Kamala Harris could end the era of hubris abroad

“If we are an arrogant nation, they will despise us,” George W. Bush said during a 2000 presidential debate. “If we are a humble but strong nation, they will welcome us.” Bush, who had promised modesty as a candidate, succumbed to his hubris as president and launched sinister and quasi-messianic wars in Iraq and elsewhere in the name of the foreign policy trend of the time, neoconservatism.

Such cognitive dissonance is a reminder that it is nearly impossible to predict how politicians vying for the Oval Office will behave once they are there. While we can speculate about the possible foreign policies of Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump, these theories are likely to be proven wrong by the vagaries of world events – as in Bush’s case with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Still, Harris has shown signs that she could follow a trajectory that would be somewhat the opposite of Bush’s. As a female candidate running against a would-be dictator, she must signal that she will be at least as tough as Trump: “As commander in chief, I will ensure that America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world,” she promised at the Democratic convention. Once in office, however, she will likely aspire to the ideal that Bush described as a candidate, not as president: strong but humble.

This can be seen in the people she has chosen as national security advisers, who are likely to take political positions if she wins the election. One of them is Philip Gordon, who also served in the administrations of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Another is Rebecca Lissner, a diplomat and academic.

Gordon has long said that “there must be a certain humility in assuming that there is an easy solution to any of these great challenges in global politics.” During his time at the Council on Foreign Relations between the Obama and Biden administrations, he wrote a book with the telling title “Losing the Long Game: The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East.”

In his report, he traces the failures, follies and unintended consequences of US interventions in the region, including the 1953 overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh (which, after many twists and turns, gave us today’s anti-American theocracy in Tehran), Bush II’s misguided invasion of Iraq (which, among other things, gave birth to the Islamic State and, paradoxically, made Iran the winner), and misadventures in Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and elsewhere.

Gordon has a keen eye for the hubris that so often accompanies American exceptionalism—the naive belief that the United States, because of its supposedly unique qualities, can fix everything and save the world. Instead, he recognizes the limits of American power and the need for humility in a fundamentally uncertain and inscrutable world. As a Russia hawk, he is not shy about asserting U.S. power when necessary. But as a practitioner, he is ever mindful of unforeseen mishaps. When Biden and Harris discussed withdrawing from Afghanistan in 2021, he apparently warned of the chaos that actually resulted and urged a residual military presence to prevent it; he evidently lost that argument.

The book, which Lissner co-wrote and which was published around the same time as Gordon’s book, covers similar themes. She concludes that the United States today lacks the means to control the world as a “hegemon” or to defend the so-called “rules-based international order.” Instead, she argues for reducing American grand strategy to more achievable goals, such as maintaining a minimum level of open exchange that would ensure U.S. prosperity.

The public profile that Harris has polished as vice president meets different and more traditional criteria on the foreign policy spectrum. By those parameters, she would largely continue in the style of her current boss, in stark contrast to Trump.

Like Biden, she would lean toward “internationalism” rather than Trump’s isolationism. She would cultivate alliances and multilateral organizations, while Trump would be unilateral and nationalistic. She would combine realism and idealism by giving equal consideration to America’s national interests and values; her opponent would represent a caricature of realism, pursuing national interests with one deal and one photo op after another.

One could argue, however, that temperament and the wisdom a politician acquires over a lifetime determine actual foreign policy more than such abstract labels. And in that light, there is absolutely nothing humble about Trump. The man is pure narcissistic megalomania; he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.

Biden may not match Trump’s arrogance, but he honed his skills in an era of national hubris: he entered the Senate when the U.S. was a superpower and the Foreign Affairs Committee when the U.S. was briefly a hyperpower in a unipolar world. He is fond of using the messianic language of exceptionalism, describing America as “the indispensable nation” and a “beacon” for the world. Early in his presidency, he experimented with a grandiose portrayal of geopolitics as a moral contest between democracies and autocracies, which he quickly had to abandon in order to get anything done.

The interplay of hubris and intellectual modesty, defined as “awareness of the limits of one’s own knowledge,” has been a theme for historians since Herodotus, who attributed the downfall of kings such as Croesus and Xerxes to their arrogance.

The United States is now more powerful than any empire of the past and has no need to prove its strength. In the hands of arrogant leaders, this power becomes dangerous. But used wisely and modestly, it can bring security to the country and stability to the world. That seems to be Harris’ intuition too. Perhaps she should say so in a debate like George W. Bush did in 2000 and then actually act on it.

Andreas Kluth is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.