Next month’s U.S. presidential election is being closely watched across the world. But do foreign governments have a clear preference for either Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald J. Trump?
According to the Oct. 9 Weatherhead Center for International Affairs forum on the election’s geopolitical stakes, many international observers remain ambivalent on the race. The panel featured four experts weighing in on the global hotspots of China, Russia, the Middle East, and Latin America.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is probably inclined toward Trump, according to Timothy J. Colton, the Morris and Anna Feldberg Professor of Government and Russian Studies Chair of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. “But the Russians will point out that Trump, in the end, did Russia no favors in his first term,” Colton said. “At least at the leadership level, they’re by and large convinced nothing good is going to come in the election from Russia’s point of view.”
At the moment, Moscow appears less invested in the U.S. election than in the last two cycles, Colton observed. “The Russians have turned away almost every shred of cooperation with the United States of America, and at least verbally and rhetorically they are fashioning a pretty radical new image of where they belong in the world.” As examples, he cited top thinkers in Russia who speak of becoming an Asian country and Putin himself describing it as a civilization state, or a unique culture descended from an empire much like China.
What’s more, Colton added, the Russian establishment sees far more opportunity in countries like Germany, Hungary, and the Czech Republic for undermining support for Ukraine. “It is reasonable to expect the war in Ukraine will come to an end, or at least to a point of suspension, in the next U.S. presidential term,” he added. “But my own sense is the geopolitical outcome will depend more on what happens on the battlefield than on anything that happens in Washington.”
Most pressing in the Middle East is the escalating conflict involving Israel, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran. Ziad Daoud, a senior fellow with the Middle East Initiative at the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, described a prevailing sense of fury amid another crisis in the Arab world. “This dissatisfaction could multiply if we get a condition in which you have loss of territory in Gaza or in the West Bank or in Lebanon, or you have displacement of people from Gaza or the West Bank or Lebanon,” he said.
For Daoud, the central question is: Which U.S. presidential administration could help secure a favorable resolution for all parties? As a model, he pointed to the “five no’s” offered last year by National Security Council member Brett McGurk: “No forced displacement, no reoccupation, no reduction in territory, no threats to Israel, no besiegement.”
“There are people who say President Trump is averse to war and therefore he’s more likely to end the war,” offered Daoud, who is also the chief emerging markets economist at Bloomberg. “But there are others who say that President Trump may not be as committed to the ‘five no’s’ outlined by the U.S. administration last year. Yes, the ceasefire might be reached but the conditions may not be great, and that might lead to further disruption down the road.”
For countries south of the U.S., the issues of drug trafficking and illegal corridors are far more central than immigration, according the Columbian journalist Diana Durán Nuñez, currently a fellow with Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism. “If the U.S. really wants to see a different outcome on immigration, they need to raise concern and interest among their partners in Latin America,” she said.
The former TV news reporter also noted the growing influence of China, highlighting Nicaragua and Venezuela as two of the Asian country’s key allies. But the region’s ever-shifting political allegiances could hold new possibility for U.S. interests. “Latin America is a complex compound of left-wing, right-wing, and authoritarian governments,” Durán Nuñez said, pointing to the U.S. military’s new naval base partnership with Argentina’s right-wing president, Javier Milei. “China was supposed to be the ally for that project — there had already been conversations, and they were quite advanced — but Milei stopped it.”
As for China itself, an obvious concern is U.S. trade policy, given Trump’s proposal of a 60 percent tariff on imports from the country. Rana Mitter, the Kennedy School’s S.T. Lee Chair of U.S.-Asia Relations, emphasized that neither U.S. presidential candidate stands for 1990s-style free trade with China. For example, a Harris administration is expected to pursue more restrictions than the Biden administration on tech investments and intellectual property transfers involving China. “But that lies in contrast with what we are promised by people involved with a Trump II administration,” he said.
Mitter, who recently visited the Chinese capital, noted how closely elites there are following the U.S. presidential race. “The only place where I’ve seen as much interest as there is on, say, CNN, is in some of the think tanks of Beijing,” he said. “Many people, very well informed about U.S. politics, wanted to talk about the subject and gave highly granular accounts of voting patterns in various Pennsylvania and Wisconsin counties.”
But these sophisticated observers favor neither candidate. “The majority view,” Mitter said, “was that it might not make that much difference on the grounds that relations between the U.S. and China will be turbulent for quite some time.”