Speculations over what American foreign policy under the potential leadership of Kamala Devi Harris might look like have begun in earnest, now that US president Joe Biden – who announced recently that he would not be seeking re-election – has officially endorsed his vice president as his heir apparent in the race for the presidency. Although many Democratic Party leaders and supporters have joined the president in coalescing behind Harris, the official nominee of the Democrats will only be chosen at their party’s national convention in Chicago next month.

Should Kamala Harris, if confirmed as the Democrats’ standard bearer, triumph over Donald Trump when Americans take to the ballot box this November, what can we expect from the foreign policy of a Harris administration towards the Indo-Pacific region? Would she prove a “weak” leader – as Beijing’s state-backed news outlet Global Times has insisted – whose presidency is unlikely to pose a threat to China?

Shaky Start

Having carved a niche as the state of California’s top law enforcement official and subsequently its junior senator, Harris stepped into the vice presidency with little foreign policy experience. Her initial foray into US diplomacy began with a stumble: her proposal to work with Central American nations to address the root causes of illegal immigration into the United States was quickly lumped with the related issue of the security of America’s southern border, which she – as in the case of a clumsy interview with the US news outlet NBC News – tried unsuccessfully to avoid. Nor did the initial turmoil among her staff do her reputation any favours.

However, things have markedly improved since those rough beginnings, with seasoned Washington operators like Philip Gordon and Rebecca Lissner being enlisted to advise the vice president on foreign policy and national security matters. According to US congressman Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, Harris’s performance at this year’s Munich Security Conference making a case for America’s role in Ukraine and NATO indicates that she has been “stress-tested” and found credible.

Staying the Course

Given her inexperience as an international leader, it is highly likely that Harris, as US president, would continue the Biden administration’s foreign policy, at least until such time as she has a firmer grasp on world affairs. Under her leadership, the United States is likely to continue supporting Ukraine and NATO while adopting a firm line against Vladimir Putin and Russia. Given her strong stance against Israel’s handling of the Gaza conflict – which she has referred to as a humanitarian catastrophe for innocent civilians – it is possible that her Israel policy may prove less fixed and intransigent than Biden’s. Indeed, she is on record for having called for a “temporary ceasefire” to the Gaza conflict well before her boss publicly did.

But far as the Indo-Pacific goes, it is unlikely that Harris would stray from extant US policy. As noted, many Chinese seem to think that Harris would prove weaker than Biden in dealing with China. As a US senator, she co-sponsored a bill promoting human rights in Hong Kong and supported another on the rights of Uyghurs in Xinjiang; in both cases, the bills included sanctions against those deemed responsible for human rights abuses.

China

As vice president, Harris has underscored America’s support – “consistent with [the US’s] long-standing policy” – for Taiwan’s self-defence and decried Chinese intimidation and coercion against Philippine vessels in the waters surrounding the Second Thomas Shoal in the South China Sea.

In an interview with CBS News last year, Harris advocated a firm stance against China, calling for “de-risking” from Beijing – a policy that aims to reduce the extent to which the US and Western economies depend on China. “It’s not about pulling out [from China], but it is about ensuring that we are protecting American interests, and that we are a leader in terms of the rules of the road, as opposed to following others’ rules”, Harris explained in that interview.

Harris’s remarks on China strongly hint at the influence of Rebecca Lissner, who currently serves as deputy national security adviser to the vice president. In her 2020 book An Open World: How America Can Win the Contest for Twenty-First-Century Order (co-authored with Mira Rapp-Hooper), Lissner argues that China constitutes America’s “chief antagonist” to an open world through Beijing’s determined efforts at forming exclusive territorial and technological blocs. Against such opposition, Lissner advocates a new vision and approach for America, one that allows it to de-risk itself while working with like-minded allies and rebuilding what she considers outmoded international institutions to set rules that ensure and enhance global openness. Lissner is adamant that the United States and the West should not pursue regime change around the world, but counter authoritarian competitors by preventing the rise of closed spheres of influence and preserving open access to the global commons.

Such an openness strategy is also in line with Harris’s criticism of the Trump administration’s inconsequential efforts to engage North Korea and rein in its nuclear ambitions, which do not close Northeast Asia off as much as create undue uncertainty and apprehension in the region. This is not to imply that Lissner’s ideas would form the blueprint for foreign policy under a Harris administration. At the very least, it suggests that Beijing’s hopes of a weak and unfocused America under Harris may be premature, perhaps even unfounded.

