The Democratic Convention and necessary foreign policy priorities for a Harris Administration

Kamala Harris on Friday delivered her major address to the Democratic Convention. (1)

I won’t dwell on the theater criticism much here. But her campaign is doing remarkably well, having begun in surprising and unusual circumstances.

Cenk Uygur, who is not known for softballing his opinion on such matters, wrote: (2)

This was Roy Edroso’s take:

Big takeaway for me is, Harris killed. I don’t want to get too deep into the political theater criticism angle but I will say her great achievement was to simultaneously embody empathy and righteousness — compassion for her fellow Americans and advocacy for their advancement as well as fierce, implacable opposition to those who would steal it from them. That strikes me as perfect for this moment of great danger and opportunity.

I forgive her for leaning on toughness because we know what a hard sell Lady Commander in Chief is in some districts; in fact I admire that she acknowledged the need and threw herself into the task. I know the Democrats suck in regard to Palestine. (Boy, she four-wheeled right through that, didn’t she?) But they’re situationally the best choice because, in this era, all third parties can do is fuck things up worse. (Get back to me when there’s a real worker’s party with a broad, genuine appeal to enlightened self-interest. Cornel West and RFK Jr. ain’t it.) (3)

I saw a documentary report on Harris’ career this week that made me think that the somewhat stiff attitude she displayed in her 2020 campaign as well as at times in her Vice-Presidential role, the attitude that contributed to her “Kamala the Cop” image, actually seems to have been an exception. In earlier political career, she was often much more upbeat and inspiring. The image of a responsible and committed public official that she projected last night is far more appealing.

I’ve sometimes compared her style to a corporate human relations department spokesperson delivering a routine talk on personnel policies to employees who have heard it all before and spend their time doing the talk thinking about planning their vacation or what they plan to cook on the weekend while trying to look completely bored on nod off. Kamala seems to have retired that particular persona, hopefully for good!

And her choice of Tim Walz as her Vice-Presidential candidate is a hopeful sign for anyone who wants to see the Democratic Party keep moving to a more progressive positions. (4)

A Harris Administration faces some serious foreign policy challenges. And we urgently need a US government that takes new approaches to the most urgent and serious ones. And it needs to be a very different approach that the Biden Administration has taken to them. At the end of four years, which featured the very sensible decision to execute the withdrawal from Afghanistan, key areas of foreign policy seem to be coasting on tired and inadequate assumptions.

John Mearsheimer in a new video talks about two of the most obvious ones, the Gaza War and the Russia-Ukraine War. (5)

Israel and the Palestinians

The October 7, 2023, Hamas attack and the subsequent war have shifted the politics of Israel within the United States. The blunt, ugly truth is that the US since then has been funding and arming, without any meaningful constraints, a genocidal war by the government of Israel against Palestinian civilians. (6)

The political situation in Israel is a horrible mess. Even though he is rightly being criticized heavily by the Israeli voters. But at the moment, he is polling better in his role of Prime Minister than he was a few months ago. And for all the political turmoil in Israel, the war itself is very popular. And the acceptance of criminal brutality against Palestinian civilians is clearly widespread. A lot of “respectable callousness” toward Palestinians of all ages is very evident.

The US government needs to shake off its own respectable callousness and do what it will have to do to restrain Israel: drastically cut military aid and withhold US direct military support from any wider war that Israel starts. The “savvy” assumption is also the very realistic one that a Harris Administration will find that extremely difficult to do, even if the new President seriously wants to do it. But it’s still necessary for the US to find a way to do it. Continuing to finance and arm and actual genocide in progress is just wrong.

Which is basically what Omer Bartov in the video above says the Biden Administration should have done early on.

The Russia-Ukraine War

The Ukrainians and the West need to find a way to establish a lasting peace agreement of some kind in Ukraine. Despite the understandable Western support for Ukraine in resisting an illegal Russian invasion, Ukraine is clearly losing the war and the long-term trend is on Russia’s side. The Ukrainians themselves will have to decide how much they are collectively willing to sacrifice in order to continue the war against Russia. And, of course, Russia has the upper hand and are in a position to keep fighting there for a long time. From the point of view of the US and NATO, we are basically enabling a war that is costing a lot of Ukrainian lives and doing a tremendous amount of damage to the country’s infrastructure and physical environment.

Nuclear weapons

The greatest failure of the “unipolar moment” that began with the end of the Soviet Union has been the continuing proliferation of nuclear weapons. A serious nonproliferation policy needs to become a top priority again:

The United States has begun a long overdue modernization of its nuclear arsenal, and it’s essential to understand the purpose of these acquisitions. The “why” and “how” of American nuclear weapons must be re-examined in consideration of emerging technologies that are complicating the logic underpinning nuclear strategy and policy. Are nuclear weapons being procured to win a war or to prevent one? Or both? Experts on both sides of a longstanding theoretical argument need to start talking to each other again.

Two schools of thought. The development of nuclear weapons started an inflexible and entangled debate between what—to borrow almost anachronistic language—may be described as the “nuclear revolution” and the “nuclear superiority” schools of thought. The former insists that mutual vulnerability (from which deterrence stability is derived) has revolutionized international competition by making wars between great powers essentially impossible. The latter, meanwhile, contends that the Pentagon should embrace nuclear warfighting postures revolving around a counterforce targeting doctrine—that is, shooting first in a preemptive strike to eliminate an opponent’s nuclear weapons before they can be launched (this is defined by its proponents as the only conceivable way to win a nuclear war). [my emphasis] (7)

To be clear, a “preemptive strike” nuclear strategy is extremely destabilizing. Controlling and reducing nuclear weapons requires a stable environment for international arms control.

And the sooner the US concentrates on building such an environment, the better.

Notes:

(1) WATCH LIVE: Kamala Harris speaks at 2024 Democratic National Convention. PBS Newshour 08/23/2024. <https://www.youtube.com/live/o10x76nSDEY?si=mXtGIEle8ms2l-S-> (Accessed: 2024-23-08).

(2) X/Twitter 08/23/2024.<https://x.com/cenkuygur/status/1826844582119645590 https://www.youtube.com/live/hlhX30TeGq4?si=I1qfZ_7s9FELRbt5> (Accessed: 2024-23-08).

(3) Edroso, Roy (2024): The Big Show. Roy Edroso Breaks It Down 08/23/2024. <https://edroso.substack.com/p/the-big-show> (Accessed: 2024-22-08).

(4) Yücel, Emine (2024): Walz Shows His Real Guy Roots As He Skewers Republicans’ Definition Of Freedom. TPM 08/22/2024. <https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/walz-shows-his-real-guy-roots-as-he-skewers-republicans-definition-of-freedom> (Accessed: 2024-22-08).

(5) Prof. John Mearsheimer: A Destructive Foreign Policy. Judge Napolitanto-Judging Freedom YouTube channel 08/22/2024. <https://www.youtube.com/live/hlhX30TeGq4?si=I1qfZ_7s9FELRbt5> (Accessed: 2024-22-08).

(6) Israeli Holocaust Scholar: Why Gaza Is Genocide - w/. Prof. Omer Bartov. Owen Jones YouTube channel 08/21/2024. <https://youtu.be/jDePmAFle4A?si=SRNmYZdzqR9BZwhH> (Accessed: 2024-22-08).

(7) O’Doherty, Jack (2024): Is America buying nuclear weapons to win a war or to prevent one? Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 08/20/2024. <https://thebulletin.org/2024/08/is-america-buying-nuclear-weapons-to-win-a-war-or-to-prevent-one/> (Accessed: 2024-22-08).