Where Trump and Harris stand on global issues ahead of the U.S. election
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| (Illustration by Kat Brooks/The Washington Post; iStock) |
The new president will face a host of foreign policy challenges including immigration, climate change and wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.
Here’s what to know about where each candidate stands on some of the most pressing global issues.
War in the Middle East
An immediate challenge for the next president will be containing the widening war in the Middle East and achieving a cease-fire to free the hostages seized from Israel and held by militants in Gaza while ramping up aid to Palestinians living in conditions top United Nations officials have described as “apocalyptic.”
Trump has broadly called for an end to the war in Gaza but has not been explicit about a path to achieve it. Privately, he has offered support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his country’s offensives against Hamas and Hezbollah — telling him in a recent call to “do what you have to do.” James Carafano, a fellow at the right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation and who was part of the first Trump administration’s presidential transition team, said that “I don’t think the cease-fire [in Gaza] is his priority” and that Trump will probably “not constrain Israel in any way in how it responds or threatens to respond” to Iran, Hezbollah or Hamas.
Harris has spoken forcefully about the suffering of Palestinians during the war. The Washington Post has reported that if she wins, she is likely to conduct a “full analysis” of U.S.-Israel policy and imposing conditions on some aid to Israel could be on the table. But Israeli officials are divided on how much they think Harris would change President Joe Biden’s policy of military support. Israel is likely to continue “largely as it sees fit” if there is a Harris win, Brian Katulis, senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Middle East Institute, told The Post.
NATO alliance
Harris’s campaign said that she will defend U.S. alliances, including the NATO military bloc, which she called “ironclad.” Yet European officials say they see Harris, despite four years as vice president, as a relative unknown who may not have the same substantive and emotional attachment to NATO as Biden, who was born during World War II and has experience dealing with Russia as a U.S. senator during the Cold War.
Trump took a more adversarial approach with the transatlantic military alliance as president, hammering members for what he called their financial overreliance on the United States. He suggested on the campaign trail that he would encourage Russia to attack NATO countries that don’t increase their defense spending and may consider leaving the 75-year-old alliance originally designed to counter the Soviet Union.
European policymakers largely don’t believe Trump would withdraw, though his former national security adviser, John Bolton, has told The Post that “he’s never lost the desire to get out.” But few think he will maintain the status quo, either, and NATO members have quietly moved to Trump-proof the organization. Trump called for “fundamentally reevaluating NATO’s purpose and NATO’s mission” on the trail.
Climate change
The words Harris and Trump use when talking about climate change show vastly different views: To Harris, it’s an “existential threat.” To Trump, who has long rejected climate science, it’s a “hoax.”
Harris has committed to tackling it with international cooperation, and experts expect Harris to pursue an array of climate actions with potential global impact. Harris backs the U.S. pledge to slash planet-warming emissions by at least 50 percent by 2030, compared with 2005 levels. The landmark 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which passed with Harris’s tiebreaker vote, poured billions in federal funds into speeding up the green energy transition.
“I expect that a Harris administration would issue stronger emission standards for passenger cars and for heavy-duty vehicles like trucks and buses and expand the electric vehicle charging network,” said Michael Gerrard, founder of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.
Politicians seeking to tackle climate change globally fear such efforts could stall under Trump. As president, he rolled back or eliminated more than 100 regulations designed to protect U.S. land, air and water. Now he is pledging to immediately reverse dozens of Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted.
Trump has also promised to once again exit the landmark Paris climate accord, arguing it places an unfair burden on the United States. His pullout from the deal to reduce carbon emissions alarmed climate scientists and experts, and Biden rejoined after his 2020 election. “We’re gonna do it again,” Trump said in a recent TV interview.
Trade with China
“Strategic competition between the United States and China is poised to intensify no matter who assumes the U.S. presidency in January 2025,” Ali Wyne, an expert on U.S.-China relations at the International Crisis Group, told The Post.
Trump has threatened to scale up economic attacks on Beijing and is considering measures that are widely viewed as likely to spark a global trade war. He has publicly floated the idea of enacting a 10 to 20 percent tariff on nearly all imports, in addition to privately discussing significantly increasing tariffs on Chinese imports, by as much as 60 percent.
Economists from both parties say this could drive huge disruptions in the United States and global economies far exceeding the impact of the trade wars during Trump’s first term. Proponents of Trump’s approach say tariffs can help return manufacturing jobs to the United States, but in the past, some experts have found they resulted in net job losses.
Harris, who also views Beijing as a strategic and economic threat to the United States, is largely expected to continue the policies of the Biden administration, which maintained many of the protectionist measures from Trump’s term and finalized regulations last month limiting U.S. investment in Chinese development of technologies with military applications.
While Harris has stressed that she does not seek conflict with Beijing and has hit Trump for the cost of the tariffs imposed on China when he was president, her platform suggests that she would go after what the United States considers to be “China’s unfair trade practices.” This could include punitive measures such as tariffs, as well as investing in domestic production and alternative supply chains to reduce U.S. dependence on Chinese goods.
Aid for Ukraine
Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, have expressed deep skepticism over continuing the United States’ financial aid to Ukraine, while Harris has promised “unwavering” support for Kyiv and met with President Volodymyr Zelensky a half-dozen times since Russia invaded in 2022.
Ukrainian officials told The Post that they believe Harris would maintain the status quo if elected. But they’re increasingly lamenting that this White House is too cautious about avoiding escalation with Russia, and that their requests for stronger weapons and looser restrictions on their use have been delayed or rebuffed.
On the other hand, some in Zelensky’s government worry Trump would push for Ukraine to make territorial concessions — which they have been adamantly against and would drive fresh splits within Europe. Trump has also boasted of being able to settle the conflict — now lurching into its third year — “as president-elect before I take office on January 20th.” He has offered no detailed plan.
The Kremlin has been outwardly cool about whom it wants in the White House, but Russian state media has been overwhelmingly flattering of Trump, who has touted a “very good relationship” with Russian President Vladimir Putin and may have spoken with him as many as seven times since leaving office.
Immigration
Immigration was central to Trump’s campaign as polls showed voters broadly disapproving of the Biden administration’s handling of the border with Mexico. He aggressively pursued policies to limit legal immigration in his first term — and his 2024 platform signals that he would do it again. Near the top of the Trump campaign’s agenda is a promise to “carry out the largest deportation operation in American history.” U.S. authorities lack the capacity to round up and deport millions of immigrants, but Trump said he’ll use National Guard troops.
The United States and Mexico, in particular, could feel “devastating effects” as a result of massive deportations, according to a research paper written in part by the North American Integration and Development center at the University of California at Los Angeles. The paper notes the two countries are “highly interdependent through dense migration, remittance and trade relations.”
Harris’s immigration role for the Biden administration has included boosting U.S. aid to Central America and discouraging potential migrants in that region from making the dangerous journey to the United States. Efforts to address the root causes of migration were overcome by a surge of illegal crossings at the southern border during much of her vice presidency. Harris pledged to revive the push for a bipartisan border security bill that Trump opposed and Republicans torpedoed this year. The legislation would have invested billions of dollars in border security, allowed U.S. officials to suspend asylum processing when crossings surge and deployed technology to detect and intercept fentanyl and other drugs.
Christian Shepherd, Loveday Morris, Steve Hendrix, Kate Brady, Anthony Faiola and Ellen Francis contributed to this report.
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