Justin Logan criticizes Harris’ silly threat inflation regarding Iran:
The best defense that can be mounted of Vice President Harris in this context is that she seemed to be groping around for an answer with the least political downside and the least offense to the foreign policy Blob, and she probably found it. The problem is that she is wrong on the substance. Should her extemporaneous remark influence her policy, it could push the United States further down the road to ruin in the Middle East.
Harris’ answer on 60 Minutes was a bad one, and Logan is right that it is absurd for her to say that Iran is America’s “greatest adversary.” I discussed that in one of my columns last week. My concern is that it wasn’t just an extemporaneous remark or a politically safe pandering response. It was another example of the very hawkish position that she has been taking on Iran since she became the Democratic presidential nominee. For whatever reason, Harris has been determined to paint Trump as too soft on Iran. Given how reckless and confrontational Trump’s Iran policy was, this has alarming implications for what her Iran policy might look like.
She made a point of threatening Iran and its allies during her convention speech that was otherwise very light on foreign policy. She said, “I will never hesitate to take whatever action is necessary to defend our forces and our interests against Iran and Iran-backed terrorists.” She has repeated that line many times since then. She followed that up by bashing Trump being too passive in response to Iranian actions. The Democratic Party platform attacked Trump for “fecklessness and weakness in the face of Iranian aggression,” and it specifically faulted him for not using force in response to the downing of a U.S. drone in 2019 and the attack on Saudi oil facilities. Harris picked up that message and ran with it.
Harris recently criticized him again for not responding to the missile barrage that Iran launched after Trump ordered Soleimani’s assassination: “When Donald Trump was president, he let Iran off the hook after Iran and its proxies attacked US bases and American troops.” Trump brought the U.S. and Iran closer to war than any other president in decades, but according to Harris’ campaign rhetoric she thinks he wasn’t hardline and aggressive enough. This is an exceptionally odd attack for Harris to make when she was one of the senators who voted for a resolution in 2020 opposing the use of force against Iran without Congressional authorization.
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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.