What A Day - Here's The Best Clue We Have on Kamala Harris' Foreign Policy

Episode Date: July 27, 2024

Vice President Kamala Harris is hitting the campaign trail, but her talking points don’t shed much light on her approach to foreign policy. With wars in Gaza and Ukraine—not to mention increasingly hostile relations with China and Russia—foreign policy could easily define a potential Harris Administration. To get a sense of how Harris might approach world affairs, Josie and Max take a closer look at her current national security advisor, Philip Gordon. They talk to ‘Pod Save The World’ host Ben Rhodes, who worked with Gordon in the Obama White House on some of the administration's most consequential foreign policy issues, like the war in Syria and the Iran Nuclear Deal. Together, they look at how those moments shaped Gordon, and how they could shape Harris' approach, too.

So, Max, even after this week-long blitz of Vice President Kamala Harris positioning herself for the presidential election, there is this big question I still have about her. What is her foreign policy? Oh, yeah. So far, she's mostly talking about, like, abortion and housing assistance and paid family leave. You know, I get that foreign policy is not her big thing, and maybe it's not feeling like an electoral winner, but this is a moment when it really matters. Right. The U.S. is mixed up in Israel's war in Gaza. It's involved in Ukraine's defense against Russian invasion. If Harris wins, her actions on those two issues alone

could have sweeping consequences for tens of millions of people and shape the future of both the Middle East and Europe. Yeah, no pressure. She's not revealed a ton on how she'd handle those conflicts beyond a few prior statements that people are now reading very, very, very closely for clues. Well, on this week's show, we've got something a lot better than some year-old press release to extrapolate from. I'm Max Fisher. And I'm Josie Duffy Rice, filling in for Aaron Ryan.

This is How We Got Here, a series where we explore a big question behind the week's headlines and tell a story that answers that question. Our question this week, how would a President Kamala Harris handle foreign policy? So strange as this may sound, if you want to answer that, I don't think the best person to look at

is actually Kamala Harris. The best person to look at might be a guy named Philip Gordon. I've heard of this guy. This is Harris's national security advisor, is that right? Yeah, he joined up with her in 2020 when she ran in the Democratic presidential primary. And since then, he's become seen as highly influential in shaping her foreign policy. And we should say it's not at all unusual for a president or presidential candidate to lean on a

trusted advisor like this when it comes to some issue that they might not be as personally experienced with. Yeah, and ultimately, she will be deciding her foreign policy. But I think it's useful to look at this advisor, Phil Gordon, because while we have very little information on how Kamala thinks about foreign policy, we have a lot on how he thinks about it. Max, I was looking over it all before we started recording, and this guy is prolific. 11 books, tons of op-eds and white papers.

Yeah, we poured through it to try to understand how Phil Gordon and therefore probably Kamala Harris would handle the world. We also talked to a former colleague of his from the Obama White House and National Security Council, who just happens to be a fellow host here at Crooked Media, Ben Rhodes. Max, before we dive in, the tension is killing me. Can you just tell us how should we feel about this guy? Good? Bad? What are we working on? So I think I came away thinking the best summary actually came ironically from an arch conservative Iran hawk named Mark Dubowitz. Last year, Dubowitz told a reporter that Gordon was, quote, very much on the progressive wing on foreign policy and, quote, Obama redux.

Okay, but are we talking drones and Libya intervention Obama, or are we talking about Cuba opening Iran nuclear deal, Russia reset Obama? I think the latter. And actually, Gordon was involved in a lot of the policies like the Iran nuclear deal that I would call the progressive end of the Obama spectrum. But let's get into it. So Max, paint a picture of this guy for us. I will let Phil Gordon introduce himself via this clip from a talk he gave two months ago at the Council on Foreign Relations. And just some context, he's talking about a fellowship that got him his first White House job way back in 1998. I was a scholar. I was working at a think tank in London. I had never served in government before,

