A hundred days is a long time in US politics. The abrupt decision of Joe Biden not to stand as Democratic nominee in November has thrown into turmoil assumptions about the likelihood of a Donald Trump victory. Biden will join the list of distinguished single-term presidents: Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford and George H W Bush among them.
Dedicated teams in global foreign ministries are frantically revising their calculations, with ambassadors wondering who they have on call. Team Trump, which has been hoping to keep a senescent Biden in office, now has to retrain its firepower onto a likely (female) opponent who knows which buttons to press: abortion, gun control, and far-right racism among them.
This will be like a minefield for Trump, since with one loose phrase he could easily alienate half the population while losing the minority support he has been cultivating.
Outright partisans, for example in sections of the UK conservative press, had few doubts about Trump since their passions are always all-in on any given issue. Nigel Farage and Liz Truss were practically doing a victory lap with him, even though the big fish they tried to suck onto did not waste his time meeting either of them.
With ineffable timing, Farage opined that the Democrats would never dare bypass “a Black African woman” through an open nomination process – even though Harris is an American with Indian and Jamaican heritage; she is the daughter of a Stanford economist and a biologist who worked on cancer genes.
Until the weekend, Trump was basking in victimhood before adoring MAGA crowds, arguing that God had spared him from assassination. He drew more attention by selecting 39-year-old JD Vance as his running mate, a son of Appalachia who in reality is the confection of American oligarchs from the worlds of finance and insurgent “new” tech. Their sole goal is to break things and to make masses of money without paying taxes.
This week Trump might have also looked forward to the fulsome praise of “King Bibi” of Jerusalem on one of his malignly partisan missions to interfere in Washington and to kill off talk of a two-state solution.
Instead, the limelight has suddenly shifted from the 78-year-old convicted felon, with his mental “episodes” and weird obsessions with Hannibal Lecter and great white sharks, to 59-year-old Vice President Harris, who Biden has tipped as his successor.
After all the acres of copy about Vance, newspapers are suddenly filled with speculation about who Harris might pick as running mate. Will it be Josh Shapiro or JB Pritzker (who could fund their campaign out of his own money) or Andy Beshear or Pete Buttigieg? Already in a single night another $60m flowed into Democrat coffers.
While America’s allies try to read the coffee grounds in these rival camps, the nation’s competitors and adversaries should not imagine that this hiatus enables them to run riot.
President Biden will remain in the Oval Office until 20 January, and so will his core team, while Harris embarks on what in our terms is a long campaign – five months rather than six weeks.
Among those forced to recalculate are Vladimir Putin, whose only discernible strategy has been to run down the clock until November in the expectation his American autocratic soulmate is returned to the White House. Then Trump (and his sidekick, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán) would blackmail Ukraine and Volodymyr Zelensky into a peace deal unfavourable to Kyiv.
Apart from being the perfect professional foil to Trump – a career public prosecutor with a sharp tongue – Harris also knows her way around US security structures and is familiar with foreign policy at the highest levels. She also has her own team of foreign policy advisers. Indeed a Harris presidency might be an opportunity to refresh US foreign policy by ditching the ineffectual Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan – the former, like a Flying Dutchman, perpetually travelling the Middle East while the Israelis continue to kill and maim with impunity.
As a senator, Harris sat on the Intelligence and Homeland Security Committees for four years, where she opposed the appointments of Mike Pompeo (twice), ex-torturer Gina Haspel as CIA chief, and Rex Tillerson as secretary of state. She has met President Zelensky six times and represented the US at this year’s Munich Security Conference, where she met many world leaders. She represented the US at the Lake Lucerne multinational conference on Ukraine’s future.
Unlike Biden, Harris has been even-handed in condemning the war crimes and human rights violations of both the Russians and Israelis. She has not rushed to visit the latter country. She has been critical of Saudi Arabia and condemned the US murder of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in early 2020. She supported the 2015 nuclear deal which Trump ripped up, thereby hastening Iran’s march to becoming a break-out state.
While the Chinese will take either electoral outcome in the US with their usual measured calm, though perhaps fearing Harris’s proven concerns with human rights, Europeans are not enthusiastic about Trump 2.0, however cautious they sound about the prospect.
The US election comes at a time when the leaders of France and Germany are considerably weakened domestically, and Poland’s Donald Tusk has not quite found his feet on the big stage, where he fully deserves to be.
On the positive side, the egregious Norwegian Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg is being replaced by a real EU insider, Mark Rutte, who is well-placed to better integrate EU and Nato defence structures and to repel the Russians – vital given America’s distracting fixations with Asia-Pacific.
Nato is not, and never should be, an Asian power, and it will certainly not be offering Article 5 protections to Japan and South Korea, let alone arming itself for a fight which requires an entirely different arsenal of weapons to the ones needed to deal with Russia.
The British, meanwhile, are busy reimagining themselves as a transatlantic bridge, with British Foreign Secretary David Lammy ludicrously referring to Vance as “a friend” even as Zelensky – who Vance would betray – attends the UK Cabinet. Maybe the US election is the time for Europe to do something about its own defence, given that its GDP is 10 times that of Russia’s, and its collective defence capabilities many multiples of anything Russia can muster even against Ukraine.
Perhaps it might adopt a more imaginative approach to the opportunities afforded by China, beyond platitudes about co-operating on climate issues? Dividing Russia and China seems a more sensible approach than forcing them together.
So while America’s foes should not make the mistake of imagining that this is an opportunity to foment trouble, US allies should ponder what a Harris presidency might offer. This is an opportunity to move beyond what may have been the last old-fashioned transatlanticist presidency and towards relationships which Europe defines and navigates for itself.
Michael Burleigh is senior fellow at LSE Ideas