Harris and Trump may sound similar when it comes to the Middle East, but their policies could diverge significantly on Ukraine.
Emma Ashford: Good morning, Matt. A massive hurricane just hit the United States, and another is coming—and I don’t mean whatever named storm comes after Milton. We’re only three weeks out from Election Day, and all the polling suggests that things will come down to the wire.
Are you a betting man? Which presidential candidate do you think will win?
Matt Kroenig: Washington is a one-industry town, and almost every conversation I’ve had in recent days starts with questions about who will win the election and what it will mean for America’s role in the world.
On the first question, it is so close. Nate Silver’s statistical forecast currently puts it at a 51 percent chance for Harris and a 49 percent chance for Trump. That’s a sophisticated way of calling it a coin toss.
I must say, my gut says that Trump still has the edge. He is polling better now than he did in previous elections, and we counted him out too soon before.
What about you? Who do you think will be sworn in on Jan. 20, 2025?
EA: I actually think Trump probably has the edge, too, but it’s very close. More importantly, after the last six months, I’m not ruling out some big October surprise that shakes up the race again. We’ve had assassination attempts, candidates dropping out, and natural disasters. We’ve even got one member of Congress speculating that the government is creating hurricanes and targeting them at swing states—and that’s still not the craziest thing she’s said in the last month. Who’s to say things will stay stable until Nov. 5?
Foreign policy could certainly provide an October surprise, for example. We’ve got a rapidly escalating war in the Middle East: Israel has invaded Lebanon and is apparently planning a retaliatory strike on Iran. Does it change the electoral dynamics if the United States is involved in a shooting war by Election Day? More involved than now, I suppose I should say.
MK: Good points. This election may be determined by something that hasn’t even happened yet. Wars tend to be bad for the incumbent, so electoral considerations are one factor motivating the Biden-Harris administration to try to de-escalate the war in the Middle East.
EA: Is Harris an incumbent, though? It’s a tricky question, because she’s simultaneously trying to run a campaign that claims she’s bringing hope and change, but she really isn’t differentiating herself from the administration on policy. The polling this week suggests she’s opened a narrow lead on this question: More voters now think she would bring change (46 percent) than Trump (44 percent). But Harris isn’t really helping. Asked this week on The View whether there was any policy of Biden’s she disagreed with, she said that she couldn’t think of any.
And then there’s the domestic dynamics of foreign policy. We’ve got Polish American voters in Pennsylvania who are increasingly pleased with Harris’s hardline approach to Russia, and Arab American voters in Michigan who are repulsed by the administration’s stance on Gaza. Both are swing states where the narrowest margins could matter.
I suspect that the dynamics of the Middle East crisis are more unfavorable than favorable for Harris. There’s also the significant risk that a broader war—or more direct U.S. involvement—might erupt before Election Day. If I were in the shoes of the Harris campaign, I’d be leaning hard on the White House to try and prevent the conflict from escalating. I’d also be extremely worried that Netanyahu has no incentive to hold back—he’d probably be happy to see Trump back in the White House.
MK: Indeed, I think that is exactly what is happening. After all, the Biden White House does not want Trump to get elected either, and they are going to great lengths to tamp down the conflict, including publicly mentioning targets they don’t want Israel to hit in retaliation for Iran’s massive missile barrage last week.
So, it sounds like we agree that either Trump or Harris could be the next U.S. president. Should we turn to what either outcome will mean for America’s role in the world?
I’ll start with a provocation. The conventional wisdom is that Harris will represent continuity with the Biden-Harris administration and that Trump is unpredictable. I think the opposite may actually be true. We know what we are getting with Trump; after all, he has already been president for four years. But Harris is more of a blank slate when it comes to foreign policy.
Thoughts?
EA: I think you’re right that Harris has no clear foreign-policy views. Honestly, “blank slate” seems charitable; her foreign-policy stances in the campaign so far seem to amount to tough talk and little else. But I’m not sure that means a lack of predictability or continuity. Advisors tend to play a more important role under a president who has limited foreign-policy experience. That’s exactly what we saw in the first Trump administration.
