Harris and Trump Say They Want Peace. But Neither Has a Plan.
Tuesday night’s presidential debate was a reprieve from the hawk-off that the 2024 campaign has become. Rather than trying to out-hawk each other, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump defended peace on the merits. Harris even bragged about ending an “endless war,” after the Democratic Party took that phrase out of this year’s notoriously hawkish platform.
But when it came to ending current wars, neither candidate could articulate how they would do it. Trump gave a peace plan for Ukraine that amounted to magical handwaving, and Harris delivered a word salad of an answer about a ceasefire in Gaza. Although she praised the end of the Afghan war, Harris also attacked Trump for negotiating the very truce that allowed U.S. forces to leave, accusing him of appeasing terrorists.
The candidates’ hawkish turn over the past few months had put them out of step with the American public. A recent poll commissioned by the Cato Institute found that swing state voters believe that the U.S. is too involved in foreign conflicts, worry about escalating to a world war, and plan to vote accordingly. Harris and Trump tried to appeal to those instincts—while avoiding any commitment to diplomacy and restraint.
“I agree with President [Joe] Biden’s decision to pull out of Afghanistan. Four presidents said they would, and Joe Biden did. And as a result, America’s taxpayers are not paying the $300 million a day we were paying for that endless war,” Harris said.
But she called Trump’s peace deal, which Biden followed through on, as “one of the weakest deals you can imagine.” Harris alluded to a recent interview with Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, attacking the truce. Bolton, for his part, would have preferred the United States stay in Afghanistan indefinitely.
The problem, Harris claimed, was that Trump “negotiated directly with a terrorist organization called the Taliban,” and brought them to “a place where we honor the importance of American diplomacy, where we invite and receive respected world leaders.”
Of course, it’s hard to see how any country could achieve a peace deal without talking to its enemies. “I got involved with the Taliban because the Taliban was doing the killing. That’s the fighting force within Afghanistan,” Trump responded. “They don’t bother doing that because, you know, they deal with the wrong people all the time.”
He also promised to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine. “It’s the U.S.’s best interest to get this war finished and just get it done, negotiate a deal, because we have to stop all of these human lives from being destroyed,” Trump said. Asked how he would stop it, Trump retreated into wishful thinking.
“I know [Ukrainian leader Volodymyr] Zelenskyy very well, and I know [Russian leader Vladimir] Putin very well. I have a good relationship,” he said. “I will get it settled before I even become president—if I win, when I’m president-elect—and what I’ll do is I’ll speak to one, I’ll speak to the other. I’ll get them together,” Trump added.
In the spring of 2022, shortly after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, the two sides did get together and even wrote draft treaties. It
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