By P.K.Balachandran
Colombo, August 3: Kamala Harris, who has secured the Democratic Party nomination to contest the November 2024 US Presidential election, is likely to be tougher on human rights as compared to Joe Biden, even as she broadly follows the bipartisan consensus on external affairs, says the leading US journal Foreign Policy.
As Vice President, Kamala Harris has been tougher on India than President Joe Biden in the past, criticizing the country’s human rights record under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, particularly on Kashmir.
She had made strong statements as a Senator and also, in a subtler way, during multiple engagements with Modi in Washington as Vice President, the journal recalls.
Harris’s age and her younger, chronically online support base could make her more willing to have those uncomfortable conversations, says Aparna Pande, Director of the India Initiative at the Hudson Institute.
“She’s also from the next generation of Democratic politicians; she’s not from President Biden’s generation. Younger Americans who form a large part of the party’s future base put far more stock in religious freedom and global injustices. Moreover, Harris comes from the Left wing of the Democratic Party to some extent, the progressive side, and so democracy matters, democratic values matter,” Pande added.
However, Michael Kugelman of the Wilson Centre cautions that if she becomes President that criticism may well be tempered, considering the US strategic interests in India.
Defence and technology have been particularly strong pillars of the US-India relationship, with several deals and initiatives announced during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s state visit to Washington in 2023.
US-India relationship remains too important for a significant shake up, Kugelman avers.
And Harris’s ancestral ties to India are something she would likely leverage to convey her own affinities for India.
Gaza
Perhaps the highest-profile foreign-policy crisis Harris will inherit if she wins in November is the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, Foreign Policypoints out.
In her public statements, Harris has placed more emphasis on, and shown more empathy toward Palestinian suffering in Gaza.
That is consistent with media reports starting late last year that she has pushed the White House to express more concern about the humanitarian crisis. The Biden administration has disputed those reports.
During a speech in Dubai in December, she revisited the brutal nature of the Hamas attacks that sparked the war, but she also urged Israel to do more to protect civilians in Gaza.
In a speech in Selma, Alabama, in March, she called for an immediate cease-fire to allow for the release of hostages and for aid to flow into Gaza. Though her remarks were consistent with the administration’s diplomatic efforts to broker a cease-fire deal, they were met with thunderous applause from the crowd due to her impassioned delivery.
While her policy on the conflict is largely likely to be one of continuity, she may strike a different tone than Biden, said Frank Lowenstein, the former special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations at the State Department.
This perception has been echoed by those who have spoken to her personally about the war.
During a meeting with Muslim community leaders at the White House on April 2 to discuss the administration’s Gaza policy, Zaher Sahloul, a Syrian American physician who worked in Gaza on a medical mission earlier this year, said that Harris was moved by their presentation about the impact of the war on people in Gaza and approached him after the meeting to ask for more reports from the ground about the humanitarian situation.
“I felt that she projected empathy,” Sahloul said. “She clearly cared about the civilian plight in Gaza.”
And while she didn’t diverge from Biden on policy, her articulation of the U.S. approach to the conflict was clearer and more detailed, he said.
In public remarks following her meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last Thursday, Harris struck a forceful tone.
Although she reiterated the Biden administration’s stance that Israel has the right to defend itself, she said that how it does so matters. Speaking about Gaza, she said, “We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering and I will not be silent.”
Commitment to Israel
Be that as it may, a close reading of Harris’s voting record and public speeches suggests that she is unlikely to preside over any “significant changes” in the U.S. approach to the war in Gaza or the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“Given what she has said, it seems like continuity,” said David Makovsky, a former senior advisor to the U.S. special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
In June 2023, Harris spoke at a reception in Washington to mark Israel’s independence day in which she touted the United States’ “unwavering” commitment to Israel and her Senate track record of voting in support of security assistance for the country as well as warned against the singling out of Israel because of anti-Jewish hatred.
Since the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, Harris has largely stuck by the Biden administration’s policy, which has affirmed Israel’s right to defend itself while slowly dialling up its criticism of the unsparing nature of Israel’s military campaign and pushing for a cease-fire deal that would also secure the release of hostages.
Harris’s husband, second gentleman Doug Emhoff, is Jewish and has played a prominent role in the administration’s efforts to address antisemitism. During her speech, Harris spoke of her pride in hosting the first-ever Passover seder at the vice presidential residence.
Balanced Policy on China
Harris’s China track record has been relatively limited compared to Biden, Foreign Policy recalls. But she is likely to continue the bipartisan policy of both competing and cooperating with China, while keeping up the pressure on China on trade and human rights, especially in regard to Xinjiang.
“Her strongest China experience may be the time she spent trying to shore up US alliances in the broader Indo-Pacific region as Vice president. She travelled three times to Southeast Asia as Vice President, visiting Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia”
Harris has often stood in for Biden at meetings in the region as well, including at the US-Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit in Jakarta last September.
In a September 2019 primary debate, she said of China, “They steal our products, including our intellectual property. They dump substandard products into our economy. They need to be held accountable,” while adding that the US should cooperate with China on key issues like climate change.
Human rights in China and other countries stand out as an area of focus for Harris both as a Senator and a presidential candidate.
Harris and 55 other Senators co-sponsored the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, which imposed sanctions on officials for violating human rights in Hong Kong during the mass protests against a controversial extradition bill.
The following year she co-sponsored a law applying a similar playbook to China’s human rights abuses in Xinjiang. She also called for then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to take further action in a subsequent letter after reports came out detailing the Chinese government’s efforts to restrict birth rates in Xinjiang.
Overall, experts said, her approach to China policy is unlikely to diverge significantly from Biden’s.
Aggressive towards Russia
Harris is expected to be continue the US policy of being aggressive on Russia on the Ukraine issue.
Biden has sent Harris to represent him at many of the biggest international conferences, including the Munich Security Conference and the Ukraine peace summit.
Harris doesn’t have Biden’s trans-Atlantic record, but three years in a row at Munich, one of Europe’s top talking shops and a place where officials go to calm their nerves on U.S. policy, she’s hit all the expected notes as America’s reassurer-in-chief, says Foreign Policy.
America’s commitment to NATO is “unwavering” and “ironclad,” she said in a February 2022 speech in Munich, just five days before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. She also said that NATO’s Article 5 self-defence pledge—which Trump has threatened not to honor for allies who aren’t meeting the alliance’s 2 percent of GDP spending mark—is “sacrosanct.”
In 2023, she returned to Munich with similar talking points on NATO but tougher language about Russia’s invasion, then a year old. The Biden administration had concluded that Russia had committed crimes against humanity in the war, she said.
And about two weeks before the debate that would effectively end Biden’s presidential campaign, Harris filled in as Biden’s surrogate at the Ukraine peace summit in Switzerland, where she called for a “just and lasting peace.”
The Kremlin has stayed mostly quiet on Harris’s presidential bid so far, with presidential spokesperson Dmitry Peskov noting the vice president’s “unfriendly rhetoric” but adding that Russia could not yet formally assess her candidacy.
Russian state media, however, immediately began to attack the Democratic Party’s new standard-bearer.
“Kamala with the nuclear button is worse than a monkey with a grenade,” said Andrei Sidorov, Moscow State University’s dean of global politics, speaking on Russian state TV’s weekly talk show.
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