Commentary: Harris and Walz can bring worldliness to Chicago — and the world

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(Bloomberg Opinion) – Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler, it’s been said. By that standard, Donald Trump and the Republican convention to nominate him as candidate for president failed. In matters of foreign policy, his MAGA show depicted every problem in the world as pliant to his alleged “strength,” as contrasted with the putative weakness of Joe Biden. That’s so much simpler than simple, it’s primitive.

During this week’s Democratic convention, Kamala Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, have a chance to do better. On issues of national security, they can show that they are sophisticated as well as strong, making her more qualified than Trump to be the next commander-in-chief. They can also signal that they’re a new generation, with a more up-to-date worldview than Biden’s – ideally, without embarrassing the president, who so graciously passed his baton to her in his speech on Monday night.

That’s how the Democrats can bring not only internationalism but also worldliness to Chicago, roughly as the Republicans brought nationalism and provincialism to Milwaukee. Harris can do this not because her parents are immigrants (so were or are Trump’s mother, two of his wives and his running mate’s in-laws). It’s because she and Walz peer beyond the water’s edge through a more nuanced prism than any that’s available to Trump.

To Trump, the world consists of fellow strongmen (such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin) to schmooze with and wayward allies (such as Germany) to browbeat on suspicion of filching from the United States. If he had been in the White House, Trump keeps hallucinating, Putin wouldn’t have dared to invade Ukraine. During his debate with Biden, Trump jeered that “Putin is laughing at this guy” (meaning Biden) and is “probably asking for millions of dollars for the reporter” (meaning Evan Gershkovich, an American journalist whom the Kremlin had incarcerated as a hostage). “I will have him out very quickly,” Trump boasted. “As soon as I take office. Before I take office.”

What happened in the real world is that Biden got Gershkovich out, and several other American detainees as well. But he did so in a discreet and complex deal that involved multiple nations, including Germany, which did its part largely against its own (narrowly defined) national interest in order to help its long-time ally, the US. When Biden and Harris greeted Gershkovich and the others on the tarmac outside of Washington, they didn’t gloat as a reality-TV president would have done. And yet it was their diplomacy and finesse that made the exchange possible.

The contrast in style and substance also shows up at the bottom of the tickets, and Walz should underline it in his speech on Wednesday. Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, turned his speech in Milwaukee into a nativist cri-de-coeur, claiming to speak for the hillbillies he once elegized. As to Putin’s invasion, Vance once said that “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other.” On China he channels the new Washington groupthink, according to which the commies in Beijing have it coming.

Walz, also a midwesterner, has done a bit more research in his time. As an avowed cartography geek and “geographic information systems” nerd, he used to teach his high-school students to analyze international relations with data and maps. (In 1993, his class predicted that Rwanda was at high risk of genocide; tragically, they were proven right within a year.)

In his twenties, Walz taught a year of high school in China, and later returned regularly, often bringing exchange students. The Republicans are now trying to hold that against him, implying that Walz is Beijing’s poodle. The opposite is more likely. As a congressman, Walz tracked China’s human-rights abuses and met with the Dalai Lama and Hong Kong activists, enraging Zhongnanhai. His experience affords him the ability to distinguish between an authoritarian regime and the people and culture under its thumb – in short, to avoid oversimplifying and embrace nuance.

Harris, a former prosecutor and senator, has less experience abroad, although she’s compensated with a busy travel schedule as vice president. In that role, she’s had no choice but to represent the foreign policy of her boss. And she’s been good at that. At the Munich Security Conference this year, she presented a clear vision, broadly in line with Biden’s and antithetical to Trump’s. She sees America as a global leader working with allies in Europe, Asia and elsewhere to maintain the international order. By temperament, she stands for engagement rather than MAGA isolationism.

Her differences with Biden will become clearer over time. So far, they come out mainly through relative emphasis. The president, born before Israel became a state, forever relates to Zionism as he encountered it in the person of Golda Meir; that has left him defenseless against a manipulative prime minister such as Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu. Harris sees Israel as it is today, as a strategic but also problematic ally, one that needs protection against Iran but also impedes Washington’s goal of a two-state solution for Palestinians and Israelis.

Biden has tried to show empathy for both Israeli and Palestinian victims of the violence and deserves credit for working feverishly toward a ceasefire, which now seems closer than ever. But Harris strikes her chords better. After skipping Bibi’s recent address to Congress and then seeing him privately, she said that “we cannot allow ourselves to be numb to the suffering, and I will not be silent.” Israel has a right to defend itself, she added, but “how it does so matters.”

That tone will satisfy neither the pro-Palestinian protesters in Chicago nor the pro-Israel lobbies on the Republican right. But it will resonate with many other Americans, and with people abroad looking for signals on how Washington will interact with the world should she and Walz win.

Where Trump’s mind is solipsistic, Harris’ worldview is open. Where he wants to retreat into isolationism, she intends to keep leading. Where his instinct is to go it alone (wasting America’s strength along the way), hers is to look for partners to share the burden, the better to conserve American might.

Today’s world is more multipolar, confusing and dangerous than the one in which either Biden or Trump came of age. Harris and Walz seem comfortable with that complexity. They should show their worldliness in Chicago, by making everything as simple as possible, but no simpler.

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

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Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.