By Michael Brenes, Boston Review, 8/26/24

Michael Brenes teaches history at Yale. His next book, coauthored with Van Jackson, is The Rivalry Peril: How Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy.

President Biden is fond of saying the United States is at an “inflection point” in world history, whether in regards to fighting climate change and racial inequality, protecting Ukraine and global democracy, navigating a new era of U.S.-China relations, or restoring an economy that benefits the middle class. If Kamala Harris defeats Donald Trump in November, she will inherit these inflection points, along with a foreign policy that is increasingly anachronistic and unproven to confront them. Would the Harris Doctrine simply extend the “Biden Doctrine”?

Philip H. Gordon, Harris’s current national security adviser, is expected to remain in the role if she becomes president. His counterpart, Jake Sullivan—who also served as Biden’s national security advisor when Biden was vice president—has transformed the role unlike any figure since Henry Kissinger. Under Sullivan’s tenure, the National Security Council has further become the most undemocratic yet essential institution of U.S. foreign policy making. He is reportedly the chief architect of Ukraine policy, U.S.-China policy, and America’s industrial policy.

Harris has her own views about a range of foreign policy issues—including Israel/Palestine, a major point of contention in the Democrats’ base—but Gordon exercises a large influence over Harris, and would likely play as significant a role in shaping her administration, as Sullivan has under Biden. “Harris depends heavily on [Gordon’s] advice given his deep experience and knowledge of all the players,” commented the late former U.S. ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk, in December 2023.

Gordon’s career, as well as his voluminous scholarship, reveals someone thoroughly ensconced in the Beltway yet aware of its hallmarks: groupthink and a dearth of self-reflection. His most recent book, Losing the Long Game: The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East (2020), chronicles the history of U.S efforts to depose leaders in the Middle East. It is also a parable for policymakers. In seeking to overthrow dictators, Gordon documents, the United States has perennially misjudged its capabilities, acted with impunity, and substituted good intentions for careful, well-developed strategy. “The U.S. policy debate about the Middle East suffers from the fallacy that there is an external American solution to every problem, even when decades of painful experience suggest that this is not the case,” he writes. And regime change is the worst “solution.”

Given Harris’s nomination, Losing the Long Game is more than a good history of a failed policy; it offers a window into how Gordon could shape Harris’s foreign policy, particularly on the Middle East. Some see grounds for cautious optimism that things may change for the better. Are we at a potential inflection point in U.S. foreign policy itself?

Gordon’s career is unique but not an anomaly, in many ways reflecting an earlier history of foreign policy making in Washington. The Cold War created a pipeline between academia and government, a demand for so-called “defense intellectuals.” Policymakers looked for experts to assume control over a potential nuclear war and to provide reasoned analysis. Persistent Cold War dilemmas—how to win a nuclear war, how to obtain technological superiority over the enemy—encouraged input from academics.

Social scientists had a conspicuous influence in the White House during this period. As David Halberstam memorably documented, President John F. Kennedy consulted with the “best and the brightest” from Harvard, turning to young academics like Kissinger and McGeorge Bundy for recommendations on how to deal with the Soviets. Subsequent presidents followed Kennedy’s lead, recruiting what former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (quoting Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.) called “eggheads” into the ranks of the national security establishment. Men like Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzeziński—the latter a counselor to Lyndon Johnson and later Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor—began their careers as Ivy League stars. This became a common pattern. In recent years, figures like Condoleezza Rice and Susan Rice (no relation)—both PhDs—did the same, becoming advisors to candidates-turned-presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, respectively.

Gordon has followed a similar trajectory. He earned a PhD in international relations and international economics from Johns Hopkins in 1991, writing a dissertation on the legacy of French President Charles De Gaulle’s assertive foreign policy that Gordon revised into his first book, A Certain Idea of France: French Security Policy and the Gaullist Legacy (1993). Gordon turned his expertise in European affairs into a position in the Clinton administration as director for European affairs in the late 1990s. He served a similar role in Obama’s presidency as the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs during Obama’s first term before becoming special assistant to the president and coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa, and the Gulf region from 2013 to 2015.

In the period between the Clinton years and the Obama years, Gordon was a senior fellow at Brookings and wrote regular reviews for Foreign Affairs and several books on international relations. He returned to the Council of Foreign Relations in 2015, staying there throughout the Trump presidency. He then became a foreign policy advisor to Harris during her 2020 campaign before taking up his current post.

