From Gaza to Beijing: What foreign policy will Kamala Harris propose?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed a joint session of the US Congress on Wednesday, July 24, during his first visit abroad since the Hamas attack on October 7. His speech was marked by one notable absence: that of US Vice President Kamala Harris, also president of the Senate, who was not in her usual place on the podium.

According to protocol, she was to chair the session. But it was Benjamin Cardin, a staunchly pro-Israeli senator from Maryland, who took her seat alongside House Speaker Mike Johnson for Netanyahu’s fourth address to the country’s Congress.

Despite the importance of the event, the vice president was in Indianapolis to attend the national convention of the Zeta Phi Beta sorority, one of the oldest university organizations in the country for African-American students. And as Harris is about to be sworn in as the Democratic candidate for the presidential election, her absence raised many questions.

Seeking to downplay the impact of Harris’ decision, her team indicated that this campaign trip was planned long before Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race and assured that the vice president would meet separately with the Israeli prime minister.

“Her trip to Indianapolis on July 24 should not be interpreted as a change in her position on Israel,” one of her advisers told reporters, stressing Harris’s “unwavering commitment” to Israel’s security.

Now that President Biden, a major ally of Israel, is out of the race for the White House, Harris’ stance on the war in Gaza — an issue that deeply divides American voters — is in the spotlight.

Newbie in diplomacy

Foreign policy is not the strong point of the candidate to become the first female president of the United States. And it is a particularly sensitive issue for allied countries, who are closely watching American security commitments, especially after Donald Trump chose the openly isolationist Senator JD Vance as his vice-presidential candidate.

A law school graduate, former attorney general and senator from California, Harris has spent her career addressing domestic policy issues. Her arrival as vice president in 2021 is not in keeping with the American political tradition, which expects the vice president to compensate for the newly elected president’s inexperience in foreign policy.

When Biden was elected president in 2020, Harris became the vice president to a politician who had logged 36 years in the U.S. Senate and eight in the White House.

After nearly four years in office, Harris is now “in the loop” on foreign policy issues, says Steven Ekovich, an expert on American politics and professor at the American University of Paris, because “vice presidents attend meetings and briefings of the US National Security Council.”

According to Ekovich, Harris will most likely maintain – if she is finally named the Democratic candidate – the same line as her predecessor on foreign policy. “She will probably maintain the same direction and the same team, at least in the short term. I don’t think she will change things immediately,” he analyzes. “I think she will run a campaign of continuity.”

But the bets are still open, says the expert: “We are in ‘terra incognita’, since we do not know much about his foreign policy orientation.”

“Much more empathy” for Palestinians

While Biden has strongly supported Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip since the October 7 attacks and has maintained US military aid despite tensions with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his vice president has taken a more nuanced stance.

Harris has supported a two-state solution and Israel’s right to defend itself since her election to the US Senate in 2017, and has been careful not to contradict the president’s position on the issue since her accession to the Vice Presidency. However, she has distinguished herself on several occasions by strongly condemning the number of Palestinian victims and the actions of the Israeli state.

In early March, he issued the strongest comments yet by a US administration official on the Gaza war, calling for a ceasefire to end the “immense suffering” of Gazans and criticising Israel for its inadequate humanitarian aid deliveries.

“People in Gaza are starving. The conditions are inhumane and our common humanity compels us to act,” Harris said. “The Israeli government must do more to significantly increase humanitarian aid. No excuses,” she urged.

A month later, the US vice president again called on Israel to “do more to protect humanitarian workers” following the death of seven staff members of the US NGO World Central Kitchen, including an American citizen, killed in an Israeli army attack on their humanitarian convoy.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Jim Zogby, founder of the Arab American Institute, a US policy research organisation on the Arab-American community, said he had had a telephone conversation with Harris in October and that she had shown “much more empathy” for the Palestinians than Biden and other White House advisers.

The Democratic nominee-in-waiting could therefore adopt a slightly more nuanced stance than Biden has so far taken, continuing to support Israel but giving more space to Palestinian concerns.

