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Who Is Kamala Harris? Aggressive Foreign and Military Policies
As she accepted the Democratic nomination, Harris promised to maintain the world’s “most lethal” military and ensure that “America—not China—wins the competition for the 21st century.”
Sep 01, 2024
It wasn’t until the final night of the 2024 Democratic National Convention that pandering to military power took the stage. Until then, conventioneers were insulated from possible second thoughts they might have had about the party’s role in the constructing, maintaining, and expanding of what is in truth an Empire.
The run up to U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris’ acceptance speech included tough talk from former CIA Director and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, who celebrated America’s “warriors,” and by a parade of members of Congress who have served in the military: Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. With the exception of celebrating the assassination of Osama Bin Laden, there were no references to those wars, nor to the president’s role as “nuclear monarch” with the sole authority to launch an omnicidal nuclear war. References to what former President Dwight D. Eisenhower initially termed the military-industrial-congressional complex and the party’s integration with it were missing in action. So too were any references to the deployment of a new generation of nuclear weapons in Europe or President Joe Biden’s recent insistence that Chancellor Olaf Sholtz accept deployment of U.S. dual capable tomahawk intermediate range missiles in Germany capable of reaching western Russia.
But, as the conservative journalist David Brooks observed, Harris concluded her rousing acceptance speech with “an aggressive picture of America in the world.” She built on her commitment to maintain the world’s “most lethal” military, with the promise to lead in the space and artificial intelligence arms races, and promised that “America—not China—wins the competition for the 21st century,” a euphemistic reference to the struggle for hegemony. Echoing the Biden paradigm and the commitment to new Cold Wars, and omitting embarrassing references to Saudi Arabia, Israel, and more than a few other U.S. allies, she told her audiences that she knew where she and the country stand in the “enduring struggle between democracy and tyranny.”
Seeking to prevent an election shattering of the Democratic Party’s coalition, Kamala Harris has attempted to have it both ways on the Gaza genocide.
Harris came to the Senate in 2017 with little foreign policy knowledge or experience, but contrary to former President Donald Trump’s accusations, she is anything but a foreign and military policy ingenue. The Biden White House downplayed her foreign and military policy roles, but once she emerged as the Democrats’ presidential nominee, it was reported that she participated in nearly every Biden-era National Security Council meeting, where U.S. foreign and military policies are made. Similarly, she has been involved in almost every one of the President’s Daily Briefs, the intelligence community’s daily super-secret briefings about threats, developments, and opportunities around the world. Ron Klain, Biden’s first chief of staff, said that Harris came to the intelligence briefings as the “best prepared, ready with questions, having already reviewed the written intelligence and ready to help ask hard questions.” The journalist Fred Kaplan put it differently: her presence in these briefings “exposed her to more information… than any newly elected president has ever had, coming into office, in more than a century.” As vice president, she visited 21 nations on 17 foreign trips and met with more than 150 foreign leaders. In three of the past four years, she led the U.S delegation to the Munich Security Conference.
We should expect Harris to hew to the trajectory of Biden’s foreign and military policies. Along her way, she has recruited a cadre of traditional national security advisers. As vice president, her first national security adviser was Nancy McEldowney, a career U.S. diplomat and former director of the Foreign Service Institute. McEldowney was succeeded by Philip Gordon, Harris’ current and very influential foreign policy adviser, who served on former President Bill Clinton’s National Security Council staff and as an Obama European and Middle East specialist. Gordon’s deputy has been Rebecca Lissner, formerly of the Naval War College and the woman who oversaw the development of the Biden National Security Strategy. Recall that the strategy declares that the post-Cold War era is over, that the struggle with China—Washington’s only peer competitor—to shape what follows is under way. And it reiterated the United States’ commitment to its first-strike nuclear arsenal and warfighting doctrine.
According to a Wall Street Journal report that Harris blames National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan along with Secretary of State Antony Blinken for failing to contain Israel in Gaza, Gordon will likely be appointed to succeed Sullivan. Gordon was a career diplomat who is seen as a “pragmatic internationalist” rather than a progressive. He served as former President Barack Obama’s first assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs and later as his special assistant to the president and White House coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa, and the Persian Gulf Region.
