyway to have predictability because outcomes could be a whole lot worse. Peter, what do you think this unpredictability does to American power and America's place in the world? Well it's a really good question because in fact it used to be that the United States was the reliable actor. You pretty much knew where the United States was going to fall on major issues in the world and other countries responded accordingly. Didn't mean that everybody did what the United States wanted them to do by any

stretch, but that that predictability, that reliability was central to at least a broad sense of order in the world. What you hear now from foreign officials is we don't know whether you guys are going to be there or not. They're like, okay, is Trump the aberration or is Biden the aberration? Which one stands for where America really plans to be from now on? Would the real America please stand up? We'll know a lot more come November. Peter, thank you. Thank you.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you should know today. On Sunday, Israel launched long-distance airstrikes in Yemen targeting shipping and power supplies of the Houthis, another group backed by Iran that has attacked Israel over the past year. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the show of force against multiple enemies at once was part of a broader strategy to create a new balance of power in the Middle East. A spokesman for the Biden administration reiterated that the White House wants a diplomatic solution rather than an all-out war. And...

Very serious situation in the South. The catastrophic aftermath of Hurricane Helene. Millions of people are still without power. Whole communities have been flattened. Over the weekend, search and rescue efforts started in the South as more than six states reeled from the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. Conditions are now safe enough in multiple states for officials to start surveying the damage. And what they are seeing in terms of Helene's wrath is horrifying.

So many communities in the Carolina mountains are now essentially cut off by road. There are much needed supplies that are being flown in, in the same time. The storm, which made landfall along Florida's Big Bend region, carried strong winds and heavy rain far inland, wreaking havoc in mostly rural areas in Tennessee, Georgia, South and North Carolina, and Virginia. I don't think anyone was prepared for it. I don't think anyone thought it would be this bad. There's probably 50 trees blocking my neighbor from coming out. I started helping them yesterday. The neighbors at the other end of the road, we got us out,

but the other neighbors are trapped. As of Sunday afternoon, the death toll from the storm totaled more than 90 people. But officials said to expect that number to rise as they reached residents who were stranded at their homes or were still unaccounted for. residents who were stranded at their homes or were still unaccounted for. Today's episode was produced by Nina Feldman, Mary Wilson, Rachelle Bonge, and Carlos Prieto. It was edited by Lexi Diao and Patricia Willens, contains original

music by Alicia Vaetube and Marian Lazano. And was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Special thanks to Ewan Ward. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsvark of Wonderly. That's it for the daily. I'm Serena Tavernisi. See you tomorrow.