A crucial issue in key states

Despite the events that have marked the campaign – the assassination attempt on Trump and Biden’s withdrawal – the war in Gaza remains a crucial issue in the presidential election.

Opinion polls in recent months show that young Americans are increasingly pro-Palestinian, and Democrats are deeply divided on the issue. Dozens of lawmakers from the left wing of the party sought to boycott Netanyahu’s speech in Congress. This was the case of the “Squad,” an informal group of young progressive lawmakers — composed of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan — and a strong supporter of Harris’s candidacy for the presidency.

The Biden administration’s policy toward Israel has angered a portion of Democratic voters and jeopardizes the left’s chances, especially in some key states.

According to Ekovich, Harris’ absence from Netanyahu’s speech sends an “electoral” message to “some key states like Michigan, where Detroit is located,” with its large population of Arab and black origin, or “in Pennsylvania, where Philadelphia is located, which has a large black population. There is a kind of allergy to Biden’s very pro-Israeli stance in these places.”

But for the political analyst, although Harris’ absence from Netanyahu’s speech to Congress could be interpreted as symbolic, the Democratic establishment is clearly behind the party’s future candidate and is unlikely to radically change US policy on the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

Continuity on Ukraine and NATO

Harris should also pursue a policy of continuity on other important issues, Ekovich says, such as the war in Ukraine and U.S. commitments to NATO.

The US vice president has had several meetings with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at international summits and most notably at the Munich Security Conference this year, where she represented Biden for the third consecutive year.

At their last meeting in June, at the Ukraine Peace Summit in Switzerland, Harris pledged significant aid of $1.5 billion for Ukraine’s energy sector, in addition to $379 million in humanitarian aid.

“She’s been tested, to be frank,” Democrat Adam Smith told the news site Politico, calling the events an opportunity to demonstrate her “impressive knowledge” and “skills” in regards to US policy in Europe and NATO.

A still uncertain position on China

However, his position on China, the other big issue in American foreign policy, remains to be determined.

Harris has taken a relatively tough stance on Beijing, supporting the Biden administration’s general line in defending U.S. interests in the South China Sea and openly criticizing human rights violations in Xinjiang.

But she has so far been less involved in the issue than other members of the administration and has yet to fully detail her own views and strategies.

So while Harris’s foreign policy may largely appear to be a continuation of Biden’s, especially in areas like Ukraine and NATO, there are several aspects, particularly in relation to Israel and China, that may lead to slightly different and nuanced approaches.

Latin America: The thorny issue of immigration

Another key campaign issue that Harris will have to convince on: illegal immigration from Latin America, an issue that Trump constantly brings up and which she was in charge of.

In this regard, the future Democratic candidate is at a disadvantage. By entrusting Harris with responsibility for the issue of illegal immigration, Biden has chosen to delegate to her a particularly thorny issue. Since the beginning of her mandate, Harris has been the subject of criticism in the face of an unprecedented wave of migration.

Scrupulously adhering to White House guidelines, the vice president made several mistakes during visits to the border with Mexico and to Latin American countries. “Don’t come,” she repeated during her visit to Guatemala in 2021, as a message to migrants from Central and South American countries trying to cross the border illegally. Harris was then accused of laxity by Republican Party lawmakers and of insensitivity by several Democratic lawmakers who harshly criticized her statements.

Experts agree that the task was almost impossible: “She inherited the immigration issue, and of course, she didn’t solve it, because no one could do it,” says political analyst Ekovich. Despite her difficulties on the issue, Harris supported a bipartisan agreement in February in the Senate and the White House to strengthen the fight against immigration on the Mexican border. An initiative blocked in the House of Representatives by the Republicans.

Her handling of this issue will be a point of attack for Trump, who has made “illegal immigrants” a central plank of his campaign. However, for Ekovich, this tactic by the Republican candidate could backfire. “If the Republicans, Trump and Vance, attack her on this point, Harris will be able to respond that a bill was proposed, and it was the Republicans who blocked it.”