As the Democratic Party poohbahs convene in Chicago to ratify the historical changes at the top of their ticket, behind the scenes, a very D.C. parlor game is playing out: If she wins the presidency, what will Kamala Harris’s foreign policy look like, and whom will she appoint to implement it?
If anyone had been hoping for a clue from the party’s platform, they would have been sorely disappointed. The document, published on Sunday night ahead of the convention opening, details at length the foreign policy of… “President Biden’s second term.” Incredibly, this wasn’t a one-off typo or a two- or even three-off. It’s the entire foreign policy section, from Ukraine and Russia to the Middle East. Evidently, whatever committee assembled the platform did not have the desire—or, more likely, the time—to update it after Biden stepped aside and Harris took over. But Democratic “Blob” insiders don’t see a problem with it. “In a strange way, I think it gives her freedom to not be perfectly aligned and not to be pinned down by anything in writing,” one source close to the Biden administration told me. “Politically, I kind of like it.”
Intentionally or not, the lack of any new foreign policy platform has reinforced the feeling in D.C. national security circles that Harris is a bit of a blank slate on these issues. Not that this notion needed any reinforcement. The message from Biden’s foreign policy people has been that a Harris administration would be defined by “continuity with change,” which just so happens to be the slogan of Selina Meyer’s presidential campaign in Veep. One person told me to expect a “10 to 20 percent difference” in Harris’s foreign policy from Biden, whatever that means. The point, of course, is that no one knows what to expect, other than in the vaguest and most obvious possible sense: some change and some continuity, with all the details T.B.D.
But that very ambiguity is also firing up the Democratic foreign policy crowd. “I’m really excited by the opportunity because she’s less fixed and her presidency could offer a reset on a whole host of issues,” one Democratic national security insider told me. “Since her time in the Senate, she’s not been known as a foreign policy/national security person, so there’s a lot of opportunity to grow and deepen.” Others noted the benefit of keeping her messaging vague and hopeful, denying the opposition anything specific to attack.
In the absence of Harris rolling out some vision for national security policy, of course, the key to determining where a President Harris would take American foreign policy will be the people she appoints to these key jobs. And, this being Washington, there are more than a few people not-so-quietly raising their hands in the air.
Cadres Determine Everything
And so begin the D.C. parlor games: Who will get which job? Who will stay on and who will go? And, of course, how can I position myself to get a job in the Harris administration if she wins? With the caveat that no one knows anything, really, the discussions are quite telling. For starters, almost no one believes that Tony Blinken will stay on as Secretary of State. He is tired, he has two very small children, people say, and he’s probably too much of a Biden guy, having come across the president’s radar as a staffer when Biden ran the Senate Foreign Relations Committee way back in the ’90s. One possible replacement is Bill Burns, the current C.I.A. director, who actually comes from State—and who originally wanted that job in 2021—and who is more or less universally beloved. “I think everyone’s pretty excited” about a Burns move to State, said the Democratic national security insider. “To go from C.I.A. to State and have people excited about it is a pretty extraordinary testament to his character.”
Few people I’ve spoken to expect current national security advisor Jake Sullivan or his deputy Jon Finer to stay on, especially with Phil Gordon, Kamala’s current national security advisor, expected to take over Jake’s role in a Harris administration. Gordon’s deputy, Ilan Goldenberg, who has since gone over to the Harris campaign to run Jewish outreach, is also apparently in the running for a plum national security job. People I talk to also seem to think that Kurt Campbell, recently confirmed to be the No. 2 at State, as well as Middle East coordinator Brett McGurk, are not long for their jobs. But even their detractors admit that they are the ultimate Washington survivors and, for now, no one is taking their exits for granted.
While I’ve written about the widely-held expectation that Harris would choose a woman as Secretary of Defense, the name in circulation has changed in the last month. At first, everyone mentioned Michèle Flournoy, one of the co-founders of the Center for a New American Security and the perennial candidate to be the first female SecDef. Her name was floated in 2016 when the polls showed Hillary Clinton’s inevitability, and again in 2020 when Biden won. She didn’t get the nod either time—and for very different reasons—but when Harris ascended to the top of the ticket, Flournoy, who is also widely loved and respected, seemed a natural contender.
But now, a month later, a different narrative has emerged. Flournoy, who is the managing partner of WestExec, a consulting firm she co-founded with Blinken, is now seen as having too many potential conflicts of interest—and, as one source told me, having “made too much money”—to serve or to get through the confirmation process. Kathleen Hicks, the current deputy to the Pentagon chief, would be another natural candidate, but is seen as having had too many actual conflicts with the Biden White House. So who will it be? The name I keep hearing is Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth.
There’s also a lot of hope that a Harris administration will mean lots of new names and fresh blood introduced into the system that, since the Clinton and Obama days, has been recycling many of the same people. But of course, because they haven’t held the top jobs, no one can seem to think of who, exactly, the new faces would be. Still, the Dems have a deep bench there, too, and a lot of these young national security types, most of them in their 30s and 40s, are raring to go—and to change up the Democratic foreign policy status quo of the last 15 years.
One name I’ve heard come up is that of Maher Bitar, who ascended from Adam Schiff’s legal advisor to senior director of intelligence on the N.S.C. to, most recently, the N.S.C.’s chief coordinator for intelligence and defense policy. He is young (in his early forties) and he is also Palestinian-American, both of which give him a different perspective than a traditional Dem foreign policy staffer. “He has done a brilliant job under very difficult circumstances,” said a source close to the Biden N.S.C. “He has brought a more human-rights oriented approach and has also been behind some of the ways they’ve declassified intelligence in the run-up to Ukraine.” Could he be offered the D.N.I. job or some kind of senior role in the I.C. under Harris? Very likely.
But again, “the names in circulation have nothing to do with reality,” as another Democratic foreign policy insider cautioned. “There hasn’t been time to even think about the things that responsible campaigns tell themselves not to think about anyway,” added this source, who is also angling for their own job in a Harris administration. “We’re all superstitious. If you even talk about it, you’re jinxing the outcome you want to see.”