Gordon’s decisive worldview reorientation reportedly came in response to former President George W. Bush’s regime change war in Iraq, which led him to understand that the U.S. is not always a force for good or on the right side of history. Bush’s wars, he understood, left that country shattered and squandered the United States’ reputation and legitimacy. As a review of the books written by Gordon explains, he believes that “the institutions of U.S. power are not in themselves wrong; it is the people who run them who make them fall short of their promise.” Staff them with better leaders he argues, and the U.S. can play its historical role as a “catalyst for democracy.” Recognizing that regime change doesn’t work, the U.S. he argues must act judiciously with the means consistent with the ends.
Gordon is seen as a Europeanist and as the E.U.’s man in Washington. Norbert Rottgen, a Christian Democratic German parliamentarian, has commented that Gordon believes that “European security is the cornerstone of U.S. global power,” and he is probably correct. Gordon has been a hardliner opposing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and criticized Sholz for resisting pressure to send German long-range Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine. But Gordon can be a subtle strategist, as demonstrated in his not being threatened by calls for a more autonomous Europe and his belief that a strong Europe is in the United States’ interest.
“Europeanist” though he may be, Camille Grand, the former NATO assistant secretary general, tells us that Gordon recognizes that Europe is “no longer the alpha and omega of American’s foreign policy.” There is of course China, the new “alpha and omega” of U.S. foreign, military, and economic policies, and with the exception of his deputy Linsser’s China containment work on the Biden National Security Strategy, Gordon’s fingerprints on Harris’ approach are hard to find.
Consistent with Biden, Trump, and the etiquette of U.S. political discourse, in Harris’ acceptance speech there were no references to U.S. imperial wars, coups, or provocative shows of force with which Washington won its Indo-Pacific Empir
Seeking to prevent an election shattering of the Democratic Party’s coalition, Kamala Harris has attempted to have it both ways on the Gaza genocide. In her acceptance speech, she honored the growing Democratic majority who have been outraged by Israel’s indiscriminate and devastating destruction of Gaza and its people. Possibly speaking from her heart, Harris reiterated the call for a cease-fire and stated that “what has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating…The scale of suffering is heartbreaking.” She then stated her ostensible commitment to the Palestinians’ ability to “realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination” and to the long disregarded and fading possibility of a two-state solution.
But, like Biden, the leverage she pledged to exercise was to enhance Israel’s military power, not to achieve a cease-fire. As she said, “Let me be clear, I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself, and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself.” Like Biden, her campaign has been clear in refusing to pressure Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and his extremist partners by withholding shipment of bombs and other weapons to Israel. And, as the Israeli leader’s campaign of assassinations in Iran and Lebanon have taken us to the brink of regional war, Harris pledged “to defend our forces,” who for reasons she didn’t dare to state find themselves deployed across southwest Asia, “and our interests against Iran and Iran-backed terrorists.”
Harris has been a hawk on Ukraine in its war of resistance against Russia, providing Kyiv “full-throated support.” We should expect her to continue unwavering support for NATO and U.S. dominion over Europe. In introducing herself in Chicago, she boasted that “Five days before Russia attacked Ukraine, I met with President Zelensky to warn him about Russia’s plan to invade. I helped mobilize a global response—over 50 countries—to defend against Putin’s aggression. And as president, I will stand strong with Ukraine and our NATO allies.”
Largely unknown prior to the convention was that in February 2022, when the U.S. intelligence community first reported that Russia’s illegal and brutal invasion of Ukraine was imminent, Harris pressed for the super-secret intelligence to be shared with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. It was Harris who was then dispatched to meet with Zelensky in Kyiv to share the detailed intelligence and Washington’s perceptions of his options. She has since met Zelensky five times.
