Kamala Harris’s 21st-Century Foreign Policy

Kamala Harris, by most accounts, has learned a great deal by serving as vice president to U.S. President Joe Biden, who is the most experienced U.S. leader on foreign policy since President George H.W. Bush.

“Kamala Harris is Joe Biden’s protégé. He trained her,” said California Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, a friend of Harris who has served as ambassador to Hungary.

But it’s also clear that Harris has created her own path on foreign policy—and that she represents the next generation of national security experts steeped in newer, high-tech threats that the Cold War generation represented by Biden is less familiar with. These encompass an array of ​​cyber threats, including election hacking and surveillance from abroad, allegedly including from state-run companies such as China’s Huawei; threats from space, such as reported Russian or Chinese plots to disable GPS systems; and over-the-horizon risks from artificial intelligence and quantum computing.

In her speech at the Democratic National Convention accepting the nomination Thursday night, Harris briefly mentioned the high-tech threat while affirming that she would prove a tough commander in chief who would “ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”

“I will make sure that we lead the world into the future on space and artificial intelligence; that America, not China, wins the competition for the 21st century, and that we strengthen, not abdicate, our global leadership,” she said.

Harris’s familiarity with such high-tech areas springs from her unique experience. Beginning as a freshman senator in January 2017, she had a crash course in national security issues on the intelligence and homeland security committees during a period when many new threats from abroad were emerging. Only three days after Harris was sworn in as a U.S. senator by then-Vice President Biden, the Obama administration publicly dropped a blockbuster report revealing the extent of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s covert effort to harm the electoral prospects of Hillary Clinton and promote Donald Trump in the 2016 election. This involved buying digital ads on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram and organizing fraudulent political rallies across the United States, among other intrusions.

“In order to understand how Kamala Harris approaches foreign policy, it’s important to remember she began work in the Senate in the same month that every U.S. intelligence agency declared that Russia intervened in our 2016 election,” said her former national security advisor, Halie Soifer, who started working for Harris during the first week that she entered the Senate. “She played a leading role in the intelligence committee’s inquiry given her experience leading investigations.”

But that was just the start of Harris’s immersion in newer types of threats from abroad, former colleagues said.

“That was a period when the [Intelligence] Committee was in a very different position than most of the rest of the Congress,” said Sen. Mark Warner, the current chairman of the committee, who argued that it was on the cutting edge of foreign policy by exposing threats to U.S. national security that no one else in Congress knew anything about. “It wasn’t just that we were investigating Russian election interference. We were the first ones to identify the China threat [of technological surveillance] from Huawei, and intellectual property theft,” Warner said in an interview.

Those threats continue—and not just from Russia and China. Most recently, the FBI has said it is investigating alleged Iranian cyberattacks against both the Democratic and Republican campaigns for president.

Harris had previously familiarized herself with many of these types of threats during her days as California’s attorney general and a prosecutor in northern California, where she got to know Silicon Valley well. In her 2019 memoir, The Truths We Hold, Harris wrote how “shocked” she was by the state’s backward voting technology when she first took office, and how vulnerable it was to hacking.

“The California Department of Justice maintains the entire criminal justice data system for the state and for many many localities. So we worry constantly about protecting that from hackers,” Harris’s former Senate chief of staff, Nathan Barankin, told Foreign Policy. “When you’re attorney general, and you’re from California, which is very tech-heavy, you come into the job in the Senate and these committees already sensitized to not only the great potential and upside of technology, but its risks too. So when things came up like Huawei, quantum computing, or the manipulation of social media by foreign states trying to influence the election, she was already there.”

By the accounts of her intelligence committee colleagues, Harris swiftly mastered arcane subjects such as Russian election influence operations in cyberspace and Chinese intellectual property theft. She also proved to be a razor-sharp, if occasionally grating, questioner of witnesses, deploying her long experience as a prosecutor and attorney general in California.

