How Kamala Harris Should Put America First — for Real

If Kamala Harris reaches the Oval Office, she will inherit a dilemma larger than the sum of all the international conflicts and crises that will land on her desk: What is the purpose of American power now?

The administration in which Ms. Harris currently serves has not given an adequate answer. President Biden has armed open-ended wars on the grounds that the United States is still the “indispensable nation” — a grim prospect as an increasingly competitive world imposes escalating costs on a country roiled by troubles at home. The leading global power has lost control of its foreign policy, buffeted from one emergency to the next, unable to set priorities of its own.

The present cacophony is decades in the making. Coming out of the Cold War, successive American administrations chose to pursue global military dominance, even in the absence of rivals. The United States expanded its alliances and stationed troops across the globe, seeking perpetual peace through perpetual strength. The hope, too, was that the stabilizing effects of U.S. military primacy would spill over into other areas, fostering global cooperation to protect the environment, secure human rights and expand prosperity through trade.

But this theory failed — gradually, then suddenly. Instead of bringing global peace and advantage to Americans, it has embroiled them in a world of conflicts. It hasn’t stopped China from rising or Russia from lashing out, but it has exposed the United States to great risk when they did. None of this has focused Washington on the threats that touch Americans where they live and work.

For eight years, Donald Trump, of all people, has been permitted to monopolize calls for a new vision of America’s role in the world. He has drawn surprising potency from his vow to put “America first,” even as many of his specific policies lack coherence and popularity. He held the advantage on foreign policy in this year’s election before Mr. Biden stepped aside, and according to recent polls, he still does. Whatever happens in November, the Republicans can be expected to carry on Mr. Trump’s nationalist pitch.

Ms. Harris won’t break sharply with her boss, the sitting president, while on the campaign trail. If she takes his seat in January, however, she should unburden herself of orthodoxy, out-innovate her opponents and create a foreign policy fit, at long last, for the 21st century. By setting the needs of Americans front and center at every turn, she will strip Trumpism of its allure and deliver the global leadership that the country craves. Call it America first, but for real.

No president since the Cold War has taken office facing an acute risk of a major-power war. The 47th will — and must make preventing catastrophic conflict the highest priority. It won’t be easy to steer a country used to dealing with weak states and terrorists rather than rivals who could, if cornered, send nuclear missiles into U.S. cities. Democrats too often turn foreign policy into a morality tale, reducing matters of geopolitics to a “battle between democracy and autocracy,” in Mr. Biden’s words. Republicans under Mr. Trump peddle a perverse anti-moralism, as though acting ruthlessly or flattering dictators could amount to a strategy.

Ms. Harris can do better. Rather than let Mr. Trump and his ilk monopolize valid concerns about World War III, she should frankly explain to Americans that the danger is real and will be mitigated only through assertive diplomacy — because no military buildup will ever be enough to make the rest of the world cower in fear and sit still. The era of unrivaled American primacy, in the shadow of the Soviet collapse, may be over. But a new era of responsible American leadership can begin. The United States should make the world safe for diversity, blocking whoever tries to dominate without seeking dominance itself.

In that spirit, Ms. Harris should sustain support to Ukraine to preserve its independence against Russian aggression. Yet she should simultaneously work to halt the war — which risks escalating into a direct U.S.-Russia conflict every day it drags on — through the only realistic means available: negotiation. Ukraine has no plausible path to retake all its territory by fighting. Even if it eventually found some way to do so, a desperate Kremlin could well resort to nuclear weapons to avert total defeat. For some Ukrainians, that might be a risk worth taking. For Americans, it would not be, and the president’s duty is to protect them.

Ms. Harris should use carrots and sticks to bring both countries to the table, including threatening to reduce aid to Ukraine if it passes up a good deal and offering sanctions relief to Russia if it signs on. Negotiations may take a long time. But from her opening salvo, Ms. Harris would break the current taboo on diplomacy, show she won’t tolerate another forever war and assert America’s interests as an independent country unafraid to pressure friends or placate foes. Let Republicans cry weakness. They always do. And let Ms. Harris reply: Would they prefer World War III?

Ms. Harris should also adjust her predecessors’ approaches to China. Under Presidents Trump and Biden, the world’s top two powers have descended into open rivalry, with tensions over Taiwan coming to the fore. The standard Washington playbook recommends more militarization: build up forces around the island and pledge to defend it. Ms. Harris should be more careful. Because Chinese leaders stake their legitimacy on being able to achieve eventual unification with Taiwan, U.S. actions seen as foreclosing that possibility could cause China to invade.

In truth, Beijing has long proved willing to tolerate the island’s self-rule so long as Taiwan does not declare independence and the United States acknowledges the position that Taiwan is part of China. America’s “one China” policy is the most essential means of preventing conflict that Washington possesses. Ms. Harris should fortify it, ending the dangerous erosion that began under Mr. Trump and accelerated under Mr. Biden, who said several times that independence was for Taiwan to decide and vowed to defend it militarily. She should also incentivize Taiwan to improve its own defenses, by offering stepped-up but conditional aid, and develop options to send supplies to the island in the event of conflict.

