Emma Ashford: Good morning, Matt! It’s almost September here in Washington, and that means just one thing: The presidential race is really heating up. Not that it was a quiet summer exactly, with an assassination attempt on Donald Trump and Joe Biden dropping out of the race, making way for a new Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris. But we’re entering the home stretch of the election now, and I thought it might be a good time for us to finally broach the question of what this election could mean for U.S. foreign policy. Did you watch the Republican National Convention and the Democratic National Convention (DNC)?
Matthew Kroenig: Hi, Emma! You’re right. School is starting, people are returning from summer vacation, and the presidential election is entering the final stretch.
I watched the DNC last week. As usual, there was not much focus on foreign policy—or policy of any kind really. Much of the event, and Harris’s acceptance speech as nominee, focused on introducing the new Democratic candidate to the country by telling her life story.
There were two foreign-policy items that struck me, however. First, it did seem that the Democrats were trying to move to the middle and reclaim patriotism from the Republicans. Harris called the United States “the greatest nation on Earth,” that she would “ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world,” and so on.
Moreover, much of the imagery (American flags, football players on stage, etc.) seemed to emphasize more conservative themes.
EA: Yeah, that was certainly a notable shift. Democrats are always keen to be perceived as tough on national security to counteract the traditional idea that they’re dovish or anti-war. And that problem is worsened for Harris by the fact she’s a woman. There’s no actual evidence that female leaders are less warlike than male leaders—in fact, there’s evidence that the opposite is true! Think of Margaret Thatcher during the Falklands War or any number of female queens in history, for example. But it’s still a perception that women such as Harris and Hillary Clinton have had to try to counteract.
MK: Yes. My former Ph.D. student Madison Schramm and her co-author Alexandra Stark have conducted statistical analysis showing that female leaders are actually more likely to initiate conflict. They argue that female politicians need to be seen as even tougher than men (“Iron Ladies,” as they call them) to rise and retain power in what has been a male-dominated space.
EA: It was more than just imagery and reinforcing the idea that Harris could be tough in foreign policy, though. I was struck by the choice to have former U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta give a speech on the final night of the convention—and by all the talk about America as the indispensable nation and defender of global democracy. That language has been more traditionally coded as neoconservative than Democratic, but it seems that Harris might be continuing the Biden administration’s rhetoric on that point. They also criticized Trump as soft on Russia and implied that his foreign policy was un-American.
Whether or not this actually tells us anything about Harris’s own foreign-policy proclivities, I am certainly concerned that the Democratic Party seems to be moving in a much more hawkish direction and openly embracing “Never Trump” neoconservative thinkers such as Bill Kristol and the more than 200 former staffers to John McCain, Mitt Romney, and George W. Bush who endorsed Harris this week.
Read the full op-ed on Foreign Policy