but always interested in policy. And getting the IAF gave me an opportunity to do a year in government. And I did that year on the National Security Council, as Mike said, where we first met. I was a director for European affairs. And it was transformative in the sense of getting, you know, especially at the NSC, you're only a couple of layers away from the president. And I was doing Europe, and we had the Kosovo War going on. We were hosting then the 50th anniversary NATO summit. And just being involved in that policy process was critical to my own development. So he was an academic for many years and then at age 36

joined the tail end of the Bill Clinton White House working on Europe. He spent the Bush years holding a lot of think tank jobs. And in 2008, he joined Obama's campaign as an advisor, which got him his second government job, this time in the State Department as the Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia. So the State Department's top Europe and Russia person, and this was a period when Russia had, at first, a relatively warm relationship with Europe and the U.S. Gordon was not particularly public-facing in those years, but he later talked about it in a podcast published in 2020 by a think tank called the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Let's listen. We got a new START agreement that allowed us to reduce nuclear risks and save a lot of money. We got the Russians to allow us to send military equipment across Afghanistan. We got a 1-2-3 nuclear agreement with Russia. We managed to move forward with our missile, two, three nuclear agreement with Russia. We managed to move forward with our missile defense system, which was important to us.

And we got Russia into the World Trade Organization to try to get some rules to apply to trade with Russia and many other things. OK, so I'm getting that he's someone who is very focused on diplomacy, on reaching agreements, even with unfriendly governments like Russia's. Though here from the same podcast is Gordon talking about what happened after 2012 when Vladimir Putin returned to power in Russia and started challenging the U.S., including in Syria. And I think this is where Gordon's larger worldview starts to click into view. We can't be naive about Russian interests and Russian cooperation. It doesn't mean we have to let the Russians have their way, but it does mean that we have to decide what is

important enough to us to fight about and to invest resources in. And you know, even in the contest over Syria, if you will, if countering Russia had been our just overwhelming priority, you know, we could have done that, you know, at the risk of military conflict and at the cost of deploying significant military forces and potentially leaving there for quite a long time, we could have done that. But I think, you know, most Americans would agree that probably wouldn't have been worth it. The lesson is not to be naive about the prospects for cooperation with Russia, because we have to be naive about the prospects for cooperation with Russia because we have to be honest, they want us to fail. Okay, so Max, translate that for those of us who don't speak foreign policies. He's saying that though Russia did become much more hostile once Putin came back,

it would have been too costly and too dangerous to push back on Putin everywhere. Okay, so I remember 2012, and this was a big debate at the time. Mitt Romney ran against Obama that year, in part by accusing him of being too unwilling to confront Russia. This episode with Russia is, I think, really instructive for understanding Phil Gordon, and therefore what a Kamala Harris foreign policy might look like. He's, one, a big believer in diplomacy, even with adversaries, and two, mindful of the limits of American power and even the dangers of using it. Okay, so the first of those I know is not like uncommon among establishment foreign

policy types, but the second seems pretty unusual, right? Yeah, this is something I brought up when I talked to our colleague Ben Rhodes, the co-host of Pod Save the World, who worked alongside Gordon in the Obama White House. That was something I was really struck by reading some of Phil Gordon's books and op-eds is that he has this kind of sense of humility about the limits of American power and also the risks of using it, which I feel is maybe kind of unusual for someone of his generation, right? Because he got his start in the Clinton administration. Do you have a sense for what the kind of foundation of that is for him? Yeah, I mean, you're right to focus on it.

It's certainly my view. I mean, it's certainly where I've landed. But I'm generationally later, so I think it was easier for me to get there because I kind of came of age with the failure of the war on terror. I went into kind of professional foreign policy right during the invasion of Iraq. And so I kind of, you know, that was in my DNA, as it were. Phil's generation generally is more in the kind of blob interventionists, like, we can do this. Balkans. One more sanction, one more cruise missile strike, you know, and everything will work out.

