L: (Montinique Monroe/Getty Images)
R: Philip H. Gordon (Michael Loccisano/Getty Images for HBO)
Just after meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week, Vice President Kamala Harris lamented "the images of dead children and desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety" in Gaza. "I will not be silent," she vowed. Apparently, that sympathy does not extend to the Druze. When Hezbollah rocketed a soccer field in the Golan Heights last week, killing a dozen children, Harris said nothing. Her national security adviser, Philip H. Gordon, tweeted an assurance that she "condemns this horrific attack and mourns for all those killed and wounded."
Harris’s views on foreign policy were largely unknown before she moved into the Naval Observatory, and since then, the vice president has largely avoided sharing her own views about foreign affairs. Reportedly, Harris even keeps quiet in the Situation Room for fear of embarrassing leaks from Biden staffers. Gordon, however, offers clues about her own ideas.
Gordon has long been a part of the Democratic Party’s progressive wing. In 2008, the party’s foreign policy experts split into the Hillary Clinton faction, which promoted Bill Clinton-style human-rights hawkishness, and Barack Obama’s more dovish camp. The insurgent Obama campaign had fewer credentialed experts, but more voters, and Gordon’s earlier tenure on Clinton’s National Security Council and adviser role in the Obama campaign earned him a spot in the State Department as the assistant secretary responsible for Europe.
During Gordon’s tenure at State, the "reset" with Russia was a major priority for the Obama administration. Vladimir Putin had already attacked Georgia just months before the election, but the Obama administration was determined to give Putin another chance. From Gordon’s perspective, the reset yielded some significant benefits, such as a new arms control agreement, a supply corridor to Afghanistan, and Russian entry into the World Trade Organization. But by the end of his time at State, he and Hillary Clinton were warning Obama that the reset had failed and Putin was not interested in cooperation. Although he no longer worked on European affairs when Russia first attacked Ukraine in 2014, Gordon defended the Obama administration’s completely inadequate response.
Having been fleeced by one autocrat, Gordon moved on to another one. As Obama entered his second term, he assigned Gordon the NSC’s Middle East portfolio. As the Syrian civil war became more brutal and Iran and Russia got their hooks into the country, Gordon realized that the Obama policy was failing. "I’m someone who started to buck the trend on Syria early in the system," he later recalled. By that, he meant letting the Iranians and Russians win, unlike other administration members like CIA director David Petraeus, who wanted to arm the non-jihadist rebels adequately enough to give them a fighting chance.
Gordon was much more enthusiastic about the Iran nuclear deal. During his tenure on the NSC, he told the National Iranian American Council that "a nuclear agreement [with Iran] could begin a multi-generational process that could lead to a new relationship between our countries." After leaving government, he became one of the most prominent advocates for the nuclear deal and criticized the Trump administration’s "maximum pressure" policy on Iran. At one point, he even signed up as a "featured expert" for a New York Times tour of Iran. (It remains unclear if the trip took place—Times Journeys shut down in 2021 and the White House did not return a request for comment.)
Although Gordon has not been directly implicated in the Iranian government’s attempts to influence American foreign policy, he has ties to some of the people who have more troubling connections. Gordon cowrote articles with Ariane Tabatabai, a member of a group called the Iran Experts Initiative allegedly formed with the encouragement of the Iranian Foreign Ministry. Many of these articles criticized Trump administration sanctions on Iran and inaccurately predicted that they would lead to conflict with the Islamic Republic. Both the content of the articles and his choice of coauthor raise questions about his judgment about a region that is increasingly perilous for Americans and their allies.
In the 2020 primary, Gordon once again picked one of the most left-wing candidates, signing onto the Harris campaign. Since then, he has worked for Harris, getting promoted to her national security adviser. Michael McFaul, who worked on Russia during the Obama administration, has written that, "From the very beginning, Gordon has been intimately involved in the formulation of the Biden administration policies towards Europe as a whole and Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus in particular." This is not a sterling recommendation: The administration failed to deter Russia from attacking Ukraine, and it has neither given the Ukrainians enough weapons to retake their territory nor allowed them to use effectively the weapons it has sent.
None of America’s major adversaries seem intimidated by the Biden administration, and Gordon was on the dovish side of an Obama administration that was weaker than this one. Whatever ails America’s foreign policy, it does not need treatments from this Dr. Phil.
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