The presidency of George W. Bush marked a turning point in Gordon’s thinking. Until the early 2000s he had produced work almost exclusively aimed at other academics; the Iraq War made him more of public commentator and critic. While many in the Democratic establishment backed Bush’s war without hesitation, Gordon was more cautious. Writing in Foreign Affairs two months before the invasion, he offered an oblique criticism of Bush’s heedless rush to invade, hoping that the president would do more to recruit Europeans.

After the invasion, Gordon condemned Bush’s foreign policy in stronger terms. A year into the occupation, he wrote that the “war in Iraq was a significant distraction from the war on terror” if Bush’s goal was to target the “direct threat from global terrorism.” The war could only succeed, Gordon contended, if it brought about a “transformation of the Middle East,” but that outcome was unlikely—and would take significant international resources to accomplish.

Gordon reiterated this claim in his 2004 book Allies at War, coauthored with Jeremy Shapiro. The particular way the U.S. went about deposing Saddam Hussein had alienated European allies to the detriment of global security, Gordon and Shapiro argued. Differences between the United States and Europe on how to wage a “war on terror” and what constituted threats to global security marred the system of alliances, but it was the “philosophies, personalities, decisions, and mistakes of the leaders who happened to be in office in 2001–2003 that led to the depth of the transatlantic clash over Iraq.” Both the United States and European powers could make “wrong choices” that might fracture transatlantic alliances in the future, but the differences were not irreconcilable, and harmony lay beyond the “the caricature of unilateral and militaristic America and a pacifist Europe.”

In a 2006 article, as Iraq descended into sectarian violence, Gordon celebrated the end of the “Bush revolution” in U.S. foreign policy—the doctrine of “pre-emption” as the basis for U.S. strategy. The objective of building a thriving, democratic state in Iraq had not only failed but likely been impossible to achieve. The war had also overwhelmed other issues at home and abroad. “By overreaching in Iraq, alienating important allies, and allowing the war on terror to overshadow all other national priorities,” Gordon wrote, “Bush has gotten the United States bogged down in an unsuccessful war, overstretched the military, and broken the domestic bank.” Even if Bush faced new terrorist threats, or anxiety about prospective terrorist attacks on the home front, “the scenario whereby dictatorships start falling like dominoes and the United States feels rich, powerful, and right is highly desirable but unlikely to unfold anytime soon.”

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Gordon expanded this critique in Winning the Right War: The Path to Security for America and the World (2007), which took Bush to task for squandering America’s “reputation” and “legitimacy” as a global protector. America’s history in the Global South certainly made this an overstatement, but Gordon was right that the September 11 attacks had generated nearly universal sympathy and goodwill toward the United States, which needed to adopt a policy of “maintaining America’s strength, cohesion, and appeal” beyond the use of force, the book concluded. Engaging in diplomacy with Middle Eastern countries, reducing America’s dependency on foreign oil, and avoiding threat inflation were safer alternatives. The United States could not win a war on terror, Gordon concluded, but it could develop a “new strategy for confronting the terrorist challenge”—including a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine crisis, diplomacy that would lead to the “containment” of Iran, a secure Iraq and Afghanistan, greater outreach to Turkey as stabilizing force in the region, and a shift away from a militarized, bloated homeland security apparatus.

In all this, Gordon presaged Obama’s foreign policy. Obama felt that U.S. foreign policy had lost its focus in Iraq, that its misadventures were symptoms of overstretch—in short, that the United States had not curated its conflicts well. The president outwardly defined his foreign policy around limits, about dealing with the “world as it is.” Four months into his first term, Obama said “I do know with certainty that we can and will defeat Al Qaida,” but he avoided using the term “war on terror,” instead describing “a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America.” Losing the Long Game shows that Obama did not always live up to this vision of limits for U.S. policy in the Middle East. In Gordon’s narrative, Obama is part of the problem and hardly exceptional.