There has been no daylight between Harris and Biden in their support for Zelensky’s “peace diplomacy” that unrealistically demands return to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders. (Worth noting is the Ukrainian sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko’s assertion that, before Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion, most Ukrainians were willing to be done with turmoil in the eastern 20% of Ukraine and accept its succession to Russia.) There has been no indication that in future negotiations Harris would accept a neutral Ukraine with credible security guarantees or to putting the questions of Crimean, Donetsk, and Luhansk sovereignty to fair referenda or onto the diplomatic shelf for later resolution.
And, like Biden, at Munich Security Conferences Harris has preached that the “backbone” of preservation of Western principles and security is NATO—“the greatest military alliance the world has ever seen.”
Amid growing international demands to cut military spending by at least 10%, there has been no hint of Harris objecting to Biden’s massive military spending increases.
Consistent with Biden, Trump, and the etiquette of U.S. political discourse, in Harris’ acceptance speech there were no references to U.S. imperial wars, coups, or provocative shows of force with which Washington won its Indo-Pacific Empire, nor to the region spanning Biden-Harris lattice-like network of tripartite and bilateral U.S alliances, nor to global NATO’s new roles in the campaign to contain China.
In her acceptance speech, Harris mentioned China only once, and then only in relationship to the contest for supremacy in space and AI. These, not incidentally, are at the defining edges of 21st-century military power. Elsewhere Harris has been critical of Beijing’s repression of human rights and warned about the Chinese “threat” to U.S. interests and to Washington’s allies in the Asia-Pacific. Following China’s simulated blockade of Taiwan in response to Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) counterproductive and unwanted 2022 trip to Taiwan, Harris also traveled to Asia. There, in meetings with allies and some of the 55,000 U.S. troops based in Japan, she reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to deter China. She has not been shy in condemning China’s aggressive actions in the South China Sea where it seeks to challenge the Seventh Fleet’s dominance in what has been an America Lake since the end of the Pacific War. And as Beijing has encroached on what are obviously Philippine territorial waters, she has played a key role in facilitating Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s (the former dictator’s son) reaffirmation and deepening of the U.S.-Philippines alliance after his predecessor’s flirtations with China.
Assuming that her audiences either don’t know or disregard the past and present practice of U.S. imperialism, Harris asserts that she is committed to the misnamed “rules-based order” and to a “free and open Indo-Pacific” to ensure stability and commerce. She warns that Beijing is unique as it “continues to coerce, to intimidate, and to make claims to the vast majority of the South China Sea.” Rather than pursue common security solutions to the dilemmas presented by Taiwan, she repeats Washington’s unofficial commitment to defend Taiwan, including the Pentagon’s first-strike doctrine which serves as the foundation of that commitment.
In these regards we have to hope that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz will be more than wallpaper as vice president and that he finds ways to influence a Harris administration with his understanding that the storied China threat is “hyperbole” and the need to build on the two powers’ shared interests.
Amid growing international demands to cut military spending by at least 10%, there has been no hint of Harris objecting to Biden’s massive military spending increases. That said, if she is elected, we should not expect her to match Trump’s call for gargantuan increases in Pentagon spending.
What else might we expect from Kamala Harris if she prevails between now and November 5? Given that Africa is projected to have a quarter of the world’s population by 2050, and the markets for goods and services that go with that, as well as its stores of commercially essential natural resources, a Harris administration will likely pay greater attention to U.S. relations with the African continent than we have seen in recent years. Similarly, given her Caribbean roots, its resources, markets, and most of all its Monroe Doctrine geopolitical relationship to the United States, greater attention will likely also be paid to Latin America.
All of which brings us back to where we began. Harris remains the uncertain bastion in the struggle to defend constitutional democracy. The outcome of the election cannot be accurately predicted, and we have been sobered by the reminder that only once has a sitting vice president prevailed in an election. Between now and then Harris will be pressed to become more forthcoming about her policy commitments and how they can be achieved. Unless the Democrats win control of one or both houses of Congress, and with right-wing extremist control of the Supreme Court, only minimal progress will be made on the Harris-Walz domestic agenda. And as Harris or Trump aggressively challenge the world, each in her or his unique ways, our work to end and prevent catastrophe remains ahead of us.
