It’s almost Election Day — do we know enough about where Trump and Harris stand? 

Last week, Vice President Kamala Harris told Fox News interviewer Brett Baier, “My presidency will not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency.” The statement reinforced her earlier comment to Stephen Colbert, “I’m not Joe Biden,” and her debate exchange with Donald Trump, “You’re debating me, not Joe Biden.” 

Harris’s implicit disavowals of identification with the Biden agenda reflect a clear reversal of her initial campaign strategy, when she and her advisers touted her Biden administration experience.

Asked last month what she would have done differently, she responded, “There’s not a thing that comes to mind.” Earlier this year, Harris said she was the last person in the administration who spoke with the president at the end of each day. She also explicitly agreed with Biden’s most controversial foreign policy decision: his catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Biden himself confirmed her integral role in his agenda when he declared, “There was not a domestic or foreign policy decision I made that she was not closely involved in.”  

The shifting campaign strategy on how a Harris-Walz foreign policy would differ from Biden-Harris offers only confusion for American voters and for foreign allies and adversaries. The parlous state of world affairs includes regional wars raging in the Mideast and Central Europe and a third potentially about to erupt in the Indo-Pacific. Awaiting the next president are three major foreign conflicts, all of which could escalate to bring more direct U.S. involvement: Iran and its proxies vs. Israel; Russia and its Axis allies vs. Ukraine; and China vs. Taiwan and the Philippines.  

Republicans and Democrats in Congress, and in the general public, agree on the outlines of U.S. policy on all three foreign challenges, where anti-Western forces seek the destruction of three vanguards of democracy. A bipartisan consensus exists for continued support of Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan. But the Trump and Harris positions are not at all clear on most of those issues and are decidedly muddled on others.  

Both support Israel’s right of self-defense against Hamas and Hezbollah and any other terrorist proxies that answer to Iran’s call for “death to Israel”; both candidates understand that Iran’s follow-on chant is always “death to America.” Both also have been sensitive to the global outcry over the toll of civilian deaths and injuries in Gaza that was triggered by Hamas’s brutal October 7 attack on Israel. 

Harris expresses her concerns in humanitarian terms while Trump cites the decline in international sympathy for Israel’s position — “it is losing the PR war,” the ex-president has said — because of the Palestinians’ suffering. Neither calls for a dramatic shift in U.S. policy, though Trump is more explicit in advocating a two-state solution. Experienced diplomats have tried in vain for decades to bridge the unbridgeable claims by Israel and the Palestinians. 

Major differences between the candidates have emerged on the Russia-Ukraine war, where  

Trump promises to engineer direct negotiations to end the fighting. His quick solution envisions Ukraine relinquishing part of its territory to Russia under threat of losing U.S. military support. Trump’s decidedly pro-Russia position was on full display again last week when it was reported that he had blamed President Volodymyr Zelensky for precipitating Vladimir Putin’s 2022 invasion.   

In contrast, both Biden and Harris claim the moral high ground. They oppose Russia’s aggression and war crimes against Ukraine for undermining the fundamental tenet of the international order established after World War II and enshrined in the United Nations Charter. They are right, but on politically weak ground; Putin started invading Ukraine in 2014 after then-President Obama promised “more [U,S.] flexibility” once he was reelected in 2012.  

Further, while the Biden-Harris administration have provided enough U.S. weaponry to help Ukraine stave off total collapse, and encouraged other NATO members to do the same, it has withheld or delayed arms systems needed to win the war — i.e., to eject Russia out of occupied Ukraine completely. Russia’s enormous population advantage can outlast Ukraine in a war of attrition. The recent infusion of North Korean forces, if it increases, may emulate the influx of tens of thousands of Chinese “volunteers” to halt the U.S. advance against the communist invaders during the Korean War. 

As for today’s China threat, Harris has refused to address Taiwan’s security situation except to support its “right to defend itself.” She demonstrated vividly one way her administration would “not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s administration.” She adamantly declined to answer the same question Biden has answered affirmatively and repeatedly: Would the U.S. defend Taiwan if China attacked it? Biden replied, on four separate occasions, that America would use force to defend Taiwan, but Harris said, “I’m not going to get into hypotheticals.”  

While Harris’s position on Taiwan seems weaker than Biden’s, at least rhetorically, Trump suggested a second administration of his would be far less favorable toward Taiwan than was his earlier term. Then, his sterling national security team, headed by former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, began transforming four decades of accommodationist engagement policy with China and deepened U.S. economic, diplomatic and security relations with Taiwan. Now, however, it has emerged that those enlightened policies were tolerated but not favored by Trump himself, and he has recently downplayed Taiwan’s importance to the U.S. national interest.

The fate of both Taiwan and Ukraine will be precarious no matter how this presidential election turns out. Whether it is Trump or Harris, the real winners will be America’s enemies. 

Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He is a nonresident fellow at the Institute for Corean-American Studies and a member of the advisory board of the Global Taiwan Institute.