You know, I think he's a pretty... I think Phil is a pretty worldly guy. So I think he has a capacity to see America and its foreign policy from the outside in, not just the inside out. I just think he was a bit more skeptical than others in his generation at an earlier time. And that doesn't mean that he's

not idealistic about anything. It just means that he has an understanding of where there are limits and that, frankly, sometimes if you overreach, it makes it harder to do the idealistic things you want to get done. Okay, so next chapter in the Phil Gordon story. In 2013, he became the White House coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa, and the Gulf region. In other words, the top White House person for Middle East policy. Yeah, and this was an intense time in the Middle East. The U.S. reached a nuclear agreement with Iran. Israel waged a devastating war in Gaza. The pro-democracy uprisings of the Arab Spring devolved into military coups and civil wars, the worst of which was in Syria. Yeah, and the question of what to do about Syria seemed to have weighed on Phil Gordon

more than any other issue he's faced. Here he is talking about it on PBS's Frontline in 2016. It is clear that by 2015, the strategic consequences of the war in Syria are becoming almost unsustainable. You have hundreds of thousands of refugees, then it spills over to Europe, where it risks undermining the basic stability of the European Union.

Four nations are tightening their borders as a historic number of refugees flood into Europe. One million refugees into Germany alone. Hungary says it's simply overwhelmed by the endless flow of refugees and migrants. So you put all of this together, and the consequences of Syria are enormous. It looks worse than the threat of ISIS.

The biggest mass migration of people since the Second World War. This is the ideal situation for ISIS to penetrate Europe. No one can look at the devastating consequences of this conflict over five years and not ask the question, what could we have done differently to prevent this horrific situation? And I think we've all rerun it in our minds. You know, could we have done this? Could we have done that? Should we do something now? This was also, I remember, a point of heated national debate at the time, whether the Obama administration was doing enough to stop the slaughter in Syria.

That included within the White House. And here's Ben on what he saw from Phil Gordon during that period. The thing about Phil, he's a pretty understated guy. So these were not, I'm not just saying this, like, I don't remember some, like, Situation Room debate where Phil pounded on the table and said something, you know, what if I remember in Syria debates and other debates, frankly, to he, you know, sometimes people in foreign policy want to put a positive spin on the ball, you know, the thing we're doing is working better than anybody understands. Or, you know, if we just did this, I'm sure that... Phil was always told it totally straight.

And I think on Syria, that was important because there was a lot of kind of wishful thinking for a good reason, because people wanted to make things better. And it wasn't that he didn't care. It was just that he was willing to reckon with reality as it was and try to build policy from that basis. And I think that's a very useful skill set for particularly Middle East policy for the United States.

And we should say that once Gordon left the White House in 2015, he became outspoken on what he thought should be done in Syria. He argued that the U.S. shouldn't intervene militarily, but instead should try to strike whatever peace deal it could to end the fighting, even if that meant entrenching the Syrian dictatorship that had started the war and massacred so many of its own people. And for context, this was a time when a lot of the foreign policy establishment had been arguing for a couple of years that the U.S. should topple Syria's government by force. This seems to have been a formative moment for Gordon. Ever since, he's talked about the perils of American military action. But he's also talked about how we have to be honest that because we can't force our way militarily, if we want to get anything done, we sometimes have to accept painful trade-offs like the peace deal he advocated on Syria.