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Palantir’s Latest Hire Is a Particularly Egregious Turn of the Revolving Door
China hawk and former Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) is now the company’s head of defense business; if he had his way, odds of an unnecessary and devastating conflict with China could increase considerably.
Aug 29, 2024
Former Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin has embraced his new role as head of defense business at the controversial Silicon Valley tech firm Palantir with relish, promising to use his connections in government to make it easier for emerging military tech firms to thrive, in large part by securing more of your tax dollars.
Senior government officials passing through the revolving door to cash in on lucrative jobs in the arms industry is not a new phenomenon. In a study I did last fall, we found that 80% of the three and four star generals who left government service in the past five years went to work in the arms sector in one way or another. And a 2023 report by the office of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) found that at least 700 former senior Pentagon and other government officials now work for one of the top 20 weapons contractors.
At the time of the report’s release, Warren argued that “[w]hen government officials cash in on their public service by lobbying, advising, or serving as board members and executives for the companies they used to regulate, it undermines public officials’ integrity and casts doubt on the fairness of government contracting. This problem is especially concerning and pronounced in the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) and the United States’ defense industry.”
The prospect of automated warfare fueled by Palantir’s products could lead to a world in which our ability to curb conflict and prevent large-scale slaughter is even more difficult than it is now.
Powerful members of Congress also regularly go through the revolving door, including most notably former House Armed Services Committee Chair Buck McKeon, whose lobbying shop has represented both arms contractors like Lockheed Martin and arms buyers like Saudi Arabia.
But Gallagher’s case is particularly egregious, given the central role he will play in his new firm’s business and lobbying strategies. Palantir’s ambitions go well beyond the kind of favor seeking in government weapons buying that Sen. Warren has described. Its goal is to shape the overarching U.S. national security policy that may determine what military technology the U.S. invests in for the next generation. The Gallagher hire fits perfectly with that plan.
Judging from his record as the preeminent China hawk on Capitol Hill during his tenure in Congress, and as chair of the China-bashing House Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, Gallagher’s views are remarkably close to those of his new employers.
For example, Palantir CEO Alex Karp has said the United States will “likely” go to war with China and that the best policy is to “scare the crap out of your enemy”—no doubt in part by wielding systems built by Palantir.
Palantir’s bread and butter is the supply of advanced computing and data management, which it has employed to help the Army share data across the service, from bases in the U.S. to commanders on the battlefield. The firm also does research for the Army on future uses of AI, and on targeting, in a project known as Tactical Intelligence Target Access Node (TITAN).
Palantir’s products are also front and center in the two most prominent conflicts of the moment. The company’s Artificial Intelligence Platform, described by Bloomberg as "an intelligence and decision-making system that can analyze enemy targets and propose battle plans," is currently in use in Ukraine. And in January of this year, Karp and Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir, traveled to Israel where they forged an agreement with the Israeli government “to harness Palantir’s advanced technology in support of war-related missions.” This reportedly includes using Palantir’s AI-based systems to select targets in Gaza.
Karp’s views about how to intimidate adversaries like China may be good for his company’s bottom line, but they are an extremely reckless guide to U.S. policy toward China. The most likely result of his counsel would be a staggeringly costly arms race which would make a U.S.-China war more likely. And even if such a war did not escalate to the nuclear level, it would be a strategic, economic, and humanitarian disaster for all concerned. The point is to prevent a war with China, not predict and profit from it.
Karp and Gallagher are virtually brothers in arms with respect to their views on China. Gallagher co-authored a recent article in Foreign Affairs entitled “No Substitute for Victory: America’s Competition With China Must Be Won, Not Managed.” In it, Gallagher and his co-author Matthew Pottinger assert that the United States needs to “put in place a better policy: one that rearms the U.S. military, reduces China’s economic leverage, and recruits a broader coalition to confront China.”
