Andreas Kluth: Harris could end America's era of hubris abroad

“If we are an arrogant nation, they will resent us,” George W. Bush said during a presidential debate in 2000; “if we’re a humble nation, but strong, they’ll welcome us.” Having promised humility as a candidate, Bush then went on to succumb as president to hubris, launching ill-fated and quasi-messianic wars in Iraq and elsewhere in the name of the foreign-policy fad of the time, called Neoconservatism.

Such cognitive dissonance is a reminder that it’s well-nigh impossible to predict how politicians running for the Oval Office will conduct themselves once they’re in it. We may conjecture about the possible foreign policies of Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, but these theories are likely to explode on impact with the vagaries of world events — such as, in Bush’s case, the terrorist attacks of Sep. 11, 2001.

That said, Harris has shown signs that she could chart a trajectory that would be roughly the obverse of Bush’s. As a female candidate running against a wannabe strongman, she must signal that she’d be at least as tough as Trump: “As commander in chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world,” she promised at the Democratic convention. Once in office, though, she’s likely to strive for the ideal described by Bush the candidate, not Bush the president: strong but humble.

We can infer this from the people she’s chosen to advise her on national security, who are likely to occupy some policy perch if she wins. One of them is Philip Gordon, who also served in the administrations of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Another is Rebecca Lissner, a diplomat and scholar.

Gordon has long talked about “the need to bring a certain humility to the notion that there is some simple solution to any of these big challenges” in world affairs. While at the Council on Foreign Relations between the Obama and Biden terms, he wrote a book with the telling title "Losing the Long Game: The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East."

His narrative charts the failures, follies and unintended consequences of U.S. interventions in the region. Those include the ouster of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 (which, via many twists and turns, gave us today’s anti-American theocracy in Tehran), Bush II’s misguided invasion of Iraq (which spawned, among other ills, the Islamic State and left Iran as the paradoxical winner), as well as misadventures in Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and elsewhere.

Gordon has a keen eye for the hubris that so often accompanies American exceptionalism, the naive belief that, by virtue of its supposedly unique characteristics, the United States can fix anything and save the world. He recognizes instead the limits of American power, and the need for humility in a fundamentally uncertain and unknowable world. As a Russia hawk, he’s not coy about asserting U.S. might when necessary. But as a practitioner, he’s ever aware of the unforeseen snafus. When Biden and Harris deliberated on withdrawing from Afghanistan in 2021, he apparently warned about the chaos that in fact ensued and urged a residual military presence to prevent it; he lost that argument, obviously.

The book that Lissner co-authored, which was published at about the same time as Gordon’s, hews to similar themes. Her conclusion is that the U.S. nowadays lacks the means to police the world as “hegemon,” or to defend the so-called “rules-based international order.” Instead, she favors scaling down American grand strategy to more achievable goals such as preserving some modicum of open exchange that would keep the U.S. prosperous.

The public profile that Harris has burnished as vice president checks other, and more traditional, boxes on the foreign-policy spectrum. According to those parameters, she’d largely continue in the vein of her current boss, in sharp contrast with Trump.

Like Biden, she would lean toward “internationalism” instead of Trump’s isolationism. She’d cultivate alliances and multilateral organizations, whereas Trump would go unilateralist and nationalist. She’d blend realism and idealism by considering America’s national interests and values alike; her opponent would espouse a caricature of realism, chasing national interests one deal or photo op at a time.

Arguably, though, temperament and the wisdom formed throughout a politician’s life determine actual foreign policy more than such abstract labels. And in that light, there’s absolutely nothing humble about Trump. The man is pure narcissistic megalomania; he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.

Biden may not come close to Trump’s arrogance, but he did acquire his chops during an era of national hubris, entering the senate when the U.S. was a superpower and joining the foreign-relations committee when the U.S. was briefly a hyperpower in a unipolar world. He’s wont to borrow the messianic language of exceptionalism, describing America as “the indispensable nation” and a “beacon” for the world. Early in his presidency, he experimented with a grandiose framing of geopolitics as a moral contest between democracies and autocracies, which he quickly had to ditch in order to get anything done.

The interplay of hubris and intellectual humility, defined as an “awareness of the limits of one’s knowledge,” has been fodder for historians since Herodotus, who blamed the downfall of kings such as Croesus and Xerxes on their arrogance.

The U.S. today is mightier than any empires of yore and has no need to prove its strength. In the hands of arrogant leaders, such power becomes dangerous. Wielded wisely and humbly, though, it can keep the country safe and the world stable. That seems to be Harris’s intuition, too. Perhaps, like George W. Bush in 2000, she should say that in a debate, and then actually live up to it.

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering U.S. diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.