So if Harris is wishy-washy on foreign policy, it’s pretty likely we’d see a similar set of appointees to the Biden administration and a similar set of policies. Change on a few issues, perhaps? Biden is really out of step with his own party on Israel, for example. But I don’t see any prospect for broad-based change. Everyone has focused in on Phil Gordon, for example. He’s Harris’s current national security advisor. And it’s true that he’s more moderate than some in the Biden administration; he wrote a book about the failures of regime change in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example. But Jake Sullivan wrote similar things before he became Biden’s national security advisor, so I’m skeptical we’ll see wholesale change.
MK: I agree that given her lack of a track record on foreign policy, her advisors are likely to play an outsized role in shaping the agenda. But I am not sure that it will be the same cast as the Biden administration. People like Antony Blinken and Sullivan are so closely tied to Joe Biden, having worked for him for years, that Harris simply cannot keep them on. She needs to show that she is her own woman.
Moreover, as vice president for the past four years—a role with few real powers—I suspect that she has felt cut out, and maybe a bit condescended to by Biden’s foreign-policy mandarins. She might be looking to clean house.
EA: Personnel, yes. Policy change? I doubt it. Ok, so what about Trump?
MK: Again, we have seen this movie before, and if you want an in-depth take, I wrote a piece on this for Foreign Policy and an entire book on the subject.
In the first term, many commentators focused on Trump’s rhetoric and overlooked the underlying policy. But a careful look at the underlying policy and their results demonstrates that he was a successful foreign-policy president who brought “peace through strength” and economic prosperity.
I think we will get more of the same in a second term. His rumored cabinet picks, like Tom Cotton, Robert O’Brien, Mike Pompeo, Mike Waltz, and so on, are experienced and capable. I predict a Trump-Reagan fusion foreign policy that will win broad support within the party.
EA: Not too fast. There’s a big divide in the Republican Party on foreign policy, as you and I know only too well. Matt, I know you like to play down the divide between the nationalist Trumpian Republicans and more traditional GOP hawks, but I don’t think it’s as easily reconciled as you suggest. Most of the debates between those two factions aren’t really partisan. They’re the same debates you and I have here every couple of weeks, and the same debates that are animating parts of the Democratic Party, as well: How should the United States engage the world? When should we use military force? Do we really need to be fighting everyone, everywhere, all at once? Are there limits to U.S. power?
Anyway, I am not so sure that Trump, having been manipulated by appointees he didn’t agree with during his first term, will be happy to have it happen again. Policy aside, no president would enjoy seeing their own staff on television bragging about the ways in which they undermined him, like former Trump appointees H.R. McMaster, Jim Jeffries, or John Bolton have all done.
There are certainly areas—like Israel or China—where Trump will probably have a fairly conventional Republican foreign policy. But I’d expect more significant change on Ukraine, NATO, or similar issues. Do you really think a secretary of state like Pompeo or Cotton would stand up to Trump on the question of Ukraine? Or that they would last in the role if they did?
MK: In his new book, McMaster argues that he tried to faithfully implement the president’s vision, but that other cabinet officials, like Rex Tillerson and James Mattis, thought they knew better and actively worked to counter the president.
So counter to the mainstream narrative that the “adults in the room” checked Trump’s worst impulses, I think they may have contributed to a lot of the policy inconsistency and perceptions of chaos in the first term.
EA: Ha! That’s funny. McMaster also blamed Trump for the Afghanistan withdrawal and said that Trump compromised American values for personal gain. It’s rather amusing—though depressing—how quickly folks in this town back away from their criticisms when they think their shot at another administration job might be in danger.
I guess we’ll see if it works, but the media is certainly reporting that a Trump transition team is putting a lot of emphasis on policy agreement and loyalty.
MK: It makes sense that Trump is prioritizing loyalty this time around. I think someone like Cotton or Pompeo (like he did in the first term) would use their experience and trusted relationship with the president to advise him and then carry out his decisions in a practical way, not to actively obstruct it.
EA: Can we shift from personnel to policy? Will Harris or Trump actually make significant changes in specific foreign-policy areas? Ukraine is probably the most likely candidate here, but there’s also Israel, Iran, China, and other issues.
