President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy holds an American flag as he addresses a joint meeting of Congress in the House Chamber of the U.S. Capitol on Dec. 21, 2022 in Washington, D.C. (Win McNamee | Getty Images)
This is one in a series of States Newsroom reports on the major policy issues in the presidential race.
WASHINGTON — The next U.S. president must steer the nation through crises across the globe, including worsening violence in the Middle East, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s refusal to retreat from Ukraine and U.S-China trade relations.
The Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, largely built her career as a prosecutor, but once in Washington she sat on the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, a position that comes with access to highly classified national security files.
As vice president she’s represented the U.S. at high-profile international meetings, including the Munich Security Conference and Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation.
The Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump, who followed his wealthy father’s path into real estate and ascended to the status of celebrity businessman, has already held the elected position of Commander-in-Chief for four years — though high-ranking officials who served under him say he should not occupy that seat again.
Trump and Harris’ track records can provide clues on how, if elected, they would handle complex and challenging national and economic security policies.
But overall on the campaign trail, foreign policy “has played a back seat role to domestic politics in the 2024 election,” James M. Lindsay, a senior fellow in U.S. foreign policy for the Council on Foreign Relations, told States Newsroom in an interview.
That’s not unusual, Lindsay said, as presidential year politics generally tend to have a domestic focus.
“This has been more a campaign about personalities than about specific policy prescriptions. It’s safe to say that the two candidates have very different world views,” Lindsay said.
Relationships with allies
Harris centers relationship building, and promised in her Democratic National Convention acceptance speech to “stand strong” with NATO allies.
In Trump’s convention speech he lamented that the U.S. has “long been taken advantage of” by “so-called allies.”
Observers say the former president leads with a transactional outlook: In other words, nations must pay for access to U.S. markets and security.
“Trump thinks that U.S. support to allies is a bad deal for America, whereas Harris realizes that the United States benefits immensely from them,” Matthew Waxman, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and chair of Columbia Law School’s National Security Law Program, told States Newsroom.
But predicting how a presidential candidate would act on the global stage, if elected, is tricky. Conflicts continue to evolve, and those in top defense and diplomatic jobs are likely to turn over.
“It’s partly because a President Harris or President Trump could face a very different situation in the Middle East or in Ukraine come Inauguration Day, but it’s also because in Washington personnel are policy, people are policy,” Lindsay said.
Here are some of the serious international situations either administration will face:
Middle East
The deadly Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, launched from the Palestinian territory of the Gaza Strip, reignited smoldering regional tensions and highlighted the inextricable U.S. role. Hamas militants killed roughly 1,200 in the brutal and unexpected incursion, and took 250 hostages, many of whom still remain in captivity.
President Joe Biden immediately surged weapons and security aid to the key U.S. defense partner, and in April Congress approved his request for $8.7 billion more in foreign military financing and missile defense.
Israel’s year-long campaign to completely eliminate Iranian-allied Hamas militants from the Gaza Strip has resulted in a staggering death toll, now over 41,000, according to Gaza health officials.
Hamas’ assault also set in motion attacks from other Iranian-backed militias, opening up a war front between Israel and Hezbollah fighters to the north in Lebanon. And for months, Yemen’s Iranian-backed Houthis have terrorized commercial shipping in the Red Sea.
Biden has faced fierce criticism for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war tactics.
Harris, as early as March, publicly criticized Israel over the humanitarian “catastrophe” in Gaza and called for an immediate six-week cease-fire.
Harris, who became the Democratic presidential nominee in mid-summer after Biden dropped his bid, has repeatedly said she defends Israel’s right to defend itself but that “how it does so matters.”
Protesters could be heard in the distance Monday as Harris planted a memorial tree at the vice president’s residence to mark the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack. Pro-Palestinian activists protesting the death toll in Gaza have marched and rallied throughout the U.S. during the past year.
Harris told reporters that the administration is “not giving up” on negotiating a cease-fire deal and release of hostages, an effort that has so far floundered.
“It’s one of the most important ways we will be able to end this war and bring any type of stability to the region. It’s one of the highest priorities of this administration,” she said.
She has not indicated any slowdown or conditions on assistance to Israel if elected — though she continues to advocate for a two-state solution.
“Trump may give Jerusalem less public chastising and criticism, but I’m not sure the policy differences would be that great either,” Michael O’Hanlon, senior fellow and foreign policy research director at the Brookings Institution, told States Newsroom. O’Hanlon recently published an article arguing the Trump and Harris defense strategies would at least “partially” converge.
Trump maintains that Oct. 7 “would never have happened” had he been in office, and he accuses the Biden administration of inviting the attack because of its “weak” relationship with Iran.
“What is needed more than ever is a return of unwavering American leadership and unquestioned American strength. We were strong, we were powerful … That’s what I intend to deliver as the 47th president of the United States,” he said Monday while in Miami marking one year since the ambush on Israel.
The attack also wrecked any forward progress on the Abraham Accords — Trump’s signature Middle East achievement that created full diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco. While those established channels remain steady, the Biden administration’s efforts to strike a deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia are now at a standstill.
Trump is increasingly selling himself on the campaign trail as the candidate of stability who can quash Iran’s aggression — which is pretty much a “standard approach to campaigning,” Lindsay said.
“He is not the first challenger to argue that the incumbent president has been weak.”
But Lindsay said, “the important question isn’t whether he was tougher, it’s whether his policies were more effective.”
For example, the Iranian-backed so-called “axis of resistance” militias currently upending the Middle East were also operating during Trump’s presidency.