As Ms. Harris stabilizes key relationships, she should seek to limit the alignment of American adversaries. It’s not inevitable that cooperation among China, Russia, North Korea and Iran will deepen. Rather than talk up the so-called axis of autocracies, she should enlarge the fissures among them. Making peace in Ukraine will go a long way, removing a focal point of these countries’ collaboration. Relieving sanctions on Iran and North Korea, in return for restrictions on their nuclear weapons programs or their arms deals with Moscow, is worth attempting as well.

Of course, Ms. Harris would face constant pressure from those in Washington who deem any gain by China or Russia to be near catastrophic. She should set the record straight: There are compelling reasons to help Ukraine and Taiwan, but not to put everything on the line for them and bring about disastrous global conflict. Pragmatic, determined diplomacy — neither the democracy-versus-autocracy fatalism of Mr. Biden nor the frenzied fumbles of Mr. Trump — will make Americans safer.

Even so, diplomacy alone won’t be enough to extricate the United States from the bind in which decades of strategic errors has placed it. Having sought to make the United States essential to security arrangements around the world, policymakers have got their wish: The United States is now committed to defend more countries than ever in its history, and several commitments might just come due.

Some in Washington already have their solution: more primacy. They are pressing for huge increases in military spending to develop a U.S. force capable of fighting in Asia, Europe and the Middle East simultaneously. The idea might seem hopelessly misguided: It would require cutting Social Security and Medicare and raising taxes, as the congressionally mandated Commission on the National Defense Strategy gingerly admits. But making promises first and considering costs later has become routine in Washington.

As president, Ms. Harris should say, “No more.” She should ask more of U.S. allies instead — more strategically than Mr. Trump would and more firmly than Mr. Biden has.

It is mostly a myth that “America First” Republicans seek a smaller U.S. military role in the world. Mr. Trump’s central complaint isn’t that American soldiers are on the hook to protect allies that might otherwise defend themselves; it’s that allies should pay more for the service. That might save some money, but it wouldn’t make the United States more secure or its foreign policy more strategic. Mr. Biden, on the other hand, calls every alliance a “sacred obligation,” as if theological declamations could overcome material constraints.

American overstretch is a problem to be solved, not denied. Today the U.S. military, lavishly funded though it is, is incapable of conducting full-scale operations against China and Russia at once. In the event of war in Asia, the United States would have little choice but to leave its European allies gravely exposed.

Ms. Harris must solve this problem and steer alliances to fulfill their rightful purpose — as means to achieve the ends of U.S. national security. She should strike a new trans-Atlantic bargain that gradually replaces most American capabilities and responsibilities with European ones, while keeping the United States firmly within NATO. Americans benefit from holding Russia at bay, to be sure. But Europeans benefit more and possess the economic and military resources to vastly outmatch Moscow. The United States may never get a better and safer opportunity, as Russia’s forces are worn down by combat in Ukraine, to bring about this overdue adjustment.

In the Middle East, Ms. Harris should have one overriding aim: to disentangle the United States from it. Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden talked about backing away from the region, only to find themselves engaging in assassinations and bombings meant to avert still larger wars. That’s because they never actually pulled back. U.S. troop levels in the Persian Gulf have remained quite stable for the past decade.

To keep the Middle East from derailing American foreign policy and her presidency, Ms. Harris should remove most of these forces, beginning in Iraq, Syria and northeast Jordan, where they serve mainly as targets for Iran-backed militias. She should then focus on two narrow goals: securing maritime trade routes and preventing terrorist attacks on the American homeland. Neither objective requires intimate partnerships with Gulf monarchies such as Saudi Arabia. Ms. Harris should shelve Mr. Biden’s hoped-for treaty committing U.S. forces to defend Saudi Arabia and return to her pledge in 2020 to “fundamentally re-evaluate our relationship” with the kingdom.

Relations with Israel will have to get worse before getting better. Ms. Harris says she will “always give Israel the ability to defend itself,” but that vow need not apply where Israel clearly goes beyond reasonable self-defense. Ms. Harris should stop sending arms for Israeli military operations in Gaza if they continue and be ready to expand sanctions against violent settlers in the West Bank. If she maintains Mr. Biden’s deference to Israel’s government, she will watch Israel entrench its occupation of Palestinian territory, escalate its strikes in the region and quite possibly draw the United States into a large war with Iran. Putting strict limits on support for Israel would be politically risky, but the alternative would be worse.

Right-sizing America’s global posture will help keep the focus on Asia, where the most consequential challenges lie. There, too, Ms. Harris can foster more self-reliant allies. She should coax Japan and the Philippines to turn themselves into bulwarks hardened against Chinese invasion, regardless of what happens in Taiwan. In the Indo-Pacific, as elsewhere, a Harris administration should shape security structures that won’t be shattered by a single act of aggression and don’t depend on a single country to provide defense. Making the world resilient beats keeping America overburdened.

