Memo from Europe: what would a Kamala Harris presidency mean?

A note to readers: Edward Luce’s Swamp Note will appear on Monday. Rana Foroohar is away.

What a difference a few weeks can make. It’s hard to overstate how gloomy America’s traditional allies in Europe were in mid-July when Donald Trump’s campaign was so clearly ascendant. Officials across western Europe and in east Asia were frantically planning for the consequences of a second Trump term. Most were, by and large, calculating how best to impress him. “There was a sense of Trump inevitability creeping into European foreign ministry discussions,” one European aide told me this week. “Some officials were even saying ‘when Trump comes to power . . .’”

Much of the thinking sounded, frankly, craven, if not supplicatory. The view was that Trump had to be appeased and flattered to entice him into remembering the value of traditional partners. Outwardly, allies talked of working together for a common policy. Privately, of course, every individual state was working out how best to pursue their own interests.

One new Democratic candidate later, it is remarkable how many European officials that I’ve spoken with are swooning over the idea of a Kamala Harris presidency. They appear to have lost sight of the fact that there are still nearly three months’ hard slog to go. But for now, rightly, there is a new question on the minds of America’s allies: how would a Kamala Harris presidency change — if at all — America’s approach to the world?

When it comes to alliances, there is an assumption that a Harris administration would follow the lead of Joe Biden, who has made nurturing these relationships a key plank of his foreign policy, especially in east Asia. European officials are especially heartened by the presence of the veteran trans-Atlanticist Philip Gordon in her team. “Every cycle there are these prophecies that the trans-Atlanticists are a dying breed and then another one comes along,” says one delighted European official. “He is exactly what every European would have wanted.”

Both America and Britain — and other parts of Europe — have lurched in lockstep in a populist direction in recent years. Four months after Britain voted to leave the EU, America voted in Trump and the very foundations of the post-cold war liberal world order seemed at risk. Yet now, Europe’s leaders — with the exception of Serbia’s and Hungary’s — while deeply fearful of a Trump second term, are daring to hope the wind could be blowing the other way.  

Officials in Sir Keir Starmer’s new, centre-left UK government have inevitably been making all the right diplomatic noises about working with whoever wins in November. To be fair, ideological mind-melds between the Oval Office and Number 10 are not essential for a close US-UK relationship. I recall working as a foreign correspondent in Washington when the conservative Republican George W Bush was in the White House and a seemingly star-struck Tony Blair seemed to be constantly hopping back and forth to see him.

While it is clear that a Harris victory would be a dream come true for most of Europe, there is uncertainty over what extent Harris will continue with the economic nationalism espoused by Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. Rebecca Lissner, Harris’s deputy national security adviser, must surely have seen a spike in her author royalty payments; diplomats are spending their summer breaks reading her latest book for insight into her view of the world.

But there is a confident expectation in Europe that a change from Biden to Harris would not be a paradigm shift and that most policies would stay the same, albeit maybe with a slight tilt to the left. There is also a sense that a Harris administration would be assiduous in trying to shore up relationships with the global south. (To be clear Swampians, I am a firm believer in the term, for all its geographic and ideological fuzziness. And for what it’s worth, after years working in Africa, I think America has casually lost moral, political and economic clout there, which it could regain.)

I appreciate that the Democratic Convention in Chicago is not about the international audience. But I for one am hoping that some of these issues will be a little clearer by the end of next week. Peter you have written about America and its stance on the world for years. You too covered George W Bush. What is your sense of the overarching philosophy of a putative Harris administration? And is there a risk that, as has happened so many times before, the world assumes one thing about a potential presidency and then — if it comes to pass — the course of events blows all previous assumptions out of the water?

Recommended reading

• In the spirit of reaching out across the aisle . . . my long read of the week was in The Wall Street Journal, which published an extraordinary account of the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipeline. You will feast on the details.

• The story of the week for me has been Ukraine’s incursion into Russia. It is still too early to know of course if this will help to change the course of the war, but it has been a huge morale boost for Ukraine — and humiliating for Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. Who better to analyse this than Professor Lawrence Freedman?

• And finally, on the subject of autocrats, I have written a column on how autocracies endure — and end. I rather hope that the Kremlin’s FT subscribers read it and take note.

Peter Spiegel responds

Alec, I think part of Harris’s attractiveness right now, both domestically and internationally, is that she’s a tabula rasa: everyone can project their hopes and dreams on to her, and there really isn’t enough of a track record to prove them wrong.

This is particularly the case when it comes to Harris’s views on Europe, and foreign policy more generally. This is not to say she’s inexperienced; as a sitting vice-president, she has been in the room for all of the Biden White House’s major global crises, both those handled well (husbanding an international coalition to support Ukraine) and not so well (the US withdrawal from Afghanistan). 

But unlike Biden, Harris has left few fingerprints on how she influenced national security decision-making during her tenure as vice-president. Indeed, when the Washington Post recently tried to delve into her role in Biden’s Afghan withdrawal, it came up empty-handed — nobody seemed to remember whether she advised anything different than what the president ultimately did, despite being in the inner sanctum.

She also differs from Biden in that her vice-presidential career was not preceded by any significant work on foreign affairs. Biden was the senior Democrat on the Senate’s foreign relations committee for more than a decade before joining Barack Obama’s ticket, and had become a leader in the Dean Acheson “liberal internationalist” wing of the party. 

For analysts, this lack of a track record is further complicated by something else you raised, Alec. Because Harris has had limited visibility on the international stage, allies and foes alike are looking to her close advisers, such as Gordon, who have served as Harris’s foreign policy brains during her vice-presidency.

Gordon is, as you suggested, one of the most prominent remaining Atlanticists in Washington. But in a Democratic party that has divided itself between the old school liberal internationalist camp, which centres around Biden and the Clintons, and a post-Iraq neo-isolationist grouping, which centres around Obama and his ex-White House coterie, which camp do you put Gordon in? He’s worked with the Bidens for the past four years, but came to prominence in Washington as one of Obama’s earliest foreign policy aides. 

In short, I think your European interlocutors are right to regard Harris as someone who will value treaty alliances far more highly than Trump did, and that Gordon will add a bit more European flavour to her outlook than Obama had. But beyond that, I suspect we’ll have to wait for events, my dear boy, events.

Your feedback

And now a word from our Swampians . . .

In response to “The meaning of Tim Walz”:
“In general elections, I have voted Tory all my life, except for this year when my vote went to Labour. The Conservative party moved away from me when it decided to hold the EU referendum and then failed to make a sound political case for voting against the idea.

So, if I was an American, I would see the Harris-Walz ticket as a breath of fresh air. Trump is now exposed as an old man who cannot make a serious, coherent stump speech about anything that ought to matter to the great majority of the US electorate and Vance as a complete freak with weird ideas. People ought not to trust either of them.” — Keith Billinghurst