ASEAN

Under Harris, the United States is also likely to stay the course taken by Biden in its ties with ASEAN and Southeast Asia, a region hotly contested by both Beijing and Washington. But whether Harris would do better than Biden at reassuring and improving the region’s perceptions of America remains to be seen. According to a 2024 annual survey conducted by the ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute, when asked who they would prefer to align with in the ongoing China-US rivalry, slightly more Southeast Asian respondents reportedly sided with the Chinese (50.5%) than with the Americans (49.5%). That said, a Harris-led America would presumably play the kind of international leadership role ASEAN desires of the United States than a Trump-led one is likely to furnish. While ASEAN leaders would no doubt redouble their efforts to keep a mercurial and capricious Donald Trump happy and engaged (were he to return as US leader), a President Harris is more likely to show up for ASEAN meetings in person – the high-mark of ASEAN summitry success – than a President Trump ever did or would.

Southeast Asians have had a couple of opportunities to see Kamala Harris up close. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in August 2021, Harris, in her capacity as US vice president, visited Singapore and Vietnam to strengthen her nation’s security partnerships and to expand economic cooperation with two of America’s critical Indo-Pacific partners. Attending the 2023 ASEAN summit held in Jakarta in Biden’s stead, Harris – in her fifth visit to the Southeast Asian region – engaged with leaders of the ASEAN member states as well as Australia, China, Japan and South Korea. Notably, as a senator, Harris was active in legislating against human rights abuses in Myanmar – a concern she has repeatedly raised during her visits to Southeast Asia. Welcomed or otherwise, ASEAN could expect a greater focus on Myanmar from a Harris administration than it ever did from the Biden – and, for that matter, the Trump – administrations.

Conclusion

Should a Harris foreign policy adopt the contours and course of a grand strategy akin to what Lissner has counselled, it would probably surprise no one if China – still designated as America’s chief antagonist – were to resume its age-old accusation against America over the latter’s ostensible “Cold War” fixation with alliances and partnerships aimed at (in Beijing’s view) encircling and counterbalancing China. In this regard, it is unclear whether Harris might tap into her part-Indian heritage – her late mother was from Tamil Nadu – to enlist India (as a member of the Quad) in checking an assertive China: she has come across as ambivalent towards India. All things considered, the prospect of a Harris presidency is not the worst thing that could happen for the Indo-Pacific region.

See Seng Tan is President and CEO of International Students Inc. (ISI) in the United States and concurrently Research Adviser at RSIS and Senior Associate at the Centre for Liberal Arts and Social Sciences (CLASS) at NTU.

See Seng Tan

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Fast forward to December and not only is 2023 likely to pass without major incidents on the border, but both sides are talking with increased optimism about seemingly concrete progress made in delimitation, with Japarov saying recently that the border might be fully agreed upon by the spring.

That is a significant change in tone.

Tokon Mamytov, a former deputy prime minister and security council secretary in Kyrgyzstan, told RFE/RL that the two governments deserve credit for “overhauling the template” in border talks.

If talks had traditionally become stuck on fixations with different Soviet-era maps — Tajikistan’s preferred boundaries date back to the 1920s while Kyrgyzstan’s are from the 1950s — now there is a “new approach” from the bilateral commission working on delimitation, Mamytov argued.

“They go to the place and look at the border. They ask people who live there about facts on the ground. In this way, the intergovernmental commission is turning agreements between the two heads of states into a reality. Communities living near the border will be able to feel safe again,” Mamytov said.

Is ’90 Percent’ Of The Border Agreed Upon?

It is impossible to discount another Tajik-Kyrgyz flare up along the border.

Nearly 17 months separated the “wars” of May 2021 and September 2022 and, in both cases, the escalation was remarkably rapid.

But few would have expected peace to last so long in the fall of last year.

In the immediate aftermath of the second, deadlier conflict, Kyrgyzstan canceled military training exercises on its territory for the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) — a Russian-led regional military bloc — that were scheduled for October 2022 by explaining that Kyrgyz citizens would not accept the presence of Tajik troops on Kyrgyz soil so soon after a conflict that claimed at least 80 Kyrgyz lives and displaced more than 100,000 people.

At talks involving Japarov, Rahmon, and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Kazakhstan’s capital, Astana, that same month, Rahmon conspicuously failed to greet Japarov.

But a year later and just two weeks after Tashiev aired his frustrations over the direction the talks were taking, both he and his Tajik colleague, Saimumin Yatimov, hailed the signing of Protocol 42. Tashiev said the document “provides a basis for resolving all border issues.”

Yatimov was almost as evocative, noting that the two countries were “aiming to reach a comprehensive and fundamental agreement” as quickly as possible.

There were few details then, but Yatimov was more specific when speaking after further talks on December 2, declaring that the question of a troublesome road linking Vorukh — an enclave of Tajik territory in Kyrgyzstan — and the Tajik border settlement of Khoja Alo was “practically solved.”

