Kamala Harris Surveys the World The Vice President needs help on the major threats to American security.
The White House is rolling out Kamala Harris for year-end interviews to improve her public standing. A generous judgment is that this isn’t helping the Vice President or the country.
The latest example is her interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday. After some boilerplate on Covid, the economy and voting rights, host Margaret Brennan turned to foreign policy: “What do you see is the biggest national security challenge confronting the U.S.? What is the thing that worries you and keeps you up at night?”
Ms. Harris answered this way: “Frankly, one of them is our democracy. And that I can talk about because that’s not classified. . . . there is I think no question in the minds of people who are foreign policy experts that the year 2021 is not the year 2000. You know, I think there’s so much about foreign and domestic policy that, for example, was guided and prioritized based on Sept 11, 2001.
“And we are embarking on a new era where the threats to our nation take many forms, including the threat of autocracies taking over and having outsized influence around the world. And so I go back to our point about the need to fight for the integrity of our democracy. In addition, it is obviously about what we need to do in the climate crisis.”
In a world of growing risks from China, Russia, Iran, cyber attacks and hypersonic weapons, the Vice President names U.S. democracy and climate change as America’s most important security challenges. Yikes. Perhaps she didn’t want to make news on a security question, so she fell back on her political safe spaces.
By “our democracy” she means the new state laws that address ballot integrity. Whatever else those laws are, they aren’t a threat to U.S. security. As for climate, we’d agree with her if she meant the threat of Biden Administration policies to reduce U.S. energy supplies and weaken the electrical grid. But she’s referring to rising temperatures and the urgent need to pass policies that have no chance—none—of stopping climate change.
This isn’t the real world of threats we are living in, and it’s dangerous that a year into the job she still can’t talk realistically about national security. The Vice President needs an intervention from people outside her political bubble.
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Appeared in the December 27, 2021, print edition.
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