All this will enable Ms. Harris to leave her mark where her national security adviser says she wants to — on “how things we do today will affect the United States and the world five, 10 or 20 years into the future.” The most pressing of these challenges travel across borders and through American communities. They include climate change, infectious disease and technological risk, the products of modern societies on a connected planet.

Americans are seeing the direct effects of global threats as never before. Climate and weather last year caused a record-high 28 “billion-dollar disasters,” which inflict damages of $1 billion or more, and are playing havoc with housing insurance. Covid-19 claimed 1.2 million American lives, exceeding the U.S. death toll from any war in history, and there are almost certainly more pandemics to come. The world doesn’t yet know how artificial intelligence will empower human misbehavior and escape human control, except that it will do both. Mass destruction and vast disruption lie ahead unless these threats are treated with the urgency of any comparable military threat.

A Harris administration should do just that and take the offensive against those who would leave the nation defenseless against lethal perils. She should travel to disaster sites, not just to console victims but also to demand far-reaching action. She should educate the country about what she has called, in spearheading the Biden administration’s A.I. safety efforts, “the full spectrum of A.I. risk.” And she should develop simple metrics to evaluate progress on America’s environmental, biological and technological defense buildup and report on them regularly to the nation.

To get other countries to do what Americans need to be safe, Ms. Harris should be competitive and even confrontational, not simply cooperative. To counter climate change, for example, she should help developing countries to green their economies by offering them abundant financing to import and produce renewable-energy technologies. She should then turn around and challenge China to do the same with its Belt and Road Initiative, which has yet to deliver on President Xi Jinping’s promises to invest in wind and solar.

Better yet, she should tell Mr. Xi to stop burning coal in China — the biggest source of emissions in the world’s largest-emitting country. Last year China was responsible for two-thirds of the world’s newly operating coal plants, capping a building spree that began in 2020. Mr. Xi should send his coal plants onto the literal ash heap of history. Chinese leaders say they want “peaceful coexistence” with America; clamping down on coal should be a price for that, allowing the United States to let Chinese companies produce green goods in America. After all, coexistence requires both countries to preserve a habitable planet.

Even where confrontation is less productive, Ms. Harris can focus unapologetically on protecting Americans. Before Covid-19, U.S. global health initiatives were frequently cast either as humanitarian endeavors or as ways to burnish America’s image. As president, Ms. Harris’s priority should be unmistakable: stopping the next pandemic or biological attack in the United States. Part of this work lies at home, in stockpiling personal protective equipment and speeding vaccine production. But much of it requires international action, so that other countries will prevent, detect and control outbreaks, keeping them away from America’s shores. A global pandemic pact, facilitating the exchange of data and pharmaceuticals, would be a start.

In his own way, Mr. Trump proves that identifying cross-border phenomena as threats can resonate politically. Yet in blaming immigration and trade, he misidentifies the actual threats. The United States needs to control its borders but also open its doors to newcomers. Immigrants are essential to keeping health care and Social Security solvent for the current population and to ensuring America’s economic growth and international competitiveness. Ms. Harris won’t defeat nativist politics with either naïve compassion or cynical concessions; she must make an affirmative case for immigration in the national interest.

Similarly, Ms. Harris should aim to renew the country’s confidence that the United States benefits from economic exchange with the rest of the world. Building on Mr. Biden’s innovations, she should crack down on tax havens and tax avoidance, pressuring Congress to carry out the international agreement to charge corporations 15 percent minimum wherever they operate. Unlike her predecessor, Ms. Harris should make new trade agreements, but ones that prioritize security and resilience. Deals in specific sectors, such as clean energy and artificial intelligence, would not only increase prosperity but also establish common rules to reduce existential risks.

Precisely by being clearsighted about threats, Ms. Harris can help Americans look out at the world and see opportunities again.

The pursuit of global military dominance didn’t work in better times; in the future, it will fail faster and harder. What’s more, downplaying nonmilitary threats has left them unresolved and let scapegoats fill the vacuum. The United States needs real change in its foreign policy.

That change, however, should not take the form of a values-first, do-gooding internationalism that disregards how Americans benefit. The problem with “America First” isn’t the claim to put America first; it’s that Mr. Trump’s version utterly fails to deliver. Ms. Harris can succeed by seizing the high ground of advancing U.S. national interests. Humanity can win, too, by preventing major-power war, building resilient security arrangements and defeating planetary threats together.

In her campaign, Ms. Harris has discussed foreign policy mostly in general terms, leaving herself room for maneuver. She shouldn’t miss the chance, if she gets it, to do better than another four years of Mr. Biden’s foreign policy — not to mention Mr. Trump’s — and turn squarely to the pressing problems of today and tomorrow. For America, and the world, there should be no going back.