What’s at Stake for Foreign Policy in the 2024 Elections

The November 5 elections for the White House and Congress will be highly consequential for U.S. foreign policy, many analysts say. Democratic candidate and Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican candidate and former President Donald Trump have divergent views on major foreign policy issues, including climate change, immigration, and the Russia-Ukraine war. In this suite of resources, CFR experts examine what’s at stake on crucial issues.

Israel, Gaza, and the Middle East

“The real issue is not a question whether there will be a regional war, it’s whether there will be an intensification of that regional war. Will countries that are non-combatants at the moment—like the UAE [United Arab Emirates], Saudi Arabia, Jordan—will they become directly involved in the regional conflict? And how will other external powers, in addition to the United States? What will Russia do? How will it seek to fuel this conflict? What will the Chinese do? It’s all wild cards,” CFR expert Steven A. Cook said on The President’s Inbox podcast.

“One of the unforeseen benefits for Iran of the past year’s conflict in the Middle East has been a greater isolation of Israel. Israel is now routinely censured in various international forums, particularly by nations of the Global South,” CFR expert Ray Takeyh wrote in this fellow roundup. “In the meantime, Israel is becoming more of a wedge issue in American politics, pitting generations against each other. … So long as war drags on in the Middle East, Western opinion is likely to further polarize, benefiting the Islamic Republic and Israel’s other enemies.”

Compare Harris’s and Trump’s views on Israel, Gaza, and the Middle East.

China

“China probably seeks to displace the United States as the world’s leading state. Now that’s a controversial assumption. It spans just about every regional and functional policy domain around the world. That is the military domain, the economic domain, tech, politics, et cetera. And finally, I think it’s important to keep in mind that China’s not going anywhere. It’s going to be here for the foreseeable future, and that means even as this competition intensifies, the U.S. and China will have to find some kind of way to live alongside each other,” CFR expert Rush Doshi said on The President’s Inbox podcast.

“A conflict between the United States and the People’s Republic of China over Taiwan is becoming increasingly imaginable, a result of China’s growing military capabilities and assertiveness, the emergence and coalescence of a separate Taiwanese identity, and evolving U.S. calculations about its interests at stake in the Taiwan Strait. If deterrence fails and a war erupts, the result would be calamitous for Taiwan, China, the United States, and the world, resulting in thousands of casualties on all sides and a profound global economic depression,” Susan M. Gordon, Michael G. Mullen, and CFR expert David Sacks wrote in this CFR Task Force Report.

Compare Harris’s and Trump’s views on China.

Russia–Ukraine War

“The [Joe] Biden administration, and presumably Vice President Harris by extension, have ardently opposed the use of U.S. weapons to strike long-range targets in Russia, despite increasing pressure from [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy and others to do so,” CFR’s Paul B. Stares and Molly Carlough wrote in this Expert Brief. While U.S. controls have recently weakened, it is unclear whether a Harris administration would eliminate all restrictions. The core concern is that allowing such strikes could lead Russia to respond with direct attacks on a [North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)] country or even the use of nuclear weapons. For his part, Trump has indicated his desire to avoid escalation, declaring on multiple occasions that the war could easily escalate into ‘World War III.’”

“No matter what happens in the conflict with Ukraine, Russia is going to be a major player on the global stage for decades to come. It is going to be a rival of the United States. And the real challenge facing the United States is not building partnership with Russia, it really is how do we manage a competitive relationship responsibly so that we avoid the type of direct military confrontation that could lead to the escalation to the nuclear level,” CFR expert Thomas Graham said on The President’s Inbox podcast.

Compare Harris’s and Trump’s views on the Russia-Ukraine war.

Immigration and Border Security

The United States and Mexico should “see migration as an opportunity for collaboration rather than a lightning rod for conflict, as both nations struggle to absorb the millions that come to and often stay within their borders,” CFR expert Shannon K. O’Neil wrote for Foreign Affairs. “With migration trending upward as the result of political instability, economic uncertainty, and climate change, both countries must make domestic modifications: the United States needs to reform its immigration laws and expand pathways for legal migration, and Mexico needs to invest in the state agencies that engage with migrants and work to integrate them into its economic and social fabrics. To incentivize these moves within Mexico, Washington can funnel resources to help build the capacity of Mexico’s immigration agencies.”

“Most immigrant[s] in the United States are people who apply to come here legally, and they come, and sometimes they live and work here for a while, sometimes they make their lives here. The story of America is a story of immigration. Our lens has become very narrowed on the southern border, given our political debates, but it’s really important to keep in context the much wider picture of immigrants in the United States,” CFR expert Ted Alden said at this CFR webinar about immigration policy reporting.

Compare Harris’s and Trump’s views on immigration and border security.

Trade

Increasingly, “U.S. policymakers are prioritizing values other than competitiveness, growth, and efficiency. They are seeking to make supply chains more resilient and redundant in order to reduce dependence on China for manufacturing in general or on Taiwan for semiconductor chips in particular. They are seeking to boost domestic capacity for producing goods deemed strategic and to create jobs associated with that production. And they are seeking to mitigate the national security implications of trade in sensitive sectors. … But the goals of competitiveness, efficiency, and growth cannot be thrown out entirely. Washington needs to strike the right balance among its various goals because pursuing each comes at a cost,” CFR President Michael Froman wrote for Foreign Affairs.

