‘We infer the spirit of the nation in great measure from the language,’ observed Ralph Waldo Emerson. American political language articulates a distinct history of national development and international power. Since 1945, the president of the United States has been the spokesperson for the ideal of the free world. The declaratory power of claiming leadership over that idea is more notable even than the tangible opportunities of heading its group of disparate nations. The stories America tells, and the words it uses, have constituted the rhetorical underpinning to the postwar world.

To earn the right to say those words, American presidential candidates, in speeches, interviews and memoirs, offer stories about their lives, their country and the world they hope to lead inflected with optimistic themes of collective history, opportunity and leadership. Barack Obama’s 1995 book, Dreams from My Father, is the lyrical bildungsroman to which all successive books have been compared. Kamala Harris published her carefully cultivated contribution The Truths We Hold: An American Journey on the eve of her first presidential run in 2019.

Harris’ sudden elevation as the Democratic party’s presidential candidate casts everything she has ever done and said in an intense spotlight. Observers are unpicking and interrogating Harris’ life, from her childhood as the daughter of immigrant parents to her experiences at the historically African-American Howard University, her career as a prosecutor in California, work as a senator and membership of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Harris’ tenure as vice-president since January 2021 has tied her to Joe Biden as a nodding, smiling associate, in perfect synchronicity with the administration. Her primary role has been to stand ready and now she has been called to centre stage. The fundamental unity between Harris and Joe Biden on most issues both aids and distorts the ongoing queries about her potential tenure as president of the United States. Journalists and international observers are dissecting and interpreting her statements from her service as a senator and vice-president. The world is asking what Kamala Harris believes and scrambling for answers.

Beneath the poignant narratives of campaign books like Harris’ The Truths we Hold is the implicit promise that the author’s journey has instructed and prepared them for the most powerful office in the world. But there is a hollowness to that assertion that hides the substance of beliefs. Harris’ statements on foreign policy over her tenure as vice-president have been limited and, as they are meant to, broadly map onto Joe Biden’s views. Her involvement in foreign policy during her time as a senator from California has also yielded little insight into her worldview. Nonetheless, interpretations of her perspective on America’s role and responsibilities in the world has been conjured out of the limited evidence by analysts searching for overlap and differences with Biden.

The challenge is not a lack of material; Harris has given numerous speeches on international affairs as vice-president. What is paradoxically striking, rather, is how little can be discerned from the numerous profiles and interviews about what she believes and might do in office. Like much of the Western political elite, Harris speaks an empty language of international order that hits essential notes but conveys little of substance.

With Trump as the pugilistic foil, support for the ‘liberal international order’ has become an important commitment of Democratic politicians but it has also slipped into a semantic trick that substitutes serious engagement with insipid pontificating. Kamala Harris’ comments on foreign policy evince a popular yet shallow understanding of American achievements and threats that offer little meaningful indication of what she might do as president. In 2019, for example, she discussed her beliefs about foreign policy with the Council on Foreign Relations. Harris cited the ‘postwar community of international institutions, laws, and democratic nations we helped to build’ in important contrast to Trump ‘disregarding diplomacy, withdrawing from international agreements and institutions, shunning our allies, siding with dictatorships over democracies, and elevating sheer incompetence in his decision-making processes’.

Since the end of the Cold War, there have been a series of incidents against which contemporary stances on foreign affairs have to be defined. The invasion of Iraq, which mobilised a generation of voters from 2003 onwards, remains a litmus test for presidential approaches to military action, for example. Trump’s presidency appeared to imperil the foundations of America’s global role and authority. Consequently, Democratic challengers in the 2020 election centrally pledged to reiterate commitment to these fundamental precepts. This context has further entrenched the use of standardised foreign policy language, making it increasingly difficult to discern genuine beliefs and intentions beneath the polished surface of political rhetoric that elevates stances against historical incidents or opposition figures over actual ideas.

To become president, candidates must affirm a particular set of principles. First, they must display an appreciation of the United States’ magnanimous role in building the postwar international community. From there, China is invariably cited as the foremost threat to the international system; America’s commitment to its European partners is dutifully reassured; the invasion of Iraq is condemned alongside pledges to avoid future entanglements; and climate change receives the obligatory mention.

The ‘liberal international order’ has become an accepted synecdoche for these themes but its overuse has allowed the substance it represents to fade. In the 2024 campaign, the Democrats’ approach has fixated on Trump’s perceived existential significance allowing them to evade proper discussion about the challenges facing the United States – from the nature of American support for Ukraine to its relationship with Israel to the threat to Taiwan. The rhetoric of urgency and the language of the international order distort and obfuscate, setting the paradigm of debate away from a deep consideration of American power and its limitations.

Under Biden, Vice-President Harris has reinforced the argument that the former, and possibly future, president poses a dire threat to the international system, escalating the political discourse to a tenor that lets smaller, but undoubtedly important, subjects pass by without sufficient scrutiny. ‘In these unsettled times,’ Harris told the Munich Security Conference in 2024, ‘it is clear: America cannot retreat. America must stand strong for democracy. We must stand in defence of international rules and norms, and we must stand with our allies.’ After Trump, the Biden administration promised a return to a calmer form of governance, but technocracy can be inherently elitist. It makes foreign policy the domain of ‘experts’ and allows political candidates to defer activity to their staff who do consider the pressing questions of international affairs.

The ‘liberal international order’ has always entailed an adept sleight of hand. ‘In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible,’ George Orwell wrote in 1946. ‘Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.’ American power after the Second World War was presented through honourable terms of law and freedom but the language also twisted the darker elements. During the Cold War, there were many member-states of the ‘Free World’ who did not meet that criteria. The brutality of the Vietnam War was hidden behind an elaborate lexicon of sanitised terms; it was easier to speak of nation-building, pacification and attrition than to remember the 1,200-degree heat of burning napalm or the civilians murdered at My Lai.

A persistent feature of American politics and debate is the distorting qualities of language. ‘No language is so copious’, wrote James Madison in Federalist 37 in 1788, ‘as to supply words and phrases for every complex idea, or so correct as not to include many equivocally denoting different ideas.’ The clarity of political speech degrades, however, when stakes are elevated and clarion calls for the supremacy of international order have become so lofty that they drift far above reality. President Harris’ foreign policy will not extend uninterrupted from her predecessor. There will be substantive differences that are worth understanding. Her term will confront urgent crises and tangible questions of blood and money about Ukraine, China, Israel and Palestine and she will react differently to Biden.

American political discourse has been sacrificed to a Manichean clash of possible futures between Trump and the Democrats. The conduct of the United States as a great power should not be ignored just because of the perceived imperative of defeating Donald Trump and what he stands for. Torn between vacuity and violence, the language of American democracy risks offering no answers to essential questions in an urgent year.