“She was a force. She signaled early on that she was willing to do the hard work of oversight,” said Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the longest-serving member of the committee. “She got more real questions into her five minutes [of questioning] than just about anybody. She made a point of staying away from speeches and asking tough, highly informed questions.”

“She showed that she understands the complexity of the world,” Warner said. He added: “I’m not sure my Republican colleagues would go on the record about it now, but she earned a whole lot of respect from them.”

Indeed, the Republican chairman at the time, Sen. Richard Burr, praised Harris in a 2019 Buzzfeed News article as a “quick study” and “very effective.” (The now-retired Burr, in an email, declined to confirm those comments for this article, saying, “I am not doing any interviews for the elections in November.” Several other GOP committee members who were quoted as praising Harris back then, including Sen. Marco Rubio, did not respond to a request for comment.)

It was notable that by the end of her first year in the Senate, Harris joined with fellow Intelligence Committee member James Lankford, a Republican, to sponsor one of the few bipartisan efforts to bolster the cybersecurity of voting systems. (The bill later stalled due to GOP opposition.) She also sponsored a bill to push the United States ahead of China on quantum computing. Later on, as vice president, Harris kept up the focus on high-tech threats, including from unregulated artificial intelligence, working with French President Emmanuel Macron on new initiatives on space and cybersecurity and representing the Biden administration at the Global Summit on AI Safety. She also served as head of the National Space Council and represented the United States at the COP28 climate conference in Dubai.

One reason that Harris focused on such an obscure area as quantum computing, Barankin said, was that she was concerned about “the investments and efforts that China was making to win that race. It was something she was very sensitive to in terms of how important it was for the U.S. to maintain its station in the world as the lone democratic superpower.”

“It was not uncommon for her to come into the office and outline some new technological development, even if it hadn’t been formally deployed,” said Barankin. “Being confronted with something different and new—that actually gets her engine running.”

Harris’s research into the cyber threat from Russia and other countries included a visit to Israel in November 2017, when she toured its cybersecurity hub at Beersheba. “It wasn’t a typical CODEL [congressional delegation visit],” said Soifer, the former national security advisor. “There were a lot of lessons to learn from the Israelis on cyber. After that, she used her role on the Homeland Security Committee to strengthen our cyber defenses.”

An aide to the vice president agreed that the prolonged intelligence committee probe was central to shaping Harris’s approach not just to Russia, but also to China and other autocratic states that seek to undermine U.S. power.

“She joined the committee at what was a historic moment of turbulence for the intelligence community and the country,” said the aide, a senior White House official who works with Harris and was authorized to speak only on condition of anonymity. “Her experience made her keenly aware of Russian’s malign influence activities and the importance of strong U.S. actions to deter, disrupt, and defend against such activities. That experience really enforced for her the need for strong global leadership by the U.S. You see her speaking about that now.”

It is no accident, he said, that in her speeches as vice president, Harris has repeatedly emphasized preserving the democratic “rules and norms” that keep the U.S.-led global system together in the face of efforts by Moscow, Beijing, and others to destroy it.

At a minimum, Harris’s performance during her four years in the Senate clearly undercuts many of the attacks on her by Trump and the GOP message machine that portray her as an intellectual lightweight (“not smart enough,” “barely competent” and “low IQ” are the epithets that Trump keeps using), and as an easy mark for other world leaders (she’d be a “play toy” in their hands, Trump said). Republicans—and even some Democrats—have also occasionally portrayed her as a mindless, knee-jerk liberal who’s been grandstanding for a presidential run almost since she was sworn in as senator.

Especially on the Homeland Security Committee, “some Democrats believed her pugilistic tone was mostly for show,” wrote Dan Morain, a former Los Angeles Times reporter, in his 2021 biography of her, Kamala’s Way: An American Life. “Others suspected her thirst for the spotlight was part of a long-range plan to ‘pull an Obama’ by staying just long enough in the Senate to get the credentials needed to run for president.” (Former President Barack Obama served briefly on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee before he ran.)