Here's Ben Agan on how Gordon came to that worldview. He had a very, I think, famous line. I don't remember it exactly, but it was basically like... I know exactly the line that you're... We, you know, we went into Iraq with an enormous footprint and it was a catastrophe. We went into Libya with a light footprint and it was a catastrophe. And we didn't go into Syria and it was a catastrophe. And the basic point that he was making, which obviously then informed,

you know, the policy when we were there, is that the idea that the U.S. could engineer kind of events and politics inside of these countries, pull a lever and oust a leader and put another, you know, group of people in and that, you know, that we had to realize that that was beyond our control. And so I think Phil was about what can we achieve getting humanitarian assistance in? What can we achieve in obviously the beginnings of what became a counter-ISIS campaign? We were in that period. What can we achieve in trying to support some opposition in the spaces where they control the country? It was dealing with like a right sizing of objectives and expectations for

what we could do. Gordon even went on to write a whole book arguing against military interventionism called Losing the Long Game, the False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East. This is a good place to pivot to talking about how Gordon might help steer a Kamala Harris administration. Yeah, I mean, his book that I mentioned came out in 2020, just as he was signing on to the Harris 2020 primary campaign. Here he is giving a book talk a few months later for the European Council on Foreign Relations. And this is from November 2020, just after Biden and Harris had won the election. You can hear him thinking through how that administration might approach the election. You can hear him thinking through how that administration might approach the world. It may be that we're, you know, genuinely at a

sort of historic turning point here, where this persistent American pattern and tendency to try to transform the Middle East and engage in the Middle East is coming to an end. And that, I do think, has repercussions for has repercussions for this question of Europe that Jeremy raised. It also is relevant to the Biden question that you asked. And it is fair to say that a lot of people around the president-elect are traditionally more inclined towards engagement, this more familiar American pattern. But again, it is also worth noting that I think the public backing for this sort of thing is extremely limited. It feels pretty unusual to hear someone who spent a decade involved in U.S. foreign policy

in the Middle East and seems to have taken away the lesson that the world might be better off if there were less U.S. involvement, you know, in the area. Yeah, he is definitely not romantic about American power as some intrinsic force for good. might be better off if there were less U.S. involvement, you know, in the area. Yeah, he is definitely not romantic about, but really should, is Israel and Palestine. Right. What would a Kamala Harris administration do about Gaza, about the West Bank, about Benjamin Netanyahu? Ben actually spoke to that, too. Here he is. I will say on Israel-Palestine, like he did uniquely for some officials, really felt an understanding of the Palestinian perspective. Like that's another like, you know, might be a surprising thing to people about Phil,

but he was there through the John Kerry process. And he was not, he saw right through some of the delay tactics that the Israeli government was using. And he was quite sympathetic to the – I hope I'm not getting him in trouble here. But he saw the Palestinians and he saw things from their perspective in a way that some officials couldn't do. He didn't kind of just play into like, oh, the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity, which is a line you hear a lot in American foreign policy. So I think because he has a kind of fairly global view, and like I said, an outside-in view, just because he's a guy that is very comfortable and in the room, as it were, doesn't mean that he couldn't inhabit the perspective of people that are sometimes on the wrong end of American policy.

Any other tea leaves you think worth reading on how he might be thinking about Israel and Gaza? Well, that's one. I mean, look, it did not, like, it has not surprised me that Kamala, by all reporting, has been a skeptic of the kind of completely hug BB approach. That's Phil. Like, I, that's that's Phil, like I, that's not that's Kamala too, you know, clearly, because when you see her speak,

like you can kind of sense that. But But this is a guy, you know, he was there in the run up to the JCPOA, you know, and the Iran nuclear deal and was, you know, comfortable being in a non hughug Israel position. So Max, what else have we learned about Phil Gordon from his time as the vice president's national security advisor? Something you often hear people say about him is that he is unusually diplomatic, not just in his policy views, but also as a bureaucratic operator. And that this made him effective at getting things done on behalf of whoever his boss has happened to be. Which speaks again to that point that we made at the top of the show, that even if he is influential with Kamala, it is ultimately her foreign policy that he's enacting.

Here's Ben one last time talking about how Kamala's handling of foreign policy visibly changed in 2022, which is when Gordon was elevated from her number two foreign policy person to the number one job. Ben, do you feel like there's anything we've learned about the kind of role that he is currently playing on Kamala's team and therefore could potentially play in a Kamala White House? Yeah, I mean, look, I think with anybody who's kind of new to government, you know, there's a, the plane takes off and there's a little turbulence, right? And, you know, I think Kamala, you know, took, you know, there was that trip she took to Central America, where it's a little messy. But the reality is that if you think about it, she's been in some pretty high stakes situations, you know, the last couple of years.

