Harris Attacks Trump for a Foreign Policy Proposal Backed by Her Own Advisors
Donald Trump believes that endless sanctions on Russia and Iran have serious downsides. So do Kamala Harris’ advisers.
The foreign policy debate this year has been an exercise in Democrats and Republicans trying to outhawk each other. Gone are the days when both parties pretended to be interested in ending "endless wars." Now, Vice President Kamala Harris insists that former President Donald Trump was a weakling for avoiding nuclear war with North Korea, while Trump claims that he would have kept U.S. forces in Afghanistan in order to fight China.
This week, the Harris campaign brought up a new line of attack. Trump is too willing to lift economic sanctions on Iran and Russia, based on comments he made on Thursday. But four years ago, Harris' own national security adviser, Phil Gordon, had attacked Trump for being too unwilling to lift sanctions. And the current Secretary of the Treasury, Janet Yellen, agrees with Trump's position on the downside of sanctions.
In a Thursday speech to The Economic Club of New York, Trump bragged that "I was a user of sanctions, but I put them on and take them off as quickly as possible, because ultimately it kills your dollar and kills everything the dollar represents. We have to continue to have that be the world currency." He added, "You're losing Iran. You're losing Russia. China is out there trying to get their currency to be the dominant currency."
Trump was echoing a common (and obvious) criticism made by economists. Cutting enemies off from the U.S. financial system can do serious economic damage to targets because most international trade is conducted in U.S. dollars. But the more the U.S. government uses these sanctions, and the wider its list of targets, the more foreign countries will start looking for Washington-proof alternatives to the dollar, a process known as "dedollarization."
China has already created an alternative market for buying Russian and Iranian oil, which is under U.S. and European sanctions.
Trump's warning wasn't that different from what the Biden-Harris administration had admitted last year. "There is a risk when we use financial sanctions that are linked to the role of the dollar, that over time it could undermine the hegemony of the dollar," Yellen, the treasury secretary, told CNN in April 2023. "But this is an extremely important tool that we try to use judiciously."
The Harris campaign sang a different tune on Thursday. "Unilaterally lifting sanctions on Iran and Russia is the exact kind of reckless foreign policy we've come to expect from Donald Trump, who would make America weak and the world less safe," said Morgan Finkelstein, national security spokeswoman for the Harris campaign, in a statement.
The key word is "unilaterally." Trump has said before that he wants to cut deals with Russia and Iran. Rather than saying that he would lift sanctions on Russia and Iran for the sake of it, Trump seems to be implying that he wants to trade U.S. economic leverage for Russian and Iranian concessions on important issues—in theory, the same policy as the Biden-Harris administration.
In practice, the Trump administration actually reversed progress on U.S.-Russian and U.S.-Iranian diplomacy. Trump pulled out of several nuclear arms control treaties with Russia, demanding that they be replaced with a new U.S.-Russian-Chinese treaty, which China was not interested in. He also tore up a deal to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, convinced by his advisers to attempt regime change in Iran through sanctions pressure instead.
Gordon, now Harris' national security adviser, was a major critic of Trump's approach to Iran. In December 2019, he coauthored a Foreign Policy article attacking the "maximum pressure" campaign. U.S. sanctions were "hurting the Iranian people far more than their rulers" and "elevating the likelihood of a regional war or nuclear crisis," wrote Gordon, who was then a senior fellow at the nonprofit Council on Foreign Relations.
A few months later, writing again in Foreign Policy, he called Washington's sanctions strategy "a scorched-earth policy apparently designed to destroy what it cannot save." Gordon praised previous administrations for "translat[ing] pressure into diplomatic gains." On the eve of the 2020 election, Gordon wrote in The Washington Post that President Joe Biden's strategy of trading U.S. sanctions relief for Iranian nuclear restrictions was "far more likely to work."
Of course, a lot has changed over the past four years. Biden, who failed to restore a nuclear deal with Iran, ended up keeping Trump's sanctions on the books. While the United States and Iran barrel towards full-on war, the Biden administration says that it is "far away" from coming back to the negotiating table.
Meanwhile, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has become the central icon of Democratic foreign policy. Biden considers shoring up "alliances"—including U.S.-European coordination on sanctions against Russia—to be his greatest accomplishment. And between the Russiagate scandal of 2016 and the impeachment hearings of 2020, congressional Democrats have tried to paint Trump as an anti-Ukrainian, pro-Russian appeaser.
Although it's tempting to say that Democrats and Republicans have switched sides, the Republican Party is still filled with hardline hawks on Russia and Iran. In fact, in the same speech warning about the risks of excessive sanctions use, Trump also complained that Biden and Harris had waived some sanctions on Russia before the war, allowing Germany to buy gas through the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
The whole U.S. political scene has moved more hawkish, even as voters turn into doves. Nobody wants to make a positive case for restraint, dealmaking, and peace anymore. Instead, both sides are looking for opportunities to call the other one soft.
