Kamala Harris and the empty language of international order

The American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson observed that ‘we infer the spirit of the nation in great measure from the language’. It is a fitting maxim for a country defined, more than most, by what it says about itself. Since 1945, the United States has spoken for the idea of the free world, and the words it has used and the stories it has told have been the rhetorical scaffolding of the postwar order.

To earn the right to say those words is the great prize of American political life. In speeches, interviews and memoirs, presidential candidates offer stories about their lives and the country inflected with optimistic themes of collective history, opportunity and leadership. They are rehearsing, in effect, the script they hope to speak to the world.

As vice president since January 2021, Kamala Harris has been tied to Joe Biden as a nodding, smiling associate in lockstep with the administration. Her role has been to stand ready, and now, with her elevation as the Democratic nominee for president, she has been called forward. The fundamental unity between Harris and Biden on most issues both aids and obscures the question of what she would do in office. The world is asking what Kamala Harris believes and scrambling for answers.

Alongside the poignant narrative of a presidential campaign comes the promise that the candidates’ journey has prepared them for the most powerful office in the world. But the story told by candidates is more sheen than substance. Harris’ campaign statements on foreign policy echo those of her vice presidency. They are limited and, by design, aligned with Biden. Analysts have nonetheless searched the record for divergence, and parsed whatever interpretations they can from the empty evidence.

The challenge is not a lack of material. What is striking is how little the speeches, profiles and interviews reveal about what Harris believes or would do as president. Like much of the Western political elite, she speaks the language of a liberal international order that commits the United States to its established role but avoids the substantive questions and hard choices about American power. It is a vocabulary of heady responsibility for the world, invoking the burden America took on in 1945, but now detached from the trials of the present.

To become president, Democratic candidates in the era of Trump must affirm a particular set of principles rooted in postwar history. First, an appreciation of the United States’ magnanimous role in building the international community after the Second World War. From there, China is invariably cited as the foremost threat to the international system; the US’ commitment to European partners is dutifully reaffirmed; the invasion of Iraq is condemned alongside pledges to avoid future entanglements; and climate change receives the obligatory mention. It is a worldview oriented backwards, couched in the reassurance that the pre-Trump order will soon be restored.

The intended liberalism of this 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.’ Even at the high point of the liberal international order, US power was presented through homilies of law and freedom, but the same language disguised what was harder to defend. Throughout the Cold War and after, there have been many member-states of the ‘Free World’ that do not meet that standard, their repressive tendencies an ironic counter to their American benefactor’s proclamations. Meanwhile, the tools of international order were further polished into abstraction. In the 1960s, the brutality of the Vietnam War was hidden behind a 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.

The tradition continues, but in a different register of evasion. Where the language once articulated a project and laundered its costs, now the elevated imperative of defending the order lets the vital components of strategy wither. In the 2024 campaign, the Democrats are fixated on the existential threat they believe Trump poses, eliding the challenges facing the United States — from American support for Ukraine to the relationship with Israel to the threat to Taiwan — by keeping the conversation above the conduct of mere policy. The ‘liberal international order’ remains their established shorthand for these themes, but its overuse as the counter to Trump has hollowed the ideal out, while the rhetoric of urgency pulls debate away from honest reckoning with American power and its limits.

As a politician who has risen to prominence in the age of Trump, Kamala Harris folds herself into a tradition of American stewardship without saying what she would build or change, qualifying her for the inheritance of the mantle against the despoiler at the expense of substantive intent. During her first run for the presidency, in 2019, Harris told the Council on Foreign Relations that she valued the ‘postwar community of international institutions, laws, and democratic nations we helped to build,’ before cataloguing Trump’s familiar offences against it: withdrawing from agreements, shunning allies and siding with dictators.

As vice president, Harris has further reinforced the argument that Trump, as a former and possibly future president, poses a threat to the international system, escalating the political discourse and letting smaller, but essential, subjects pass without 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.’

Even as she runs for president, selling herself as the saviour of the liberal international order, Harris is speaking a language that says little about the choices she will make and the consequences the world will face. The differences between Harris and Trump are far deeper and more significant than the contrast presently being drawn. Wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and economic crises at home, demand that the political class step down from its Manichaean battle long enough to answer to the world it still claims to lead. The principles are admirable and the values are real, but they are all that is said. The US risks settling for the champion of a brighter past.