What might the foreign policy of a President Kamala Harris look like? This week brought lots of loose speculation on that question—but also one solid sign of hope for advocates of military restraint. 

On Ukraine, China, and the Middle East, Harris’s foreign policy would be more or less a continuation of Biden’s, a piece in Politico suggests. The article paraphrases one former Pentagon and NATO official as saying that Harris “came into the vice presidency with relatively little foreign policy experience, which left her dependent on her advisers, who are largely traditionalists.”  

But, actually, “traditionalist” is a misleading term for the adviser considered most likely to replace Jake Sullivan as national security adviser in a Harris administration: Philip Gordon. Gordon, Harris’s top foreign policy aide since 2022, “became an outspoken dissident against the foreign policy consensus” after serving in the Obama administration, writes Matthew Petti of Reason. In 2020, Gordon published a book that condemned America’s decades of regime change wars in the Middle East—wars that, in his view, resulted in “no case of clear success, some catastrophic failures, and universally high costs and unintended consequences.”

Of course, by 2020, it had dawned on a number of people—even some in the very heart of the Blob—that the disastrous outcomes of recent regime change wars raised doubts about their wisdom. But Gordon’s penchant for restraint had shown up earlier than that, and in a particularly illuminating context.  

While working in the Obama administration, Gordon was “deeply skeptical of plans to arm Syrian opponents of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad,” according to the Wall Street Journal. Such skepticism appears justified in retrospect. The CIA’s effort to mount a Syrian opposition wound up funneling weapons toward an al-Qaeda ally and encouraging Russia to intervene directly in the conflict. More broadly, the arming of various rebel groups by both the US and its friends in the region fanned the flames of a civil war that has taken more than half a million lives—and, in the end, left the Assad regime in power.

Even today, doubts about Obama’s Syria policy aren’t as commonly expressed as doubts about more overt recent regime change efforts (Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011). And back when Gordon first voiced doubts about the Syria policy, they were even less common. 

Among the people in the Obama administration who supported arming Syrian rebels was Jake Sullivan (as did, apparently, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who also served in the Obama administration). This may be one reason that foreign policy analyst Esfandyar Batmanghelidj says Gordon would be a “big upgrade” over Sullivan in that position. (The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that, according to unnamed officials, Sullivan and Blinken probably “wouldn’t be extended in their current roles.”) 

Daniel Larison, a longstanding advocate of military restraint, also had kind words for Gordon: “Gordon has demonstrated that he understands the Iranian government better than a lot of his colleagues, and that could be very useful in reviving negotiations with Iran under its new reformist president Masoud Pezeshkian.” 

But if any restrainers are looking for reasons to worry about Gordon, there’s this: Former US ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul—one of the foreign policy establishment’s most prominent and vocal Russia hawks—gave him a thumbs up:

Of course, restrainers can console themselves with the hope that this tweet was merely tactical. After all, you don’t reach the highest echelons of the Blob without having a sense for which way the wind is blowing.

Vir: Robert Wright, Nonzero