A lot of scrutiny. A lot of scrutiny, you know, dealing with issues like Ukraine, high profile venues like the Munich Security Conference, kind of swapping in, subbing in for Biden, at head of state level meetings, like in ASEAN, the Southeast Asian Summit. And, you know, Phil, since he's been there as National Security Advisor, like, she has been on point.

She has not put a foot wrong, you know, from all accounts. And I've heard this from other governments, like, well-briefed, well-prepared. That's, you know, that's her first and foremost, but that's also kind of what I know about Phil. Like, the process runs smooth. Oh, yeah. The principal, well briefed. He's going to interact with his counterpart before the meeting to make sure that it's teed up. And so I think he's a guy that for her is going to be a tremendous resource, assuming I think he'd be a likely front runner for

that national security position, national security advisor position, maybe something else, I don't know. But, you know, things run well. He's the kind of guy that you can trust with the process and that is hugely important. And people tend to focus on grand strategy, but a lot of this is just like do I trust the person

briefing me? Is that person getting the best advice from all the different sources they have? Is that person like getting the best advice from all the different sources they have? Is that person sending me in a meeting to, you know, get the best possible outcome? Like, that's the kind of intangible that he brings to it. And I think that's probably why they've got a tight relationship. I think he's also been with her for a while. Like, I think he was, you know, in her kind of campaign orbit too when she was running for president. So that's very useful for someone like her who's relatively new, you know, even her kind of campaign orbit too when she was running for president. So that's very useful for someone like her who's relatively new,

you know, even for someone who's been vice president. Having a history with somebody makes a huge difference. I know for Obama that was important. Like the people who knew you kind of before you were president, you know, you think are maybe telling you the straight scoop a little bit more. And I think Phil probably has that kind of relationship with her. We've learned a lot about Phil Gordon, what he's been through, how it shaped his worldview and priorities, what role he's played with Kamala Harris so far. So what do you think?

How does it make you feel about foreign policy under a potential Harris administration? Yeah, I don't want to speak too soon, but it makes me feel pretty hopeful, right? Someone who is coming to this work without kind of the sentimentality of American power and is willing to take a harm reduction look at where should America best exercise its tools if it should exercise those tools ever. Yeah, I think that was something I was really struck by, is it's so unusual to meet someone who is this involved in the conduct of American foreign policy, who is not really idealistic about its use and who has like a lot of humility about it. Because Phil Gordon is someone who, no offense to him, but he kind of looks and presents like a like bog standard, like DC think tank circuit, like foreign policy guy. And in some ways he is, and his like, his emphasis on diplomacy is well within a like certain American foreign policy tradition, although it's, you know, definitely on the more dovish end of the spectrum of that. But his opposition to the

use of American force, especially in the Middle East, and especially at the time when he was raising that, is, I think, really unusual and like really sets him apart from a lot of people. His turn on Russia, especially, I know that feels like that was a thousand years ago and like how relevant is that still today? But I do think it's really striking to see that at a moment when he felt like he could get a lot by working with Russia, he was like really leaning in and trying to get as many agreements as he could. But also at the moment when that no longer became possible, he was not shy about saying, okay, well, they're just going to treat us as an adversary now, so we're not going to try to work with them as much. So very, very kind of hard-nosed realist.

