More Continuity, Less Change Under a Harris White House

Kamala Harris would likely keep to — but tweak — the foreign policy priorities established by the administration of President Joe Biden.

In his gloomy novel The Dean’s December (1982), Saul Bellow expressed the discontent, if not disdain, that conservative intellectuals have often directed toward liberal American presidents. Bellow’s implicit target was Jimmy Carter, who had entered office vowing to overturn the Machiavellian foreign policy of Henry Kissinger that had prolonged the Vietnam War and led Washington to support a variety of dictators around the globe, including Chile’s Augusto Pinochet. Carter hoped to do better by focusing instead on democratic values, global poverty, human rights, and nuclear arms control, but much of it came to naught as the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and student revolutionaries seized the American embassy in Tehran. Soon enough, Carter himself became synonymous with weakness, futility, and surrender. “We are used to peace and plenty, we are for everything nice and against cruelty, wickedness, craftiness, monstrousness,” Bellow wrote. “Our outlook requires the assumption that each of us is at heart trustworthy, each of us is naturally decent and wills good.”