STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
At the Democratic National Convention, Vice President Harris made a promise.
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VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.
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INSKEEP: Harris has said less about what she would do on the world stage. And that got Michael Hirsh reading. Two of Harris' foreign policy advisers have written books in the past on their views of the world, so Hirsh read them and wrote what amounts to a high-stakes book review for the magazine Foreign Policy. What he perceives in those books is a desire for a relatively humble approach by the world's most powerful nation. One of the books Hirsh read is by the Vice President's national security adviser Philip Gordon.
MICHAEL HIRSH: What's most notable about him was that in 2020, he published a book that was fiercely critical of U.S. efforts at regime change, going all the way back to the CIA-orchestrated ouster of the Iranian Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953.
INSKEEP: So he's looking at several generations of U.S. military and other kinds of interventions around the world.
HIRSH: He is. And in that book, he concluded, quite firmly and clearly, that we don't do regime change well. We're constantly overestimating the beneficial impact of these efforts and that they come back to haunt us.
INSKEEP: We have to add a bunch of ifs to this next statement. If Harris is elected, and if Phil Gordon ends up being one of her senior foreign policy advisers, what would that view of history, of mistaken efforts at regime change, imply about the way that the United States might approach a problem like - I don't know - Iran.
HIRSH: I think that you would see an attempt to, say, go back to the 2015 nuclear deal, which Gordon supported. I think in general, if you take Gordon's views together with Harris' deputy national security adviser, a scholar named Rebecca Lissner, you have a much humbler view of what the U.S. can and cannot do in the world, that we really have to stop this long-term sort of messianic policy, if you will, of trying to transform regimes, remaking the world in the U.S.'s image, and have to do a much better job of working with autocratic and illiberal regimes in terms of cooperating on critical issues, whether it's climate change, pandemics of the future and so forth.
INSKEEP: Joe Biden has made a big theme of promoting democracy or defending democracy around the world, yet these past books by Harris' advisers seem skeptical of American ideological crusades. Would that imply some different approach in a different administration?
HIRSH: Yes, I think so. I mean, there's no question that Kamala Harris herself is a strong defender of democracy, going back to her days as a California prosecutor and attorney general. But in terms of a sort of evangelical or messianic approach to converting resistant or autocratic regimes, I think that you would see Kamala Harris more or less playing a much more restrained role than you've seen past presidents do.
INSKEEP: I'm thinking about the way that Republicans would respond with these policy views if they are, in fact, attached to Vice President Harris. And it's pretty easy to predict because Republicans have consistently said this about Democrats for decades. They would see arguments like this as embracing American decline.
HIRSH: Yes.
INSKEEP: Are Harris' advisers embracing American decline in these books from past years?
HIRSH: They're not embracing it, but they are trying to address the mistakes made through past excesses. I don't think you're going to hear this, particularly over the next two to three months until the election because Harris has to, you know, do a good job of essentially avoiding precisely the image you laid out that Republicans would accuse her of. And hence you see her speaking in very strong terms. What she might do later on as president is a whole other question.
INSKEEP: Michael Hirsh, who's a columnist for Foreign Policy, who's been reading books by Vice President Harris' advisers. Thanks so much.
HIRSH: Thank you, Steve. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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