Trump vs. Harris: Whose Foreign Policy Will Win the 2024 Election?
The November presidential election is less than three months away and despite conventional wisdom, foreign policy and national security issues are playing a role in the campaign discourse, helping to define the campaigns and the candidates and reflecting Americans’ often polarized views on the major conflicts of the day. There are three major issues upon which the major candidates — Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump — can define their foreign policy, if they haven’t already: Ukraine, Gaza, and U.S. competition with China, including a potential conflict over Taiwan.
We’ve pulled together a roundtable of political and foreign policy experts on both sides of the political spectrum to have a candid discussion about how these issues are playing out in the campaigns and with voters, and what we might expect from either candidate if he or she were to win the presidency in November.
The Quincy Institute held a conversation with George Beebe, Grand Strategy Director at the Quincy Institute, Emily Jashinsky of Unherd magazine and co-host of the Counterpoints podcast, and Daniel Bessner, QI Non-Resident Fellow and co-host of the American Prestige podcast. Kelley Vlahos, editorial director of Responsible Statecraft, moderated.
Program
Topics
Panelists
George Beebe
George Beebe is Director of the Grand Strategy program at the Quincy Institute. He spent more than two decades in government as an intelligence analyst, diplomat, and policy advisor, including as director of the CIA’s Russia analysis and as a staff advisor on Russia matters to Vice President Cheney. His book, "The Russia Trap: How Our Shadow War with Russia Could Spiral into Nuclear Catastrophe" (2019), warned how the United States and Russia could stumble into a dangerous military confrontation.
Emily Jashinsky
Emily Jashinsky is the co-host of the political events podcast Counterpoints and UnHerd's Washington D.C. Correspondent. She previously served as the Culture Editor at The Federalist and a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner. She also serves as director of the National Journalism Center, a program of the Young America's Foundation.
Daniel Bessner
Daniel Bessner is a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute and the Joff Hanauer Honors Associate Professor in Western Civilization in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. He is the author of "Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual" (Cornell, 2018) and co-editor, with Nicolas Guilhot, of "The Decisionist Imagination: Sovereignty, Social Science, and Democracy in the Twentieth Century" (Berghahn, 2019).
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos is a senior advisor for the Quincy Institute and editorial director at Responsible Statecraft. Previously she served as Executive Editor at The American Conservative magazine, where she has been a contributing editor since 2007. She also spent 15 years as an online political reporter in the Washington bureau of Fox News.