War with Russia?

Seymour Hersh on the "horrific" Harris Foreign Policy

THE HOLES IN HARRIS'S DEBATE VICTORY by Seymour Hersh
September 11, 2024

The vice president remains committed to Biden's failing foreign policy

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Harris proved she could handle America’s most demanding job, in terms of domestic policy. She deftly separated herself from President Joe Biden, who is now a figure of yesterday. Trump repeatedly invoked Biden’s name to the point where Harris testily told him: “I am not Joe Biden.” She later reminded Trump that he was not “running against Joe Biden.” 

There was one vital area that scared the hell out of me: foreign policy. Harris did not deviate from Biden’s horrific and dangerous foreign policy in two areas: his continuing personal and military support for the ongoing Israeli terror in Gaza and his administration’s continuing support in dollars and war goods for Ukraine and its delusional president, Volodymyr Zelensky. There is no brief here for Putin, who chose to be provoked by West’s expansion of NATO to the east, despite American promises made more than three decades ago not to do so, and inflammatory language by Biden’s foreign policy aides, led by Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

Biden had one moment of lucidity in his disastrous debate with Trump in June when he spoke of Putin. “The fact is that Putin is a war criminal,” he said. “He’s killed thousands and thousands of people. And he has made one thing clear: he wants to re-establish what was part of the Soviet Empire. . . . He wants all of Ukraine. . . . Do you think he will stop when he—if he takes Ukraine? What do you think happens to Poland? What do you think of Belarus? What do you think happens to those NATO countries?”

Last night there were strong echoes of Biden’s dark view of Russian intent. “Because of our strong support,” Harris said, referring to the many billions the US has supplied in aid and arms, “Ukraine stands as an independent and free county. If Donald Trump were president, Putin would be sitting in Kyiv right now . . . with his eyes on the rest of Europe.” There is little doubt that Harris believes what she said, but politics are always present. “And why don’t you,” she asked Trump, “tell the eight hundred thousand Polish Americans right here in Pennsylvania how quickly you would give up for the sake of favor and what you think is a friendship with what is known to be a dictator who would eat you for lunch?”

It was a good line, seemingly practiced and delivered with firmness. Harris badly needs those votes. But Trump’s response made clear that there are much bigger issues at stake. Putin has, Trump said, “got a thing that other people don’t have. He’s got nuclear weapons. Nobody ever thinks about that.” 

What was not mentioned last night were the many times early on that the Biden administration did all it could to undercut negotiations with diplomats from Russia that might have led to a ceasefire shortly after the war began. In a recent interview, Victoria Nuland, a hardline anti-Russia hawk who served for years as undersecretary of state for political affairs in the Biden administration acknowledged that she and others in the administration viewed the Russian demands of Ukraine as too onerous. Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, was seeking to limit the size of the Ukrainian army and its weaponry, Nuland said, and the White House objected, as Nuland made clear, to the military reductions in Ukraine insisted upon by Putin. 

One American official, who has firsthand information on the state of the war today, dismissed the ultimate significance of the much ballyhooed Ukrainian penetration into Kursk—caustically depicting it as the distance between downtown Washington DC and the Maryland suburb of Gaithersburg: twenty-two miles. It was the first military penetration into Russia since World War II, when the Germany Army, in what became one of the largest battles in the history of warfare, lost a crucial tank confrontation. Russian troops are now in the process of reclaiming the settlement and villages seized this summer by Ukraine.

The current Ukraine war has severely diminished both sides. There is recent American intelligence depicting the extent of disarray and low morale along the more than 600-mile Russian front inside eastern and southern Ukraine. The Russian infantry soldiers in foxholes along the front are getting by on what was known in US Marine Corps military prisons as “piss and punk”: bread and rainwater. Russia’s special forces—the Spetsnaz—are said to be, as the official told me, “squared away.” Despite their low morale, the Russian frontline forces have continued to advance against a Ukrainian army that is poorly equipped and equally demoralized. 

The official added that the crucial question, seemingly little understood in the White House, is whether the Russian Army inside Ukraine now is “the spearhead of a modern military force with the power, machinery, and morale capable of sweeping through Ukraine and then on to Poland anytime in the near future? The answer is no. And more importantly, the Russians know it. They remain an army, however and can continue to achieve some limited success and suffer some limited setbacks.

“Do the Ukrainians have sufficient manpower and sustainability to rout the Russian Army? Obviously not. That means stalemate and slow but sure mutual destruction will continue until the West, led by the US, forces the belligerents to negotiate.”

Meanwhile, the official added, Zelensky’s “idea of escalating the war by widening the target base inside Russia will only increase the bloodshed and destruction on both sides without changing the balance.”

The Guardian reported this week that Blinken, who just visited Zelensky in Kyiv along with David  Lammy, the British foreign secretary, was preparing to recommend that the Biden administration lift the current restriction barring Ukraine from using long-range American missiles against military targets deep inside Russia. The Guardian quoted Lammy as saying that a recent dispatch of ballistic missiles from Iran to Russia was a “significant and dangerous escalation” and had changed strategic thinking in London and Washington. (It was not clear how a shipment of missiles from Iran to Russia was an escalation since Russia has had a potent long-range nuclear arsenal for many decades.)

Harris was supportive of Israel during the debate when asked about the Biden administration’s policy in the current war in Gaza that was triggered by the horrific Hamas attack on October 7, in which 1,200 Israelis were murdered and 251—both Israelis, many of them members of the Israel Defense Forces and foreign nationals—were taken hostage. “I said then, I say now, that Israel has a right to defend itself. . . . And how it does so matters. Because it is also true far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. Children. Mothers.” The war must end immediately, she added, “and the way it will end is we need a ceasefire deal and we need the hostages out. And so we will continue to work around the clock on that. . . . We also must chart a course for a two-state solution. And in that solution, there must be security for the Israeli people and Israel and in equal measure for the Palestinians.” Speaking sternly, she affirmed that she always would be there for Israel—and in equal measure for the Palestinians—and that she would always give “Israel the ability to defend itself,” as Biden has done, from Iran “and its proxies.” There must be a two-state solution, she said, as if it were possible now, so “we can rebuild Gaza, where the Palestinians have security, self-determination, and the dignity they so rightly deserve.”

Her sentiments were little more than political doubletalk aimed at the young American critics of the administration’s support for Israel’s constant air and ground attacks in Gaza, who may choose again not to vote in the presidential election, as many did in the earlier primaries. There was no mention of the rabid right-wingers who, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in their thrall, have shown no intention to agree to a ceasefire with Hamas under any circumstances, and have rearmed the Israeli settlers in the West Bank. They are clearly intent on turning Gaza and the West Bank, at the least, with Israeli military support, under permanent Israeli control. The possibility of a viable two-state solution is fading day by day.

If elected, Harris will have to deal realistically with Israel and its enemies, especially Iran and Syria, and find a way to give the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank the hope, dignity, and security they “rightly deserve,” as she said. All of that must begin with a lot more straight talk about where Israel is today and where it is headed under Netanyahu’s leadership. 

So she gets an A+ from me for her brilliant chumming of an unprepared Donald Trump—has age caught up with him?—and a F for playing politics and refusing to deal with the reality of America’s most pressing foreign policy issues.