On Aug. 22 at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Vice President Kamala Harris will take the stage to officially accept her party’s nomination. After a week of speeches, will a new Democratic foreign policy take shape? Will Harris try to put daylight between herself and her current boss, U.S. President Joe Biden?
FP’s Ravi Agrawal was joined by Anne-Marie Slaughter, the CEO of New America and a former head of the U.S. State Department’s policy planning team, and Matt Duss, a former foreign-policy advisor to Sen. Bernie Sanders. They outlined what we know and don’t know about the foreign-policy plans of a potential Harris-Walz administration.
Video clips from this event
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Matt Duss offers his takeaway from the Democratic National Convention’s goals, from developing a pro-worker agenda to portraying Harris as ready to be commander in chief.
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Anne-Marie Slaughter reflects on Harris’s DNC address: “What I came away with was strength, and freedom, and patriotism.”
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Did Harris manage to walk the tightrope of foreign policy on the Middle East? Duss and Slaughter differ on what they hoped to hear from her and debate whether she supported policy agendas to end Gazan suffering.
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“We are in a moment where I think the old [foreign-policy] consensus has come apart,” Duss says. And the great question of a potential Harris administration is what shape the new consensus will be, and whether she would continue to uphold American primacy.
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Slaughter points to Harris’s agendas and speeches to argue that she is not interested in the minimalist view of merely maintaining “a world free of spheres of influence.”
