David Ignatius
Would Kamala Harris make a good president and commander in chief? The vice president certainly strengthened her case with a deft performance in Tuesday night’s debate. To use a combat metaphor, she appeared to encircle and at times overwhelm her adversary.
Harris was forceful in discussing America’s role in the world and her commitment to a strong, secure nation. She stole some of former president Donald Trump’s lines, calling him a “disgrace,” a weak leader and a man manipulated by the flattery of dictators. But skillful performance as a debater isn’t the same thing as executive leadership. Baiting an opponent on television isn’t preparation for making decisions in the Situation Room. So it’s important to examine how Harris would perform on national security issues in office if she won the presidency.
To get a better sense of her potential strengths and weaknesses, I interviewed more than a half-dozen current or former officials who have observed her in the Situation Room or other sensitive national security meetings.
They all expressed versions of the same basic theme: Harris behaves like the prosecutor she was for much of her career. She’s skeptical, probing, sometimes querulous. She can be impatient and demanding. But she asks good questions. And if she’s convinced of the need, she’s not afraid to act. “She’s more hard-line than most people think,” said one retired four-star general who has briefed her many times. One top member of her staff put it this way: “She’s always the same person, pushing for information, making sure people aren’t bulls—-ing her.” Having watched her often in discussions about using military force, he concluded: “Her approach is to measure twice, cut once. But she’s not afraid to take the shot.”
Based on these and other conversations, I can offer a narrative of the “hidden Harris” as she was involved in key national security decisions during the Biden administration. My sources requested anonymity, but each detail in this account comes from someone who was with Harris when the events happened. Harris got off to what her aides agree was a bumpy start with her intelligence briefer. During the administration’s first year, the briefer was presenting a classified personality profile of a female foreign leader Harris would be meeting. The briefer was a woman, but Harris thought some of the language she was using was gender-biased. Rather than just voicing her discomfort, Harris requested an intelligence community internal review.
The result, never previously reported, was an internal assessment by the intelligence community of whether analysts had routinely used gender-biased language in intelligence reports. The review examined several years of analytical reports, comparing how often certain words had been used about women and men. Harris was so concerned that she asked intelligence agencies to train their analysts to avoid any such bias in the future. She also requested more reporting from the intelligence community on gender issues and sexual violence around the world.
Though she is said to have been pleased by the agency’s responsiveness to her concerns, after that first year she dropped the personal, one-to-one briefing. A spokesman for Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines declined to comment on the gender-bias review. The ODNI oversees the President’s Daily Brief and other reports to top officials, but many of them are prepared by analysts at the CIA.
The Biden team’s first big national security crisis was Afghanistan in mid-2021, and Harris played an interesting role. Philip H. Gordon, her national security adviser, agreed with the Pentagon that President Joe Biden’s plan to pull all US troops from Kabul would be unwise. Biden strongly disagreed. Harris pressed the Pentagon briefers about what would happen if 2,500 US troops remained, as the military wanted. Would the Taliban resume attacks on Americans – and would more US troops be needed to protect the residual force? Pentagon officials conceded that additional forces might indeed be necessary.
Harris backed Biden’s decision to pull all the troops out – which led to a collapse of the Afghan government and a chaotic, bloody withdrawal. On that issue, and all other major ones, she was careful to always support Biden when he’d made his choice – as vice presidents nearly always do. The border problem vexed Harris during her first year, and it remains a campaign issue now. Biden asked her to take charge of stemming immigration from the so-called Northern Triangle of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. In a June 2021 speech in Guatemala, she delivered a sensible message: Stay home. But that was unpopular with progressive Democrats, and the White House left Harris holding the bag.
Though Republicans have tried to tag her as “border czar,” it’s more accurate to say that she was captive of the administration’s sluggish and reactive policy. Democrats were allergic to anything that looked like Trump’s harsh border enforcement measures. When Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra was reluctant to shoulder responsibility for overcrowded facilities, leaving blame to rest with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Harris stood with Mayorkas, telling him after a key White House meeting, “I saw exactly what went on in there.”
The Ukraine war has been the administration’s biggest foreign policy challenge. Harris was fully involved in the run-up. When Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned the administration in October 2021 that the Russians were preparing to invade, one participant in the briefing remembers Harris pressing him for details: “How fast can the Russians move? What kind of units do they have? What are their capabilities?” On the eve of the invasion, Harris personally delivered to President Volodymyr Zelensky the decisive intelligence that the Russians were coming. The meeting took place at the Munich Security Conference, days before the Russian invasion on Feb. 22.
Zelensky was still dubious about the invasion and questioned Harris’s troop numbers. “You’re wrong,” Harris told him bluntly. “They’re going in.” She pressed Zelensky on whether he had a plan to defend Kyiv and to leave the city if necessary. The Russians did indeed come across the border. Zelensky bravely stayed and fought. He reportedly tweaked the administration later for having talked about possible evacuation, saying: “I need ammunition, not a ride.”
Through the Ukraine war, Harris has shared Biden’s twin objectives of supporting Ukraine’s armed resistance and avoiding a US war with Russia – goals that have sometimes been in conflict. This debate now focuses on whether the United States should remove its limits on Ukrainian use of long-range ATACMS missiles, to allow them to strike targets deep inside Russia.
Harris, characteristically, has made a lawyerly assessment of pros and cons. She and her advisers have queried whether, given the limited number of ATACMS available, they might be more useful striking Russian targets in occupied Crimea – especially given intelligence reports that Russia has pulled its aircraft that target Ukraine back to bases beyond the missiles’ 300-kilometer range. Another concern for the Harris team is whether the Russians might retaliate by giving long-range missiles to adversaries, such as the Houthis in Yemen, further threatening Red Sea shipping and perhaps Israel. Harris hasn’t been convinced that helping Ukraine strike deep inside Russia would be a good trade-off for the United States. But Biden is said to be exploring a possible relaxation of rules, and Harris undoubtedly will support his decision. Colleagues say she has taken a similarly measured approach to other issues of escalation risk.
A key moment was October 2022, when Russia signaled it might use tactical nuclear weapons to prevent a collapse of its forces after they had fled Kharkiv and Kherson. Harris joined a discussion of “what if” questions: Might the Russians demonstrate using a tactical nuke, over the ocean, say, or fire one in Ukraine? How big a bomb? How many casualties would result? How would the United States respond? In the end, the Russians conveyed to senior US officials that they didn’t intend to use tactical nukes.
On the Middle East, Harris has privately voiced the same mix of goals she described in Tuesday’s debate. She’s committed to defending Israel’s security but thinks too many Palestinian civilians have died and that the war must end now with a cease-fire and hostage release. That’s Biden’s position, too – balancing complex and possibly irreconcilable goals.
Through nearly four years, Harris has had a seat at the table on the most sensitive national security issues. Her careful approach has mirrored Biden’s. Hawks might argue that she has been too cautious, on supplying weapons to Ukraine, for example. Progressives might argue that she has been too ready to support use of military force, by Ukraine or Israel.
Harris as commander in chief would continue the traditional bipartisan foreign policy consensus. That should reassure allies who want a forward-leaning America, and it might worry those who think we’re overextended. Lawyers have played a decisive role in national security policy – from Dean Acheson to Jake Sullivan. Harris would sustain that long line of lawyerly balancers and trimmers who weigh risks and benefits before they take action. She might turn a page in our domestic life, but not so much in foreign policy.
The Washington Post