MK: Ukraine will be the biggest difference. Trump has been very clear that his stated goal is to force a near-term negotiation to end the war quickly. From his statements, one can devise a strategy of threatening to withdraw military support if Zelensky does not negotiate and—and this part is often overlooked by Trump’s critics—threatening to “give Ukraine more than they’ve ever got” if Putin does not negotiate. I suspect this strategy would likely result in some kind of cease-fire roughly along the current lines.
For those who argue that this approach means selling Ukraine down the river, I would ask them to defend the Biden-Harris strategy. They are giving Ukraine enough to fight, but not enough to win. So I suspect their approach will also result in a stalemate roughly along the current lines—it will just take more time, blood, and treasure to get there.
EA: I wonder if the “give Ukraine more” side of that equation could really be credible given Trump’s past statements on the subject, but it is probably the best available strategy. It’s a Nixon-style “madman” strategy, and Trump is uniquely well-disposed to play the madman in that scenario.
If you’ll forgive me, I think it’s perhaps most telling that you—and many other mainstream Republicans in Congress and elsewhere—appear to now be largely on board with this strategy. Just last year in this column, you were arguing that Western support has been halfhearted and that we should give Ukraine everything they need to mount further counter offensives.
I’m not sure that European policymakers have really absorbed that shift; they’re still waiting for a rerun of the first Trump presidency, in which conventional Republicans work to block Trump’s foreign-policy choices. It is quite striking that European states are doing nothing to prepare, either to take over more of the burden on Ukraine or for their own defense. They may regret that choice if they do face a sudden drop in support under Trump.
MK: When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do? You are right that at the start of the war, I was arguing that Washington should give Ukraine everything it needs to win a decisive victory. But that is not what we did, and we missed the window. In January of this year, I argued that a change in conditions requires a change to an approach similar to the one Trump recommends.
I do think Europeans are preparing for the change that Trump represents. They just understand that Trump 2.0, and a return of peace through strength, will be better than an overly cautious foreign policy that invited major wars in Europe and the Middle East.
EA: What about Israel? I suspect that Harris will be less forward-leaning on Israel, but she’s been surprisingly resistant to openly criticizing Israel—or Biden’s strategy in the region, despite the obvious political payoff it might generate. And Trump is perhaps more of a wildcard than one might think on this topic. He’s hugely supportive of Israel, but I also can’t see him being happy with Netanyahu calling all the shots—or ignoring Trump the way he’s ignored Biden.
MK: Middle East policy will also be an area of divergence. It has been perhaps the most partisan aspect of U.S. foreign policy over the past three or four administrations, with Republicans supporting traditional partners (Israel, the Gulf states, etc.) to counter Iran and terrorists, and Democrats searching for a kind of balance among competing interests in the region.
We see this in Israel’s war in Gaza, with Biden and Harris trying to both support and restrain Israel at the same time. Trump, in contrast, says he would want Israel to “finish what they started” and “get it over fast.” To me, this sounds like he would back Israel with less concern for collateral damage.
There was also a somewhat humorous exchange this week as the world braced for Israel’s promised military retaliation for Iran’s missile barrage. Biden said that he would not support Israel striking Iran’s nuclear facilities. Trump retorted, “That is the craziest thing I have ever heard. He said, ‘Please leave their nuclear alone’? That’s what you want to hit, right? … You hit the nuclear first.”
Again, I think this reveals a Biden-Harris view that they are somehow above the conflict trying to manage it, with Trump seeing the United States as a participant in the conflict with clear friends and enemies.
EA: If the Biden administration thinks they’re an impartial party in this conflict—or even that they’re successfully “managing” it—then they’re completely delusional. The administration has done everything Israel has asked of it and has changed its stance a variety of times after being blindsided by Israeli actions. Just look at the invasion of Lebanon. The United States was pushing for a cease-fire, but Netanyahu wanted the war to continue, so now the White House says it supports the Israeli invasion. Whatever the merits of the policies, it’s pretty clear that the Biden administration is being led around by the nose on this issue.
I’m not sure I see much prospect for change here, though, from either candidate. Things are too far gone for productive policy change.
But I think we are out of time for today. I wonder what surprises the rest of October will bring?
MK: Let me venture a guess. Next week, Emma Ashford endorses Israel’s remarkably successful strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities—you heard it here first.
EA: That’s too far-fetched to be a black swan event. Sounds more like a pink ostrich.
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