Then came the news that the countries had agreed on another 24 kilometers of the border after talks held in the Tajik town of Buston, near the Kyrgyz border.

But it was after talks in Kyrgyzstan’s southern region of Batken on December 12 that the two men claimed their countries had preliminarily agreed on more than 90 percent of their shared border.

That would be a significant achievement.

Only last year, around one-third of the approximately 975-kilometer frontier (Kyrgyz officials claim it is slightly shorter) was still not demarcated.

In an interview with RFE/RL, Dushanbe-based political analyst Sherali Rizoyon said incentives for an agreement were raised by a growing impulse in Central Asia toward regional integration and an uptick in diplomatic activity involving several outside powers.

“Whether on the bilateral or regional level, the problem of state borders prevents the countries of Central Asia benefiting from the new opportunities that are appearing today,” Rizoyon told RFE/RL. “Countries cannot afford to remain hostage to border issues for long — they need to restore mutually beneficial cooperation.”

The ‘Deterrent Component’ And Unclear Russian Role

The word “historic” is overused in Central Asian diplomacy, but it would definitely apply to any agreement between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan on their state border.

Although the dispute did not turn violent until independence, analysts note that Tajik and Kyrgyz opinions on where the border begins and ends have been at odds since 1924, when Tajikistan was still an autonomous territory inside the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic and the territory of modern-day Kyrgyzstan had a similar status inside the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic.

That makes next year the 100th anniversary of the dispute — and as good a time as any to end it.

But if 2023 has proven a year of genuine progress on border talks, it comes on the back of the tremendous human and material price paid by the two poorest countries in Central Asia.

And a big part of that is the increasingly deadly weapons deployed in the last two conflicts, amid a mini-arms race that has seen Kyrgyzstan secure Turkish Bayraktar drones and Tajikistan receiving equivalent weapons from Iran.

Francisco Olmos, a senior researcher in Central Asian affairs at Spain’s GEOPOL 21 Center, noted the “deterrent component” in the Kyrgyz leadership’s boasts about their recently acquired Bayraktar drones while speaking on RFE/RL’s Majlis podcast in November.

The destructive power of the Bayraktar was also in evidence in last year’s clashes, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW), whose investigation published in May 2023 found that forces on both sides had “likely” committed war crimes against civilians.

In an interview with RFE/RL after the release of that report, HRW Senior Crisis and Conflict Researcher Jean-Baptiste Gallopin said the watchdog’s interviews with people on both sides of the border showed that local populations “are tired of these terrifying conflicts and are really yearning for peace.”

At the same time, local communities in Tajikistan’s Sughd Province and Kyrgyzstan’s Batken Province — the scene of most of the violence in recent years — will have their own opinions about what constitutes a good settlement.

Additionally, unrest in Kyrgyzstan over a landmark border agreement reached with Uzbekistan early this year suggests that selling a border agreement to the population is not always easy.

Yet another unknown is Russia, whose failure to prevent large-scale conflict between two of its military allies drew criticism of a Kremlin bogged down in its invasion of Ukraine. Also criticized was the CSTO — a security bloc sometimes framed as Moscow’s answer to NATO.

That trilateral meeting in October 2022 in Astana was more welcomed by Japarov — who unsuccessfully requested Putin’s intervention — than Rahmon, who later launched a tirade focused on Moscow’s shortcomings as a strategic partner.

Putin said after the talks that Russia had offered to retrieve some of its own archival Soviet-era maps to help resolve the dispute.

Since then, Russia has done almost nothing to suggest it is playing a mediatory role.

But on September 20, the Russian Foreign Ministry waded into the diplomatic fallout over Tashiev’s comments, warning against “harsh declarations” that it said could reverse the progress made on the border by the two countries.

“It should be remembered that armed conflicts in the post-Soviet space are beneficial primarily to the collective West, which has its own tendentious goals that have nothing to do with the real interests of Central Asian countries,” the ministry said.

Source: RFERL

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The Palestinians’ longstanding and legitimate grievances have been irrevocably subverted by Hamas’ brazen attack against Israel on Oct 7. Unlike previous rounds of conflicts and clashes between Israel and the Palestinians on the one hand and neighbouring Arab states on the other, Thailand has become a direct casualty like never before, as 30 Thai workers have been killed to date, with at least 16 injured and 17 taken hostage. As a militant political movement motivated by Islamic fundamentalism using methods of terrorism to achieve its objectives, Hamas has made a bad name for the Palestinian cause, eliciting condemnation and opposition all the way over here in Thailand.