The book presents readers with outcomes they already know: American strategy for the Middle East has failed. It is not a holistic narrative of U.S. foreign policy in the region but a history of “regime change”—efforts to nation build and steer history in an American direction—and why it has failed to serve U.S. interests. Gordon offers a chronological narrative of seven case studies, moving from the 1953 coup in Iran to Afghanistan (the Soviet, then American invasion), Iraq, Egypt, Libya, and Syria. The names and contexts change, but as Gordon sees it, the origins and results are the same. Regime change should remain an option for U.S. policymakers, he concludes, but it should never be indulged, as it too often fails to consider the “inherently high costs, unexpected consequences, and insurmountable obstacles.”

This is a persuasive critique of regime change, but in the end the book is an indictment of the character of policymakers, not the history or structure of U.S. foreign policy itself. As Gordon sees it, the United States does not invade countries because of material pressures stemming from its large military, say, or because it possesses unrivaled power, but because the “temptation” to overthrow a regime becomes too great to the point that policymakers ignore other options.

Indeed, Gordon blames regime change on the hubris of foreign policy leaders, who he sees as too consumed by American exceptionalism and wishful thinking and too ignorant of the histories and cultures of the regions they invaded or intervened in. His portrait of Iraq policy is devastating in this regard; he shows that most of the figures overseeing the 2003 invasion and occupation did not speak Arabic, did not understand the tensions and histories between Shiite and Sunni Muslims, or they had too much faith that a democratic government could emerge from political protest. Even when the United States did not invade countries to depose leaders, as in the cases of Iran and Libya, or failed to overthrow dictators, as in Syria, Gordon argues that the results created “unanticipated and unwelcome consequences.” U.S. leaders lacked the necessary foresight and the information they needed to realize it would not work, since “expertise is in short supply.”

The upshot, in Gordon’s account, is that we must recognize that foreign policy is made by people who share enduring traits of human frailty: egoism, overconfidence, and incuriosity. Americans are inclined toward optimism, toward utopian plans, but this is the handmaiden of a disastrous foreign policy if it is not checked by a severe, rigorous, and strategic realism. As Gordon sees it, the institutions of U.S. power are not in themselves wrong; it is the people who run them who make them fall short of their promise. Staff them with better leaders, those inclined to make more humble, cautious decisions, and we’ll have better policy.

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Reading Losing the Long Game provides hints on how a Harris administration might diverge from the Bush and Obama eras, but what does it say about a remaking of foreign policy? After all, Biden has avoided regime change, has extricated the United States from Afghanistan—the last “forever war” of the post–9/11 era—and boasts (misleadingly) that “the United States is not at war anywhere in the world.”

Gordon’s worldview defies easy categorization, departing from the traditional foreign policy “Blob.” He does not believe, as Biden seems to, that U.S. power is always a force for good, or that the United States invariably falls on the “on the right side of history,” as Sullivan has said and sought to be. On the contrary, Gordon thinks the “good” must be demonstrated. He also believes the United States has a historical role to play in world affairs and wants it to be a catalyst for democracy, but the devil is in the details. If the United States must act to help others—and it should, Gordon thinks—it must do so judiciously, wary of unintended consequences. Above all, he fears events that the United States cannot control even if it wanted to, and he seeks to avoid “mission creep” or unnecessary escalation.

His disgust for escalation may offer insight into how a Harris administration would approach war in Gaza. Gordon wrote in 2015 that it was impossible for Israel to “remain a secure Jewish and democratic state—at peace with its neighbors—if it tries to govern the millions of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.” But nearly a year into Israel’s response to the October 7 attacks—with tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians killed, Gaza totally devastated, and some Israeli leaders declaring intent to reoccupy Gaza permanently—that is where Israel is headed now.

If Gordon adhered to his conclusions in Losing the Long Game, a Harris administration would work to avoid wider wars in the Middle East. That would mean rejecting moves to escalate the war—whether by Israel, Hamas, or Hezbollah—and prioritizing a political resolution. It would mean not just telling the Israelis that winning a war on terrorism is futile but actively discouraging Israel’s own self-described war on terror. All this would require the United States to change course from its current direction of preparing for regional conflict and giving unconditional material and ideological support to Israel’s war plans.

Whether such change is in the cards is uncertain, but some movement seems possible. Harris has publicly opposed an arms embargo against Israel and refused to repudiate Biden’s Israel policy, but she has privately criticized it. She has talked over protesters at campaign events but has also called the destruction and death in Gaza a “catastrophe.” Gordon has used similar language, as he believes a two-state solution must remain the “ultimate goal,” as he put it in a speech delivered in Israel at the Herzliya Conference on Israeli security in June—where he also did not refrain from calling “settlement expansion, settler violence and other destabilizing activities on the West Bank . . . counterproductive to peace.”