“[They] pre-dated his coming into office but it’s not that a Trump administration ended that network of anti-Western, anti-Israeli groups,” Lindsay said. “And during the Trump administration it was the case that Iran both underwrote attacks on American troops and actually launched attacks on American troops.”
Trump drew attention last week to an early January 2020 barrage on U.S. troops in Iraq when he again described the traumatic brain injuries they suffered as “headaches.”
U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria, already a target, have come under increasing fire from Iran-backed militants, with more than 100 attacks on U.S. service members since Israel began its post-Oct. 7 offensive. A drone strike in January killed three U.S. soldiers and injured 30 at an outpost in Jordan on the Syrian border. The U.S. retaliated by launching more than 100 precision rockets at 85 of Iran military sites in Iraq and Syria.
The U.S. assisted Israel twice in 2024 in intercepting rockets fired directly from Iran — once in April following Israel’s bombing of the Iranian embassy in Damascus, and again in September after Israel’s assassination of Iranian-backed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut, Lebanon.
“We’re in the last months of the Biden presidency, and Biden’s own, I think, personal influence here is quite diminished. And you know, I can’t predict what Trump policy really would be. I assume he would be less likely to be trying to restrain the Israelis, but so is the Biden administration. And maybe that is a Biden-Harris policy,” Elliott Abrams, CFR’s senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies, told reporters on Oct. 2, the day after Iran launched its second direct attack.
Ukraine and NATO
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with both Harris and Trump in recent weeks to shore up continued U.S. support for his country’s ongoing war against Russia’s occupation.
Harris’ meeting with the Ukrainian leader was her seventh, and she pledged continued aid for the eastern European nation on the principle that Putin would continue marching into Europe if allies relent on Ukraine.
Harris supports continued U.S. assistance, which has totaled roughly $175 billion since 2022. At the Ukraine peace summit in Switzerland in June, Harris pledged nearly $2 billion, some new and some redirected, to bolster the country’s energy sector and add to humanitarian efforts.
The vice president has represented the U.S. three times at the annual Munich Security Conference in Germany, where she praised the NATO alliance and said the U.S. commitment to its principles is “ironclad.”
When facing Harris on the presidential debate stage in September, Trump refused to answer whether he wants Ukraine to be victorious over Russia.
Trump’s rhetoric and past behavior “spells bad news for Ukraine,” Waxman said.
“He is likely to reduce American support for Ukraine and push Ukraine to make concessions to Russia. Overall, Trump’s transactional approach to leader-to-leader diplomacy is likely to benefit Putin,” Waxman continued. “Whereas Harris wants to invest in alliances like NATO, Trump is skeptical of them.”
That type of leader-to-leader communication was notoriously highlighted in 2019 when U.S. House lawmakers impeached Trump for directly threatening to withhold Ukraine aid if Zelenskyy did not announce an investigation into Biden — Trump’s presidential campaign rival at the time. The Senate acquitted Trump.
Like his campaign line on the Israel attack, Trump also repeatedly claims that had he been in office, instead of Biden, Russia would have never launched its February 2022 attack on Ukraine.
“The war in Ukraine did not begin in February of ‘22, it began back in 2014,” Lindsay said, referring to Putin’s forced annexation of the Crimean Peninsula.
Trump’s own administration expanded Obama-era sanctions meant to punish Russia’s actions in Crimea.
“Experts can argue about how to dole out criticism across administrations, but clearly the issue of Russian support for a notionally independent insurrection in eastern Ukraine was not solved during the Trump presidency,” Lindsay continued.
China and trade
Foreign trade is a “political hot potato,” and neither Harris nor Trump are offering much clarity for U.S. trading partners around the world, Mary E. Lovely, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told States Newsroom in an interview.
Lovely described the Biden-Harris approach as multipronged, in that they’ve instituted policies to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. while also aiming to maintain good trade relationships with partner nations.
The tightrope walk becomes even trickier as U.S. policy also disincentivizes materials and components from China — one of the world’s largest trading nations — in the final products imported from trading partners. Think: components in solar panels and electric vehicles.
The Biden administration’s major legislative accomplishments — the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act — provided major subsidies for “reshoring,” or returning to the U.S., clean energy and semiconductor production. But the policies were not without risks to U.S. trading partners.
“We had a lot of things [in the legislation], including things that upset the allies — you know, subsidies for American businesses, that they saw potentially as pulling investment out of their economies,” Lovely said.
“These are things that the European Union, Japan, Korea were concerned about,” Lovely continued. “So we’ve seen it there — this tension between foreign policy and this idea of economic security.”
While Lovely said she worries about how some of the Biden-Harris trade policies might affect competition and the nation’s ability to sign timely trade agreements, she said Trump’s plans are overall “destabilizing.”
“The increased use of tariffs is misguided at best,” Lovely said.
Trump’s promise to not only increase tariffs on Chinese imports to 60%, but also to slap flat 10% to 20% tariffs on all imports across the board is akin to “starting a trade war with the entire world.”
“We’re not going to see those kinds of tariffs without retaliation,” Lovely said.
If enacted, the tariffs would be particularly challenging for Indo-Pacific countries that rely on U.S. partnership in the face of China’s regional dominance.
“I mean, you can imagine how this will go down in, say, Japan and Korea, two countries which rely on the U.S. for a security umbrella, which is why Trump thinks that he can do stuff to them. But they also have to protect their own economies,” Lovely said. “So it’s going to put them in a really terrible position because it’s very important for them to maintain their alliance with the U.S., economic as well as military.”
But one thing is for sure, Lovely said: “Everybody wants to know what’s going to happen. Everybody in every embassy here in Washington.”
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