Kamala Harris and China

Is she boxed in on China?

Donald Trump has long had strong adversarial views on China, both as America’s 45^th president and now as the Republican candidate for a second term.  Over the past couple of weeks, I have detailed what I would expect on China policy in a Trump 2.0 scenario, focusing first on tariffs and then on Taiwan. But what about Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee?

For starters, there is no discernible difference between President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on major policy issues — domestic or foreign.  The press will try to tell you otherwise — drawing on her record as a senator, including co-sponsorship of human-rights legislation on Hong Kong and Xinjiang, as well as the views she expressed during her earlier, short-lived presidential primary campaign of 2019-20.  But my advice is to ignore her pre-vice-presidential record, when she had little direct exposure to the tough policy issues that have been on the Biden Administration’s plate since 2021.

The same is the case regarding her foreign policy stance as Vice President.  That includes Harris’s current position on China.  She has made 17 foreign trips in her 3 ½ years as Vice President, but none to China. She met briefly with Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the APEC Summit in Bangkok in November 2022; she also met with Premier Li Qiang at the ASEAN Summit in Jakarta in September 2023. Apart from those two occasions, her Asian travels have been limited to swings in Singapore and Vietnam (August 2021), heading up a funeral delegation to Tokyo that included a perfunctory stopover at the Korean DMZ (September 2022), and a trip to the Philippines (November 2022).  Coming close to China doesn’t count. It doesn’t provide the  first-hand knowledge that can be gleaned from extensive travel inside the country, which can often inform enlightened policymaking.

Moreover, Vice President Harris has not visited any of the major geostrategic hot spots — Ukraine, Gaza, or Israel — during her tenure in office.  The closest exception to that was her three consecutive appearances heading the US delegation at the Munich Security Conference (2022-24), making strong pro-Ukraine, pro-NATO cases against Russia’s illegal invasion and subsequent war in Ukraine. That is not to say she hasn’t been exposed to tough foreign policy problems. Like most vice presidents, she has access to the full range of intelligence on foreign risks, including but not limited to attendance at the President’s daily security briefings. Unlike former President Trump, who eschewed such regular briefings, Vice President Harris has welcomed the opportunity to learn on the job.

On China, I see little point in attempting to read between the lines between Biden and Harris positions.  Should she win in November, she will immediately own the trajectory of conflict escalation that occurred during the Biden Administration.  That means she will inherit Joe Biden’s tough anti-China approach on tariffs as a carryover from Trump 1.0, targeted tech and human rights sanctions, derisking, friendshoring, and support for Taiwan — all key pieces of America’s “small-yard, high-fence” national security focus that Xi Jinping has described as “all-around containment, encirclement, and suppression” of China.   And if recent press reports are to be believed, there is good reason to believe that the foreign policy team of a Harris Administration would initially be staffed largely by holdovers from the Biden Administration, including the Vice President’s national security adviser, Phillip Gordon who is known mainly for his expertise on the Middle East.

Nor does the outside world view Kamala Harris any differently from Joe Biden. Like her boss, the Vice President is viewed favorably by most of America’s major allies.  According to a mid-2022 Pew Research Center survey, fully 55% of an 18-country sample had confidence that she would “do the right thing in global affairs.” As can be seen by the scatter plot below, her foreign confidence rankings are quite comparable to those of Joe Biden — underscored by dots ranging from lowest collective approval of Biden and Harris in Hungary to the highest approval of both in Sweden. With the remaining dots tightly clustered around parity, as indicated by the dashed 45-degree line, the world shares the view that on foreign policy leadership, there is little difference between Harris and Biden.

All in all, there’s little reason to expect something radically different on foreign policy from  Kamala Harris, at least, initially.  That’s especially the case on China, where she would quickly confront solid bipartisan support for Congress’s tough anti-China stance, reinforced by comparable readings from public opinion surveys. Undoubtedly, both she and former President Trump will be pressed on this key issue during the upcoming election campaign. Trump has already made his hawkish views on China quite clear.  In the current climate of Sinophobia, Harris hardly wants to risk being labeled a China dove.  Just as Trump boxed in Biden on China, there is a distinct possibility that Harris may find herself trapped in a similar situation. In a highly contentious political climate with anti-China sentiment at an extreme, it will be all but impossible for either candidate to wiggle out of that position.

The more pertinent question for Kamala Harris is how she frames the China issue as an opportunity to demonstrate her capacity for statesmanship. As just noted, this is hardly the time for her to announce a new China policy.   But it could well be a moment to stress that the US-China conflict is a very real and serious problem that could well shape the global order for decades to come.  In keeping with those concerns, it would be entirely appropriate for the Vice President to state the obvious — that the old approach to US-China relationship management has failed and that a new approach is desperately needed, before it is too late.  That simple statement as a presidential candidate would then allow her to commit to a major review of the US-China relationship, if and when she becomes president.

A major policy review is hardly a promise by Kamala Harris to reverse course on China.  But it would offer her the opportunity that any new leader seeks: a chance to assess the strategic optionality that will be needed to address a thorny problem of immense consequences.  Such a review may well lead her to stay a conflict-prone course on China as Biden did when he followed Trump.  Conversely, it could also give her the chance to rethink America’s China policy as President Nixon did when he first went to China in 1972.  As outlined in Accidental Conflict, which features a three-pronged proposal for a new architecture of US-China engagement, that would certainly be my preference. But I concede that in this case, I am obviously talking my book.

While Kamala Harris is not Richard Nixon, many of today’s geostrategic circumstances bear an eerie similarity to the cold-war climate of fifty years ago. For that reason alone, the possibility of a Nixonian moment should not be dismissed out of hand. Who better than a thoughtful new president to seize on a critical opportunity to shift the dynamic with another superpower — from adversarial to competitive, from conflict escalation to conflict resolution?  On Joe Biden’s watch, America’s China problem went from bad to worse.  For Kamala Harris, that need not be the case.