Does Foreign Policy Even Matter for the 2024 Democratic Ticket?

In selecting Minnesota Governor Tim Walz – a man with even less foreign policy experience than herself if that is indeed imaginable – presumptive 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris seemed to be saying that foreign policy doesn’t really matter in this election.

But if you look carefully for what’s not being said, the truth is even more alarming.

American decline in world affairs has become such an accepted notion that ignoring national security credentials in a forming a leading party ticket is almost normal. Sixteen years ago, former Democratic President Barack Obama took Delaware Sen. Joe Biden onto his ticket because the then-chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was supposed to be good at foreign policy, and Russia had just invaded its tiny neighbor Georgia. Last month, President Biden couldn’t seem to distinguish between Russian President Vladimir Putin and the man standing beside him at that moment, Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky, putting that old chestnut to rest.

But what Harris really did this past week in tapping Walz was not so much discard the notion of foreign policy, but rather the core assumptions about it which have guided America in the past decades.

Just as she ducked a joint appearance before Congress with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu two weeks before, Harris again gave Tel Aviv the cold shoulder in choosing Walz – a fellow traveller of Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar – over Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who is arguably far more pro-Israeli. With her pick, Harris virtue-signaled to pro-Palestinian youth and Muslim voters in Michigan who had been deserting the Democrats in droves, primary results this past spring indicated.

To say Walz is a tabula rasa on foreign policy would be misleading. After all, his sobriquet Tiananmen Tim didn’t come from nowhere. As a young English teacher in China in 1989, Walz could have left in protest when the totalitarian government there slaughtered actually peaceful protestors in Beijing’s central square, but he didn’t. In fact, he honeymooned with his wife on the five-year anniversary of the massacre in what some have called a kow-tow to statist absolutism. Known as a Sino-phile while in Congress, Walz said in 2016 that he thought the U.S. should do more to find common ground with China, rejecting the premise that the Peoples’ Republic is necessarily a competitor and a threat.

(The Harris-Walz campaign has been working furiously in recent days to paint Walz as more hawkish on China than his record suggests.)

But the narrative restoration effort that caught my attention last week was one I’d hoped the Harris camp would be smart enough to steer clear of, which is to say the attempt to argue that her service on the Select Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), specifically during its Russia investigation, qualifies her as a foreign policy pro. In a fawning piece that appears seeded by the Harris-Walz campaign, Foreign Policy magazine made just this case, without a single reference to the dishonest origins of the Russiagate adventure Hillary Clinton’s campaign launched against then candidate Donald Trump in 2016.

In the wake of subsequent revelations about Russiagate and the mainstream media’s unfortunate role in empowering its falsehoods, more intelligent politicians have tried to build distance between themselves and their roles in the probe at the time. When I gifted Maine Senator Angus King, a SSCI member, with a copy of my book “Dangerous Company: The Misadventures of a ‘Foreign Agent’,” which details what it was like to be caught up in the whole affair, I wrote in the inscription: isn’t it interesting how Vice-President Harris no longer refers to her SSCI service as evidence of national security bona fides.

Clearly, I ribbed too soon.

Unlike the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, on which there was healthy and spirited debate about the substance of the charges between vice-chairs Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) (the House later censured Schiff for his dishonesty during that period), the SSCI prided itself on a “bipartisan” investigation, about which Harris waxed nostalgic during the memorial service of the late Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.), whose staff seeded and promoted many of the false allegations. For her part, Harris lent a “prosecutorial” air to the inquiry, SSCI Chairman Mark Warner glowed in the Foreign Policy article.

If her staff had to stretch this far to try and make the case Harris has foreign policy experience, that in itself is noteworthy.

The world today is as dangerous a place as it has ever been. With a full-scale war between Russia and Ukraine threatening to spill further into Europe, a growing conflict between Israel and Iran in the Middle East, and an ever-advancing China chipping away at the influence of democracies and the West, it is arguably time for a truly credentialed foreign policy ticket for Americans to choose for the White House in November. The past week has offered nothing to suggest Harris-Walz is the right choice for this moment – instead, we’ve seen troubling indications it isn’t.