What did you take away from what approach you think he might bring on the kind of hard-nosed realist. What did you take away from what approach you think he might bring on the kind of major foreign policy issues that Kamala Harris is going to face and that we're going to face in the next couple of years? I'd be interested to hear what you think about China and Russia-Ukraine. I think it seems like, at least on the Israel-Palestine inflection point, that term is thrown around all the time, but it definitely feels like that when it comes to, you the process and the relationships feels very hopeful to me. You know, it's hard to know. It feels like sometimes with foreign policy, it's hard to know what the best case scenario is, but the worst case scenario is pretty clear. And so, you know, I feel like the principle of avoiding the worst case has some real

heft here. I think that's a really good point. And it's a really good articulation, I think, of like how it sounds like Phil Gordon would approach this. I feel like what we've learned about how he thinks about this issue specifically, it's like we are reading a lot of tea leaves here and a lot of these data points are from like a decade ago. I do think that he is not someone who shares that kind of Joe Biden, like almost reflexive, like bone deep kind of pro-Zionist attitude towards the conflict. You know, he was also in the Obama White House 2013 to 2015 working on policy towards Israel and Palestine at a time when the Obama White House was 2013 to 2015, working on policy towards Israel and Palestine at a time when the Obama White House was becoming much more vocally critical of Israel. And when that

relationship was like really becoming pretty sour in a pretty significant way. And that turned a lot around Benjamin Netanyahu. So I think that the people who are kind of looking at Kamala Harris and saying, we think that she will represent a break with Biden, I think there's a lot of truth to that. At the same time, kind of weighing on the other end of the spectrum, something that is bouncing a lot around in my head is Phil Gordon saying, as he did in his books and in so many op-eds about what the U.S. should do in the Middle East more broadly, is he constantly says the U.S. should not try to transform the Middle East and that we should be really modest and humble about what we can achieve. And that's something that when he's talking about like Syria and whether we should

invade Syria, it's very easy for me to agree with. But it does make me wonder if he is going to also bring, I would say, constrained ambitions to something like, can we achieve some sort of sustainable long-term peace in the Israel-Palestine conflict after 60, 70 years? Or is he going to be looking at it in this much more kind of, you know, humble, how can we bring a ceasefire in Gaza that will kind of get us through the next year? And I don't know, but, you know, reading those tea leaves, I do think that it's likely that we'll see humility from them. Yeah, it's an interesting point. It seems like even that approach is kind of harm reductionist because so much of what's happened in the area has been fueled by American intervention, just supply. I think you mentioned Russia, Ukraine too.

I feel like you'll probably see status quo with this past administration on that because that's an approach that's been very multilateral. It's been very much about like working with European allies. And that seems to be the approach that he took when he was at State Department working on Europe and Russia. mark for me because the Biden administration has taken, I wouldn't say a hawkish approach to China, but very assertive in engaging in this kind of like trade war with China and like very pretty intense like economic conflict with China. And I don't have a great sense for whether that falls within the kind of Phil Gordon vision of acceptable use of American power. So, Josie, just to bring us back to those stakes, let's go out with a clip from the person who held Phil Gordon's job under the Trump administration. This is Keith Kellogg, who is National Security Advisor to Vice President Mike Pence, speaking a few months ago on Fox News about the Israeli invasion of Gaza, comparing Palestinians to Nazis. Neat.

And here's what I would say as everybody's watching this operation. We need to think back to what it looked like in World War II with the United States and the Allies when we went against Germany and against Japan. And what I mean by that, it's an eradication of an element

of that society, which is Hamas. And then you start to rebuild from there. And that's what they need to be thinking about. Let's not bring him back. How We Got Here is written and hosted by me, Max Fisher, and by Aaron Ryan. It's produced by Emma Illick-Frank. Evan Sutton mixes and edits the show. Jordan Cantor sound engineers the show.

Audio support from Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landis, and Vasilis Fotopoulos. Production support from Adrian Hill, Leo Duran, Erica Morrison, Raven Yamamoto, and Natalie Bettendorf. And a special thank you to What A Day's talented hosts, Traevel Anderson, Priyanka Arabindi, Josie Duffy Rice, and Juanita Tolliver for welcoming us to the family. 다음 시간에 만나요