The thrust of Gordon’s remarks is that Israel’s current war now runs contrary to its own “long-term security” and the stability of the Middle East. “The reality,” he said, “is that there is no enduring defeat of Hamas without a credible governance and security alternative in Gaza—as we in the United States learned the hard way from our experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan.” But the government of Benjamin Netanyahu does not see it that way, and a month after the Herzliya Conference, just before Netanyahu’s trip to the United States, the Knesset voted overwhelmingly for a resolution stating that Palestinian statehood would pose an “existential threat” to Israel. What actions a Harris administration, with Gordon’s counsel, might take in the face of this intransigence remains to be seen.

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Gordon’s views have earned him the moniker of “progressive” in some corners. To reject the idea that the United States cannot make the world in its image—that it does not have a solution to every problem, that short-term solutions create long term problems—makes one a progressive in Washington’s national security circles, but the characterization is not quite accurate. Most foreign policy progressives embrace some form of restraint or retrenchment of U.S. power. But as Gordon sees it—and as most in Washington see it—the United States can have global engagement or global withdrawal; there is only internationalism or isolationism, and though the United States has erred through policies such as regime change, it must continue to exercise its power as the world’s global leader.

The orientation evident in Gordon’s writings is a pastiche of idealism and realism, a propensity for global stasis with the hope that the world can be remade through better, more reasoned leadership. He rejects the cold realism promulgated by balance-of-power advocates such as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt as well as the anti-imperialism of the left. “I do not share the view, often expressed both by Trump himself and by some of his critics on the left, that the United States has little at stake in the Middle East,” Gordon writes in the introduction of Losing the Long Game.

It would be more accurate to call Gordon a pragmatic internationalist, for whom foreign policy must be conducted with inhibition and reason and must properly align means and ends. Gordon is sensitive to what can go wrong in U.S. foreign policy, to the “long game”—the unforeseen yet predictable contingencies that can jeopardize U.S interests. He endorses the well-worn premises of U.S. national security, yet he expresses a persistent disappointment in its architects. In short, he is an insider with empathy for the outsider. Above all, his writings and policy record reveal a faith in liberal internationalism and the promise of American power—a faith chastened by bad outcomes but unwilling to deny the potential for better results.

In this chastened faith, Gordon is not exactly a typical representative of the national security apparatus, but he does have counterparts. His views are similar to those of Obama foreign policy advisor Ben Rhodes, who belatedly accepted in 2017 what Gordon has argued since 2003: the United States cannot construct democracy in the name of stability or will it in existence. At the same time, Gordon thinks we cannot give up on influencing world affairs—that is, that “there are often practical things that the United States can and should do to reduce conflict, alleviate suffering, promote prosperity, deter atrocities, and advance political reform.”

But doing “the practical things” on a global scale is a much more delicate exercise than even Gordon and other reason-minded liberal internationalists have acknowledged. The United States has proven to be reliably bad at making hegemony more benevolent or effective. The problem is not the people who oversee U.S. foreign policy but the structures of American power themselves—its global archipelago of military bases, the budgets and largesse of the national security state, the relentless militarization of America’s foreign policy. The idea that primacy can be improved—without recourse to international law or multilateral institutions—is historically blind.

In this respect, it is notable that Rhodes has now crossed a bridge that Gordon has not. In a recent article in Foreign Affairs, Rhodes argues that the United States cannot afford to retain primacy in a world—including much of the Global South—that no longer wants it. Biden has carried out his foreign policy with “one foot in the past, yearning nostalgically for American primacy, and one foot in the future, adjusting to the emerging world as it is.”

A Harris administration that rejects great power competition with China (which has intensified under Biden), that gives up on pursuing primacy for the sake of it, that prioritizes justice over unbridled military power, would truly be a departure from precedent. The world, including much of the Global South, is looking for relief from a warming planet, from rampant inequality and exploitation, from great powers that disregard the futures of the less fortunate. The United States has a role to play in addressing these problems too. But holding onto American primacy to resolve them is not realistic.