The American Prospect Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, if elected, are sure to produce vastly different outcomes on nearly every domestic issue in contention: women’s reproductive rights, taxation, public education, corporate regulation, the environment, and immigration. There’s far less divergence, however, on foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East. Like the Biden administration before it, a Harris administration may be softer around the edges, a “Trump lite” if you will, with rhetoric and sentiments favoring human rights and international law but no policies to back them.
There are two principal reasons for this. First, Harris and Trump’s worldviews are grounded in an article of faith that has undergirded America’s post–World War II foreign policy: maintaining U.S.
hegemony and supremacy. There is full agreement, as Kamala Harris recently declared at the Democratic convention and reiterated in her debate with former President Trump, that the U.S.
must have the “ ” military in the world, and that we must maintain our military bases and personnel globally. While Trump may have a more openly mercenary approach, demanding that the beneficiaries of U.S.
protection in Europe and Asia pay more for it, he is a unilateralist, not an isolationist. At bottom, neither candidate is revisiting the presuppositions of U.S.
primacy. Second, both Harris and Trump are subject to the overwhelming incentive structure that rewards administrations for spending more on th.