When U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump meet for tonight’s presidential debate, most observers will be paying close attention to the interpersonal dynamics of their faceoff. Since Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic Party’s candidate, she has changed the tone and tenor of the campaign, drawing a much sharper contrast to Trump in terms of age and vitality than the 82-year-old Biden ever could. And as always when it comes to presidential debates, viewers will be keeping their eye out for moments of confrontation, gaffes and even humor, for their ability to reveal things about the candidates in ways that scripted campaign events never do.
One area where more information about both Harris and Trump would be very useful has to do with how they would conduct U.S. foreign policy in the four years to come. Harris is not the neophyte she is often made out to be when it comes to foreign policy. In her four years as vice president, she has traveled extensively and widely on behalf of the Biden administration, particularly in Latin America, but also Southeast Asia and Africa. Still, very little is known about her personal convictions and policy priorities with regard to the United States’ role in the world.
As for Trump, it’s a safe bet that a second term in office would closely resemble his first, with implications for U.S. allies in Europe and Asia, as well as trade partners around the world. But any effort to find a foreign policy logic in Trump’s first term is complicated by how chaotic, inconsistent and confused his policy pronouncements often were, and how often they were either ignored by his team or quickly reversed by Trump himself. Moreover, besides the COVID-19 pandemic, which Trump catastrophically bungled, his first term was uneventful—even historically so—when it comes to external crises not of his own making. So while we can assume his approach to managing a geopolitical crisis will be dangerously amateurish, we really have little precedent to go on.