In service of this goal, they advocate ratcheting up Pentagon spending to as much as 5% of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product, which would push the Pentagon’s base budget to over $1.2 trillion. Gallagher and Pottinger give no clue as to how this enormous sum would be spent, or why a rapid military buildup would somehow bring Beijing to heel rather than stimulating an equally furious buildup by China. They wrongly analogize the current situation between the U.S. and China to the one facing former U.S. President Ronald Reagan vis-a-vis the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War. But China has a much more vibrant, technologically sophisticated society and a much larger place in the global economy than the USSR did at the end of its reign.
China isn’t going anywhere, and the idea that arms racing and trade wars will change that basic reality is wildly unrealistic.
While Washington and Beijing don’t need to be best friends, they do need to set parameters around their relationship to prevent a catastrophic war. They also need to find ways to cooperate, despite their differences, on addressing existential global challenges like climate change and pandemics. And while it is important to help Taiwan build up its defenses, it is even more important to engage in diplomacy and reassurance to avoid a U.S.-China military confrontation over the island.
The path advocated by Gallagher and Pottinger would destroy any possibility of reaching such common ground, and would likely lead to a dangerous state of permanent antagonism.
Gallagher is just the latest addition to Palantir’s growing web of influence. As the world now knows, Thiel was both a mentor and a donor to Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance. In 2017, before Vance entered politics, Thiel hired him to work at his global investment firm, and then donated $15 million to Vance’s 2022 run for the Senate.
Meanwhile, Palantir CEO Alex Karp has reached out to the other side of the aisle, albeit on a smaller scale, tellingThe New York Times that he gave $360,000 to Biden’s campaign before the president announced that he would not be running for reelection.
It would be one thing if Palantir were the nimble, cost effective producer of indispensable next generation technology it purports to be, but its bulked up political machine and hawkish rhetoric suggest that it is far more than that.
And as for its technological prowess, it remains to be seen whether all the emerging technologies championed by Thiel and his cohorts will work as advertised, and if so whether they will make future conflicts more or less likely. But one thing is clear: If operatives like Gallagher and Karp have their way, the odds of an unnecessary and devastating conflict with China could increase considerably.
Last but certainly not least, the prospect of automated warfare fueled by Palantir’s products could lead to a world in which our ability to curb conflict and prevent large-scale slaughter is even more difficult than it is now. All the more reason to take their claims to be new age patriots, poised to restore American global dominance through the wonders of technology, with an enormous grain of salt.
Regardless of who wins in November, the last thing we need is a Palantir-inspired foreign policy.
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What US Militarism Has to Do With Japan's Quest to Slaughter More Whales
Whaling, it turns out, has very little to do with whaling and much more to with how powerful nations want to dominate the world's oceans.
Aug 26, 2024
In early August, the crew on Japan’s new whaling factory ship dismembered a male fin whale, the first commercial catch of the species in several decades. A few days earlier, Paul Watson was arrested in Nuuk, Greenland. He sits in a Danish prison, waiting a decision on his extradition to Japan. Given the Japanese courts’ record of 99.9% conviction rate for criminal cases, and issues with Japanese justice system, if extradited, he will probably spend the rest of his life imprisoned.
A few months ago, a paper led by Norwegian government scientists showed that there are around 50,000 fin whales in just one small part of the Southern Ocean. Also in Antarctic waters, the Japanese Institute of Cetacean Research has been running a research program which, as the the Institute states, is the “aimed at the sustainable use of whale resources in the Antarctic Ocean.” A new era of commercial whaling in the Antarctic looms.
Forty years ago, the International Whaling Commission introduced the whaling moratorium—a pause in slaughter, to allow whale populations to recover. At the time, the belief by most in the whale conservation community was that by the time that whale populations finally recovered, those still engaged in whaling would have given up, making the moratorium permanent. That’s not what’s happened. Three nations—Japan, Norway, and Iceland—still engage in commercial whaling.
There are many arguments against whaling: it’s cruel, it has to be subsidized, most people in whaling nations don’t care about it, it’s traditional in very few places in Japan, whales don’t eat all the fish, instead they’re ecosystem engineers that contribute to carbon sequestration. These points have been made for many years, and have never had the slightest impact on the Japanese whaling bureaucracy. They’re not only irrelevant, they’ve proven pointless.