Harris had been warned before she even arrived in Washington that the Intelligence Committee, in particular, was not necessarily a place for an ambitious politician to go. Her fellow Californians, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and outgoing Sen. Barbara Boxer—whose seat Harris had just won—gave her a frank rundown on the pitfalls. The intelligence post, they told her, rarely yielded headlines. Most of the committee’s work was done behind closed doors, with no TV cameras in sight. It had a heavy workload, and it was the most mentally taxing assignment on Capitol Hill: Members went home every night with huge binders of material, but the subject matter was so classified they couldn’t even hire their own staffers to help figure it out.

Boxer, in an interview, said that she warned her successor of the committee’s low profile (a conversation confirmed by Harris herself in her autobiography). But Harris thought the committee would provide her some fast lessons in what was, until that point, mostly a blank spot on her resume: foreign policy. “I do think she just wanted to learn more, to know more about the world,” Boxer said. “She wanted to know about every threat out there. That committee doesn’t give you high visibility, but it certainly teaches you about what the heck is going on in the world.”

Warner added: “Remember, there are members that wouldn’t want to be on a committee where 80 percent of the meetings are in closed session. Because of that, some don’t even show up all the time. She showed up. We were the minority, and she was literally the last person to talk. But she would sit through all these sessions. She did her homework.”

Above all, Harris’s time on various Senate committees deepened her understanding of the vulnerability of U.S. democracy to both foreign and domestic threats from technology, her colleagues said. And she came to understand the threat in a visceral, very personal way, which may provide some insight into how she could be different from Biden, who learned foreign policy from a grand strategic perspective during his three decades on the Foreign Relations Committee.

Harris gradually realized there was a through line, a common theme, to what she’d been doing for much of her career as a prosecutor in California and shaping foreign policy, the new subject she was taking up as a neophyte senator, former aides said. She had spent her previous career as a district attorney and then attorney general of California dealing with the inequities and flaws of U.S. democracy, such as racial injustice in the criminal system and economic exploitation by Wall Street. Now she was faced with a high-tech plot to undermine democracy by exacerbating those same internal vulnerabilities and weaknesses.

“One of the things she found most insidious about Russia’s interference in the 2016 elections was its targeted effort to divide the United States from within,” said Barankin, her former Senate chief of staff. Or as Harris wrote in her autobiography, “Russia’s goals were to undermine faith in the U.S. democratic process.”

Harris said it was clear to her from the Senate investigation that the Russians were focused on dividing Americans over “hot-button” issues, “from race to LGBTQ and immigrant rights.” She described the moment Lankford, a fellow member of the Intelligence Committee, crossed the aisle to tell her he saw the same danger: “I’ve been listening to what you’ve been saying about race as our Achilles’ heel, and I think you’re onto something important.” (Lankford’s office did not directly respond to a request for comment.)

And now, in a kind of career twist she couldn’t possibly have imagined, Harris is running against a candidate who—though he was never shown to be colluding with Russia—is also directly threatening U.S. democracy, at least in the minds of many Trump critics. That has thrust Harris’s theme of democracy-and-freedom promotion forward in a unique way in the current election campaign, said Soifer, Wyden and other Harris supporters.

“You have to think about the moment of history when she started, in January of 2017,” Soifer said. “There was no real playbook for a situation in which a U.S. president would question our institutions and completely disregard our democracy. So not only was her experience on the [Intelligence] Committee essential for investigating the actions of a foreign adversary, it occurred at a moment that the person she’s now running against for president began to directly threaten our democracy domestically.”

And whereas Biden learned foreign policy gradually during his three decades in the Senate—dating back to the Vietnam War—“her view came in a crash course, shaped out of crisis,” especially the cyber threat from Russia, according to one former senior aide who spoke on condition of anonymity. “She had to become an actor right away in mitigating against the threat. So today, even as it relates to the way she talks about preserving democracy and norms and the rule of law, she’s infusing her own experience, making it distinctly her own.”