“New rules and frameworks are only durable if the biggest economies agree to play by them. When all countries are not held to the same standards, uncertainty becomes a feature of the system. Those trade-offs are particularly clear when it comes to countries that are not U.S. partners,” CFR expert Inu Manak wrote in this CFR article. “For example, if China were to remain outside of the main grouping in which U.S. rules will proliferate, it will not be bound by new disciplines. Isolating China has consequences for U.S. interests, including losing leverage to compel China to change its economic strategy, such as its industrial overcapacity.”

Compare Harris’s and Trump’s views on trade.

Defense and NATO

“NATO under a second-term U.S. President Trump would look different than NATO today—less a value-based alliance, and more a pay-for-service business deal. And this transformation would come at a time when NATO’s challenges and scope are expanding like never before: although it is a North Atlantic alliance, China’s support for Russia’s war and its hegemonic ambition in the Indo-Pacific increasingly interlink the two theaters,” CFR expert Liana Fix wrote for this Council of Councils global memo.

“In some strange way, the core issues that NATO ought to be talking about are nowhere on the agenda. And by that I mean that in some ways the greatest threat to the West, to NATO right now, is not [Russian President Vladimir] Putin or [Chinese President] Xi Jinping. It’s [the United States], right? It is the erosion of our political centers, the threat that poses to liberal democracy,” CFR expert Charles A. Kupchan said at this CFR media briefing. “What I think [NATO] best ought to be talking about is how to make sure our workers are earning a living wage, how to get immigration under control, how to tame and regulate AI before it causes more socioeconomic dislocation. Strength starts at home. Those are the issues that I think should be front and center.”

Compare Harris’s and Trump’s views on defense and NATO.

Inflation, Debt, and the Economy

“An effective economic security policy requires coordination along three challenging vectors: first, within the U.S. government itself, where relevant legal authorities are spread among multiple agencies; second, between government and the private sector, as the latter undertakes most of the activities—technological development, exporting, and supply-chain management—that are the target of economic security policy; and third, among allies and partner countries, because alignment of approaches is essential to keeping sensitive technologies out of adversaries’ hands and ensuring truly resilient supply chains,” CFR expert Matthew P. Goodman wrote for the RealEcon initiative.

“We don’t know exactly when there’s going to be a tipping point when all of a sudden, international investors and borrowers say, ‘We don’t want to take any more U.S. dollars,’ but… interest payments on the debt are now the second-largest expenditure, and it’s only going to go up,” CFR expert Roger W. Ferguson Jr. said on the Why It Matters podcast. “So what does that mean? It means that we have less room in our budget to pay for retirement, to pay for defense, to pay for healthcare, to pay for a lot of other things. … It is what I would describe as a chronic problem that builds up over time without being an acute problem where we feel it all of a sudden in one quarter, one month, or one year.”

Compare Harris’s and Trump’s views on inflation, debt, and the economy.

AI and Technology

“For me, the biggest concern is not [generative artificial intelligence (AI)] technology. It’s the use of the technology outweighing our societal agreement on what makes it okay, and where and how we trust it or would use it. And then that is resulting in a just overreaching sense that we’re in a different moment in our democracy, that I think we actually may be truly,” CFR expert Kat Duffy said at this virtual event convened by CFR and the Brookings Institution.

“In this emerging era of AI diplomacy, Washington will face similar challenges in one setting after another: it will have to control the proliferation of technologies that might have critical national security implications without kneecapping American corporations or driving potential partners into the arms of China,” Sam Winter-Levy wrote for Foreign Affairs.

Compare Harris’s and Trump’s views on AI and technology.

Climate Change

“Will humanity survive? Yes, but we will see some areas of the globe become uninhabitable. They’ll simply disappear, a lot of land erosion. As you’ve mentioned, coastal cities, particularly in Asia, are at great risk of losing landmass,” CFR expert Alice C. Hill said on The President’s Inbox podcast. “We’ll find temperatures that are intolerable either because of the heat itself or the heat combined with humidity, and we will find that it’s very difficult to ensure food security; crops will fail. We have bread grasses around the world, but all of them are affected by climate change, water security, and difficulty obtaining fresh water. All the agreements that we have amongst different nations on how to share waterways, pretty much still don’t account for climate change.”

“The [climate] problems that afflict countries around the world will eventually affect American interests, whether that is immigration into Europe, contributing to the rise of these far-right parties, immigration affecting the United States, the rise of increased great-power competition in the Arctic as the Arctic ice melts. There’s a range of potentially difficult geopolitical consequences that we will face as climate change continues,” CFR expert Varun Sivaram said on The President’s Inbox podcast.

Compare Harris’s and Trump’s views on climate change.

Global Health and Pandemic Prevention

“In terms of transnational health problems, no political consensus exists on pandemics and climate change as national security threats. COVID-19 has coarsened U.S. politics on pandemics and infectious diseases in ways that make the United States less prepared for a serious disease event than it was before COVID-19,” CFR expert David P. Fidler wrote for Think Global Health. “The polarization of pandemics and climate change means that perspectives on those threats to the United States are experiencing as much de-securitization as securitization.”

“Geopolitical tension [and] rivalries between nations can hinder international cooperation and funding for global health initiatives like disease surveillance, sample sharing, vaccination campaigns, research and development of new treatments and preventive measures. … These geopolitical factors could influence the availability and affordability of health-care services and medical supplies, particularly in developing countries or regions affected by conflict or economic sanction. That sort of leads to disparities between North and South in access to essential health care and drugs,” CFR expert Yanzhong Huang said at this CFR academic webinar.

Compare Harris’s and Trump’s views on global health and pandemic prevention.