Turmoil and staff exodus has become the principle rather than the exception in the Office of the Vice Chief executive since its 49th occupant, Kamala Harris, was sworn within on January twenty, 2021.
Within the 17 months since Harris ascended to the nation’s second highest office, she has confronted criticism on different fronts, with brickbats thrown in particular on her public persona and perceived lack of administration skills.
All those criticisms are becoming even more concerning given her boss’s age, apparent fragility and cognitive decline.
In the good the United States, only eight vice presidents have ascended to the Oval Office due to the dying of the incumbent. Just three have offered in a temporary performing capacity as necessary under the 25th variation. Harris is one of them.
With speculation swirling around the president’s physical and mental health, questions are starting to rise over what a Harris foreign policy might look like in the event that Biden does not live out his term associated with office.
In this regard, Harris is definitely something of a wildcard. Her record within the Senate showed that will she is basically a typical issue liberal hawk.
Yet the national security team she gets assembled around the girl as vice leader is in many ways preferable to Biden’s, that has deep ties towards the Clinton machine and remains wedded to liberal interventionist ideology that has been responsible for so many of the failures and debacles of US foreign policy witnessed in the 3 decades since Bill Clinton took office.
Since March, Harris’ national security group has been quietly steered by a pair of international relations scholar-practitioners, namely national security advisor Philip H Gordon and his deputy Rebecca Lissner.
Gordon and Lissner have credentials that will arguably exceed Biden’s own top nationwide security staffer, the particular ambitious political climber Jake Sullivan. Like the ‘ organization men ’ Biden has surrounded himself, they are professional and (mostly) regular.
Gordon is certainly Harris’s second national security advisor in 18 months and Lissner recently joined the girl staff after a stint on the Biden Nationwide Security Council (NSC) where she apparently ran the The ussr Strategy Group, that was charged with plotting the administration’s reaction to the Russian army build-up along the Ukraine border in late 2021.
The protege of Biden Homeland Security Mechanic Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, a former deputy secretary of energy who has long been among of the most respected nationwide security professionals in Washington, Lissner could be the author of the well-received Wars associated with Revelation: The Transformative Effects of Military Involvement on Grand Strategy.
Gordon has had a lengthy and distinguished profession in the upper echelons of the US international policy establishment. He checks all the institution boxes: a doctorate from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies; a Brookings Institution fellowship; a Council upon Foreign Relations fellowship; a well-received, slightly heterodox book , Losing the Lengthy Game ; and high-ranking appointments under both Clinton plus Obama.
Throughout the Obama administration, Gordon offered as the assistant secretary of state pertaining to European and Eurasian Affairs during the period of secretary associated with state Hillary Clinton, in which capacity Gordon oversaw the administration’s checkered but ultimately failed “reset” policy with Russia.
Gordon’s leaving from that office to assume the particular role of Center East policy planner at the White House came to be a source of regret for those who placed their hopes towards a more productive, less good US-Russia relationship.
Gordon’s successor since assistant secretary, Victoria Nuland, the neoconservative former national safety adviser to Cock Cheney, has turned into the worst possible choice at the most severe possible time.
Gordon, unlike the cookie-wielding , regime change aficionados Nuland, didn’t look for to make waves. 1 high-ranking former colleague of Gordon’s from your Clinton and Obama administrations praised him with faint compliment, telling this reporter “He’s competent plus good-natured. Beyond this particular, nothing remarkable occurs to you. ”
Gordon’s time as Center East policy planner on Obama’s Nationwide Security Council had been dominated by the war in Syria.
At the time of Gordon’s appointment, Ghaith Al-Omari, the executive director of the American Task Force on Palestine, left a comment that will “Gordon understands the particular bureaucracy. He’s a professional brought from the professional echelon to fill up a professional job. ”
Along with bringing years of experience to the job, Gordon has also shown the willingness to sometimes buck the conventional intelligence that still retains so much of the Biden administration foreign policy team in its hold.
Gordon’s period as Obama’s NSC point-man on the Middle East coincided with deepening US intervention in Syria. In an interview in 2016 with the neoconservative careerist Jeffery Goldberg, Gordon said he wished Obama had bombed Assad for their alleged (though unproven) use of chemical weapons in 2013.
Yet, in his 2020 book, Losing the Lengthy Game , Gordon seemed to have a modify of heart over the wisdom of fomenting regime change in the region. What explains the change on Gordon’s part?
Joshua Landis, the Sandra Mackey Chair and Director of the Middle of Middle Eastern Studies at the University or college of Oklahoma and among America’s smartest Syria-watchers, told this particular report, “It had been clear that got the US not pumped billions of dollars associated with arms and aid to the opposition together it not motivated the Turks, Saudis, Qataris and EU countries to do exactly the same, the war may not have been as long or even as destructive. A lot of fewer Syrians could have been killed or even forced to flee their homes. ”
“In his book, Losing the Long Online game , Gordon makes this argument brilliantly and points out that the exact same is true for Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. America’s predictions regarding each of these countries turned out to be wrong. ”
According to Landis, who may be also a fellow on the Quincy Company for Responsible Statecraft, “If Philip Gordon was incorrect at the beginning of the Syrian war as well, he was in very good firm. ”
Which would seem to be fair enough. It would be an tiefstapelei to say that not everybody in the US foreign plan establishment is right most of the time. But Gordon has been righter than many.
Should Kamala Harris be sworn in as the 47th president of the ALL OF US before January twenty, 2025, she will ideally have the good sense to raise Gordon and his deputy Lissner, both of whom would probably be a vast enhancement over the current management of the current president’s national security staff.