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. Presidential campaigns are auditions in national expression, in which candidates tell stories about themselves and their country, rehearsing the language they hope to speak to the world. Kamala Harris enters this ritual from an unusual position. Since January 2021, the vice presidency has bound her to Biden’s language as much as to his policies. Her role has been to stand ready as his understudy, publicly in lockstep with the administration, and now, with her elevation as the Democratic nominee for president, she has been called to centre stage.

The unity between Harris and Biden both clarifies and obscures the question of what she would do in office. The world is asking what Kamala Harris believes and scrambling for answers. The challenge is not a lack of material to be parsed. Harris has served at the top of an administration confronting the Russian invasion of Ukraine, conflict in the Middle East and Chinese power in the Indo-Pacific. She has given speeches, interviews and statements on all of these subjects. Rather, what is striking is how little they reveal about what she believes or would do as president.

This is not simply because, as vice president, Harris holds an office that usually restrains individual expression. The problem is deeper and older, reaching back through her earlier career as a senator from California and outward across the American political system. Like much of the Western political elite, Harris speaks the language of a liberal international order that affirms America’s established role while avoiding the substantive questions and hard choices of American power. It is a vocabulary of heady responsibility for the world, invoking the burden the United States took on in 1945 while saying little about what that burden now demands.

To become president in the era of Trump, Democratic candidates must affirm a familiar set of principles. First comes an appreciation of the United States’ magnanimous role in building the international community after the Second World War. From there, China is cited as the foremost threat to that system; America’s commitment to European partners is dutifully reaffirmed; the invasion of Iraq is condemned alongside a pledge to avoid future entanglements; and climate change receives its obligatory mention. But since the rupture of the 2016 election, this has become a worldview oriented backwards, sustained by the reassurance that the pre-Trump order can still be restored.

The professed 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, statesmen presented American power through homilies of law and freedom, while the same language disguised what was harder to defend. Throughout the Cold War and after, many members of the ‘Free World’ failed to meet the standard proclaimed on their behalf. In Vietnam, the brutality of 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, the elevated imperative of defending the order against Trump lets the vital components of American strategy wither. In the 2024 campaign, Democrats have been fixated on the existential threat they believe Trump poses, eliding the challenges facing the United States — from support for Ukraine to the relationship with Israel and 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, and the rhetoric of urgency pulls debate away from honest reckoning with American power and its limits.

During her first run for the presidency, Harris folded herself into the tradition of American stewardship, joining a primary contest over who could best restore what had been lost. She told the Council on Foreign Relations in 2019 that the greatest American foreign-policy achievement since 1945 was the ‘post-war 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. It did not work. Harris’ campaign ended before the voting began, and the nomination passed instead to a former vice president born less than a year after Pearl Harbor, a Democratic senator through the height of the Cold War, and a politician whom the party ultimately chose as the surest champion of the order Harris had invoked.

As vice president, Harris has reinforced the same argument that Biden personified in the 2020 campaign. Donald Trump, as a former and possibly future president, is the threat against which the order must constantly be defended, while smaller but essential questions 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.’ The cadence is declarative, but the commitments remain undefined in a world of finite means, divided publics and spreading war.

The differences between Harris and Trump are far deeper and more significant than the contrast presently being drawn in the election. Geopolitical turbulence and the economic crises that draw the disruption close to home demand that the political class step away from its Manichaean struggle long enough to answer to the world it still claims to lead. Otherwise, the United States risks settling for the champion of a brighter past.