Whaling, it turns out, isn’t about whales at all. Japan’s primary interest in commercial whaling is to maintain their geopolitical clout to exploit other marine wildlife (“living marine resources”) internationally. Tuna, for example. This point’s been made recently in a couple of forums. For the Japanese government, whaling’s a thin-edge-of-the-wedge problem. The moratorium was a big win for marine conservation that couldn’t be repeated with other international fisheries.
Given this framing, the actions of the Japanese whaling industry over the past forty years are rational. Whaling is primarily about asserting dominance in international negotiations over access to marine wildlife, so whether or not Japanese people eat much whale meat is irrelevant. What matters is access to other fisheries by Japan’s pelagic fishing fleets. Subsidizing whaling is a minuscule price to pay. The primary role of Japan’s new floating factory, the Kangei Maru, is as a flagship, a symbol of Japanese hegemony in international maritime negotiations. So its $48 million price tag is trivial. A Ford class US aircraft carrier, with a build cost of around $13 billion and an annual upkeep of $700 million, puts that in perspective. The Kangei Maru’s costs are a rounding error.
Despite Japan leaving the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in late 2018, the Japanese fisheries bureaucracy still controls the activities of the pro-whaling bloc. This September, the IWC meets again. One rumor currently swirling is that the Japanese will rejoin the IWC with a reservation to commercial whaling, one way to demolish the whaling moratorium. Another appeared a couple of weeks ago, when the prestigious scientific journal Nature published an opinion piece calling for the IWC to be dismantled. The article’s first author is a former chair of the IWC, who with his coauthors, argue that the IWC is now a “zombie” organization that has outlived its usefulness and should be dismantled.
Interesting timing.
Once, the threat of US sanctions in response to “diminishing the effectiveness” of the IWC regulated the manner in which the whaling bloc engaged there. That threat—obviously—no longer exists. How have the whalers brought the U.S. to heel on whaling? What’s their lever?
There was a belief in the NGO community that the threat of withholding IWC quotas on U.S. Inuit bowhead whaling was driving U.S. acquiescence. The pro-whaling bloc engaged in brinkmanship on this several times in the past. But the “Aboriginal Subsistence” whaling issues at the IWC have been resolved, removing this threat. Besides, ending the IWC would put bowhead whaling management back entirely with the U.S., internally. It can’t be that.
It’s here the military comes in. The U.S. has around 55,000 military personnel based in Japan. This is, for example, almost the size of the Australia’s active duty defense forces. Their weaponry includes some the most advanced in the U.S. arsenal. Most of those personnel are based in Okinawa, where there were over 6,000 criminal cases involving U.S. military personnel in the 50 years since the island was handed back to Japan in 1972. That’s a couple of crimes a week. And they include reported 134 rapes, or two to three reported rapes per year, including recent charges of the sexual assault of a child. Understandably, there is a vocal anti-US-base movement in Okinawa that regularly engages in mass protest.
These put Paul Watson’s “accomplice to assault” and “ship trespass” charges in context.
At the same time, the U.S. is reconstituting its forces in Japan, a buildup in response to the perceived threat to U.S. hegemony now posed by China. The Japanese government has leverage. Getting its way on whaling is Japan’s price for U.S. bases.
What could happen? Possibilities include Japan rejoining the IWC with a reservation that allows it to conduct commercial whaling wherever it wants. Perhaps the IWC will collapse. The recent Nature article shows that destroying the IWC is being considered. Returning the management of whaling to whaling nations? We know how that worked. And allowing Japan’s return to the IWC with a reservation will return the IWC’s role to that of a toothless body overseeing mass slaughter.
The huge U.S. military presence in Japan matters to the national security apparatus of the United States. The bureaucracy has worked with the Japanese government to see commercial whaling return. The return of commercial whaling is the U.S. military's quid pro quo for its regional dominance in the Pacific—not to mention its rapists in Okinawa.
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