Developing countries like Thailand generally tend to support underdogs in the rough-and-tumble canvas of international politics. When Israel was established as a nation-state in 1948, it enjoyed broad global support, backed by a United Nations resolution to split the land of Palestine between local Arabs and Jews. Many of the latter gravitated to Palestine after World War II when their race and religion faced persecution and genocidal extermination. Israel’s wars for survival in the face of Arab states’ invasions in 1967 and 1973 also found global sympathy and support.

After this point — perhaps Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 to eradicate the Palestinian Liberation Organisation — the tables turned. Israel became an occupying force and was seen more as the aggressor rather than the victim. Although a “two-state” deal was worked out and codified in UN resolutions, the Palestinians never got a state and the self-determination they were promised until the Oslo Accords, brokered by the United States, allotted the West Bank and Gaza Strip to the PLO to administer under the Palestinian Authority.

This was more like a one-and-a-half state solution. The Palestinian Authority became a limited self-autonomous government in both territories. The West Bank remained workable as a self-governing entity, but Gaza became problematic. Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, eventually won an election in Gaza in 2006 over the PLO’s Fatah party. Hamas has since carried out unrelenting attacks against Israel and faced continual reprisals from the Jewish state.

Hamas’ latest violence is attributable to several motives. First, the Arab world is moving beyond the Palestinian plight. While the West Bank remains self-governing and viable despite tensions and issues with Israel, particularly Jewish settlements, Gaza under Hamas’ autocratic control was being lost on the Middle East’s geostrategic chessboard.

Over the past three years, the US-sponsored Abraham Accords have profoundly realigned regional relations in the Middle East and normalised Israeli ties with key Arab states. The peace agreements and attendant recognition of the Jewish state started with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in 2020, building on Israel’s earlier peace treaties with Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994.

Soon after, Morocco and Sudan entered into similar normalisation agreements with Israel. Other regional players, from Saudi Arabia and Qatar to Turkey and Iran, then shuffled their strategic postures, realigning and considering normalisation deals, including with Israel.

The diplomatic remaking of interstate relations in the Middle East is favourable to Israel as much as it threatens the existence of violent non-state terrorist entities, such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. If their sponsoring states, such as Iran, normalise relations with hitherto adversaries, these extremist movements’ days would be numbered.

Apart from sabotaging, if not altogether derailing, the peace deals among Arab states and between them and Iran and Israel, Hamas may want to regionalise or even internationalise a broad pro-Palestinian uprising in the region and beyond. The Palestinians’ death toll and sufferings in Gaza have already prompted the Malaysian government to take a supportive stance for Hamas, Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world, is casting a glaring eye on Israeli retaliation in Gaza, which may involve a ground incursion. Palestinians in the Arab world, not to mention the Arabs themselves, will likely become more critical of Israel as the conflict escalates.

In addition, it is reasonable to assume that Hamas knew exactly what it was doing when it attacked and wantonly killed hundreds of innocent civilians inside Israel. With Israel’s well-known doctrine of disproportionate response, Hamas was likely geared to provoke the Israeli Defence Forces into a violent overreaction. As more Palestinian lives are lost, Israel may end up being the villain perpetrating violence against a helpless population rather than the victim of Hamas’ aggression.

Global public opinion will thus be fiercely contested. It is not hard to see that the longer the war goes on, the more disadvantaged the Israelis will be. The more measured and Hamas-focused they are within a limited duration, the better the Israelis will likely come out of it. In Hamas’ calculation, Israel’s overwhelming superiority in the force of arms and military prowess may well be its chief weakness in this situation.

For the Thai people, Hamas’ killing spree on Thai workers is unfathomable. Thailand has never done anything to harm Hamas nor caused any trouble for the inhabitants of the Palestinian territories. Survivor accounts from Thai workers who have returned safely indicate that they were specifically targeted by Hamas militants. Perhaps Palestinians in Gaza were resentful of Thai workers in Israel’s agricultural farms for holding jobs that could and should have gone to them. Because of Thailand’s 30-year estrangement with Saudi Arabia until normalisation last year, Israel became an attractive employment destination. Thailand is not alone, as the Philippines has similarly enjoyed employment opportunities in Israel.

Hamas’ brutal killings of Thai workers are totally unjustified. Thai Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin was spot-on to condemn Hamas’ action. When Thais are killed indiscriminately, the Thai government cannot conscionably stand on neutral ground. We need to condemn Hamas’ murderous acts in no uncertain terms and call for the immediate release of Thai and all other hostages. Doing so is not making enemies out of Hamas but sticking up for the innocent Thais who have been killed, injured and abducted.

Source

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