Van Jackson read the Harris campaign’s new “policy” page and he was not impressed:
It pains me to observe this because I want better, we need better, and I’m very invested in her beating Trump. But we are well and truly in the territory of HBO’s Veep and nobody wants to say it for fear of harshing the vibes that appear to be central to the current strategy.
The foreign policy section was notable for saying very little about anything. Most of the text on foreign policy issues seems to have been lifted verbatim from Harris’ acceptance speech, complete with the same hollow words on Gaza that we have seen before. Like the foreign policy remarks in the speech, this “policy” page comes across as a box-checking exercise to satisfy the party’s hawks. It talks about having “the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world” and reaffirms Harris’ willingness to bomb Iranian allies, but there is precious little about non-military policy tools and there is no mention of climate, migration or pandemics in the foreign policy section. If you didn’t know that the Harris is the Democratic nominee, there wouldn’t be much in the foreign policy section to let you know. Put another way, there is nothing in here that would make Dick Cheney uncomfortable.
Each section of the “policy” page includes a paragraph that focuses on Trump’s agenda, and the attacks on Trump’s record are not nearly as strong as they could and seem to be aimed at pleasing other people in the Biden administration. The Harris campaign repeatedly hits Trump for his unfitness for office, and that’s fair, but when it comes to criticizing what he did wrong as president they are reduced to saying that he “cozied up to dictators and turned his back on allies” and they refer to his disparaging remarks about U.S. servicemen. Like the rest of this section, it all comes across as hastily thrown together and half-baked.
No one expects a campaign website to have every policy spelled out in detail, but for a candidate with limited foreign policy experience it is important to demonstrate that she has something like a coherent foreign policy vision or agenda. As Jackson says, rattling off a list of foreign countries that you have visited as vice president doesn’t cut it. We don’t really care if she has been to the DMZ in Korea. What we want to find out is what her North Korea policy is going to look like. Is it going to be defined by knee-jerk hostility to engagement as expressed in the party platform, or will it be something else? It’s anybody’s guess at this point.
Read the rest of the article at Eunomia
Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.
We're expecting the US government to have "policies" now – other than "bomb and sanction everything into submission, then steal their resources"?
Since when? This IS America and always has been since at least the 1800's if not before.
I read Obama's foreign policy prescriptions during his campaign. He sounded like "Bush Lite" and that's what I started calling him. I was the only one who noticed he advocated a gasoline blockade on Iran (back when Iran didn't have enough refineries for their own gasoline) – which was an act of war. Everyone else believed the stupid PR that he was a "Peace President". He also promised to continue the war in Afghanistan and end the war in Iraq – and he did the one and not the other.
Biden promised student debt relief. He promised to rejoin the JCP:OA. And a ton of other stuff. He did none of it.
Who the hell cares what Harris' "policies" are? Or Trump's? They're all lies and will continue to be so. It's naive in the extreme to be taking any of this crap seriously. If the candidate says they want to start WWIII, that might be the time to take it seriously – but since we know they already do, why bother?
Is this what Larison considers "deep analysis"? Seriously?
Chris Hedges postulated that a Biden administration would bring no real change from the Trump administration. It is my belief that the Biden administration is on par with the Trump administration, in lock step with the GOP. A coup was undertaken right before our eyes. Oligarchs saw, in their eyes, that Biden was faltering, so, the money was cut off, which killed the campaign. Kamala Harris, who came in 4th in the California primary, was anointed as THE ONE for the DNC. And so, the combatants for POTUS are a blowhard criminal in one corner, a grinning, vacuous woman in the other corner. A grim choice, indeed.
Not sure about it being the "strongest, most lethal" fighting force in the world, but it's certainly the most expensive!
Bernhard has a similar comment to mine over at MoA.
Harris And Trump Debate Whatever
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2024/09/harris-and-trump-debate-whatever.html
Correct. Let that sink in, folks.
"We don’t really care if she has been to the DMZ in Korea…"
But it WAS funny when Republican governor of South Dakota Kristi Noem claimed she'd been to the Korean DMZ in her book & audiobook, then when pressed by journalists, claimed that the statement was "included in the book by someone else by mistake".
Then the journalist asked why Noem didn't notice the error when Noem READ HER OWN BOOK for the audiobook recording.
Noem just defaulted to "well, I don't talk about what world leaders I have met" after bragging about what world leaders she has met. In print and on audiobook.
Redundancy?…
She's the George Santos of the South Dakota Government. She says different things about what she did and did not do.
“Delusions by their very nature, are sweet?”….
During the debate of Tues Sept 10, 2024, Kamala Harris said:
“Putin’s agenda is not just about Ukraine. European allies are grateful to us for understanding the importance of the greatest military alliance the world has ever known, which is NATO. What we have done is to preserve the ability of Zelensky and the Ukrainians to fight for their independence. Otherwise, Putin would be sitting in Kyiv with his eyes fixed on the rest of Europe.”
Kamala Harris is twisting reality here and she is hiding the fact that it was NATO, under US command, that has attacked Russia over the years, expanding its military bases and nuclear weapons ever closer to Russia’s frontiers, besides having financed, in 2014, with neo-Nazi forces the coup d'état in Ukraine and the subsequent attack against the Russian minority in Ukraine.
She seems to have been left outside of the loop as far as the Biden foreign policy is concerned. She is left with the task of repeating the official propaganda line regarding the US led proxy war against Russia.
She does not seem to have any clue how she would have a different foreign policy than Joe Biden’s permanent warmongering policy.
She knows. She cannot speak otherwise.
Her policy? 1) give Israel all that it needs to kill more Palestinians, 2) keep the war in Ukraine going, plus, give the green light for bombing deeper into Russia, 3) establish more bases, 4) all the above.