The first presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump presented a bleak picture of the future of U.S. foreign policy no matter who wins in November. On the most urgent and important foreign policy issue of the year, the war and genocide in Gaza, Harris repeated empty platitudes about a “two-state solution” and Trump fell back on tired “pro-Israel” rhetoric. Neither candidate offered voters any hope that there would be a meaningful change from Biden’s policy of unconditional support for the slaughter and starvation of Palestinians.
Trump absurdly said that Harris hates Israel, but aside from her perfunctory expression of support for Palestinian self-determination there was unfortunately very little to distinguish the two of them on this issue. Like Trump, Harris backs Israel to the hilt, and the main difference is that she pays lip service to Palestinian rights while doing nothing to protect them. She says some of the right things about the need for a ceasefire, but the Joe Biden administration isn’t willing to use its leverage to secure one and Harris refuses to call for the halt to U.S. arms transfers that U.S. law requires.
Harris has had many opportunities in the two months since Biden dropped out to separate herself from the president on this issue. She squandered them all by sticking to the official administration line. The vice president would rather tout her support from the likes of Dick Cheney than try to win the support of antiwar voters across the country. Harris has been catering mostly to hawks this summer, and she prefers attacking Trump for being “weak” instead of using his policy failures against him.
For his part, Trump returned to his old obsession with Iran and criticized the Biden administration because “they took off all the sanctions that I had.” Unfortunately for diplomacy with Iran, Biden never lifted any Iran sanctions, and the small amount of sanctions relief that he was prepared to grant was never delivered. Biden kept Trump’s dangerous Iran policy in place with similarly poor results, and there is no evidence so far that Harris is interested in pursuing a policy of diplomatic engagement.
The candidates had almost nothing to say about diplomacy during the debate. It was telling that the only time the word diplomacy was uttered during the debate was when Harris was criticizing the Trump administration’s negotiations with the Taliban that led to the withdrawal of U.S. troops. Trump mentioned negotiating an end to the war in Ukraine, but he offered no specifics on how he would bring the belligerents to the table or what he would do to secure an agreement.
Harris also repeated the president’s strange lie that the U.S. isn’t at war anywhere. She said, “there is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone in any war zone around the world, the first time this century.” That would come as a surprise to the soldiers recently injured during a raid in Iraq and to the sailors waging Biden’s war in Yemen. It would also be news to the U.S. forces fighting in Somalia and the troops illegally stationed in Syria. The Navy has said that its ships have been engaged in the most intense combat since WWII in the Red Sea, but as far as Biden and Harris are concerned it isn’t even happening.
Meanwhile, the U.S.-backed war in Gaza continues to claim innocent lives. Israeli forces bombed yet another tent encampment filled with displaced civilians on Tuesday, killing dozens of them. According to analysis of the damage, they used 2,000-pound U.S.-made bombs to do it. These bombs are so large and so powerful that using them in a densely populated area is obviously criminal. That was just the latest in a string of attacks on civilians in Gaza, including attacks on at least 16 schools where displaced people had taken shelter. The official death toll is now over 40,000, but informed estimates from doctors that have worked in the territory suggest that the real number is more than double that.
During the debate there was no mention of that massacre in a so-called humanitarian zone, nor did anyone bring up the name of Aysenur Eygi, the American citizen murdered by an Israeli sniper in the West Bank just last week. People watching the debate would have had no idea that one of the worst man-made famines in modern times is currently raging in Gaza, and they wouldn’t know that the famine is the result of an Israeli campaign of deliberate starvation. The victims of the monstrous bipartisan foreign policy consensus in Washington are usually invisible in American debates, and this was no exception.
Daniel Larison is a columnist for Responsible Statecraft. He is contributing editor at Antiwar.com and former senior editor at The American Conservative magazine. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago. Follow him on Twitter @DanielLarison and at his blog, Eunomia, here.
