Vice President Kamala Harris has made a rapid rise as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee following President Joe Biden’s shocking announcement that he would exit the 2024 race. The sudden turnaround has led foreign policy observers to wonder about Harris’ vision and stances with respect to addressing the United States’ international challenges if she prevails over former President Donald Trump this November.
Needless to say, the increasingly adversarial China-U.S. relationship, and, with it, the tense Taiwan Strait situation, will remain highly significant for the next occupant in the White House. How would a Harris administration approach Taiwan?
Harris’ September 2022 Speech aboard the USS Howard in Yokosuka Base
A Harris administration may walk back one aspect of Biden’s position, which is the president’s repeated affirmations that he would dispatch U.S. forces to shield Taiwan from China’s military invasion. Harris gave only a vague reply when asked about Taiwan in a press gaggle during her September 2022 tour of the USS Howard at Japan’s Yokosuka Base. Her remarks were all the more striking coming only days after Biden’s CBS interview in which he reiterated the United States’ rock-solid support for Taiwan and pledged military interventions in a Taiwan Strait contingency.
In her address aboard the U.S. naval ship in Japan, the vice president criticized Beijing’s intimidating and coercive behaviors across the East China and South China Seas while emphasizing that “peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait is an essential feature of a free and open Indo-Pacific.” She emphasized, “We will continue to oppose any unilateral change to the status quo. And we will continue to support Taiwan’s self-defense, consistent with our longstanding policy.”
Harris added, “Taiwan is a vibrant democracy that contributes to the global good, from technology to health and beyond, and the United States will continue to deepen our unofficial ties.” All of that showed no daylight between her and the Biden White House’s articulations about Taiwan.
Yet, notably, Harris did not elaborate regarding how the U.S. would respond to a cross-strait crisis. When asked about the president’s recent promise to get involved militarily to defend Taiwan, Harris answered in an intricate way, saying that “the relationship and the alliance is based on shared principles in terms of international rules and norms, such as sovereignty, territorial integrity. It is also about what we know to be our commitment to security and prosperity for all these nations.”
To be sure, as of this writing, Harris is still a few weeks away from being officially nominated by the Democratic National Convention, even though she has already secured enough delegate votes to solidify the party firmly behind her candidacy for president. She only today announced her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. Her policy platforms, domestic and foreign, are works-in-progress. Thus, it’s too early to tell what her Taiwan Strait position would be.
Yet, the vice president’s imprecise rejoinder to the press queries in September 2022 should not be taken too lightly in the context of Biden’s lucidness on the matter.
Harris’ Experience With the Indo-Pacific and China Affairs
Harris has been a staunch proponent of Biden’s agenda in both the domestic and international political realms, in spite of her relatively limited experience in the latter until becoming the vice president nearly four years ago. Unlike Biden’s seasoned knowledge and extensive involvement with Sino-American relations, Harris is perceived to be quite a novice. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to equate a lack of exposure to ignorance.
In fact, Harris is known to be one of the key architects shaping and driving the Biden administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy since 2021, underscoring the importance of strengthening cooperation and alliances with ASEAN, Japan, South Korea, and other like-minded partners in the region. She has traveled to the Indo-Pacific four times as vice president, even having a brief meeting with China’s Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the November 2022 APEC summit.
During her tenure as a U.S. senator from 2017-21, which encompassed her brief 2020 presidential bid, Harris co-sponsored and ultimately passed legislation sanctioning Chinese officials for their human rights repressions in Hong Kong and Xinjiang. While calling out Trump’s tariffs on China as counterproductive, she also lashed out at Beijing’s unfair commercial practices and infringement of the rules-based international order.
On Taiwan, then-Senator Harris endorsed the Taiwan Travel Act in 2018 allowing high officials from both Washington and Taipei to visit each other in their official capacity with fewer restrictions. In January 2022, she met with Lai Ching-te, then Taiwan’s vice president, during the inauguration ceremony for Honduras’ president.
Furthermore, Harris is surrounded by a capable foreign policy team. Philip Gordon, the vice president’s trusted national security advisor, has championed the Obama and Biden-style of competitive engagement with Beijing. Lastly, the vice president is not shy about offering her own take regarding imminent foreign policy issues, as shown by her enduring concerns about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza in the wake of Israeli retaliation against Hamas after the October 2023 attack.
These instances should amply demonstrate Harris’ competence to handle effectively U.S. foreign policy and national security affairs. Viewed in that light, her 2022 reticence on whether to send U.S. forces to defend Taiwan may suggest a minor divergence from Biden’s position, a possible return to the more traditional strategic ambiguity trajectory, which was the norm in the Obama administration and prior.
Everything, however, could change if she’s elected president. By then, Harris would have to adjust her perspectives to match the crude reality of U.S. national interests in the Taiwan Strait.
Biden’s 2020 campaign is illustrative of such a shift: He ran as a sharp critic of Trump’s protectionist measures on China. In office, he not only kept the Trump-era import duties and trade barriers intact but also erected an industrial policy aimed to enhance and defend the United States’ own supply chain integrity, particularly in the advancement of AI, clean-energy vehicles, and semiconductor chip development. The Biden administration has erected targeted restrictions and export controls (also known as “small yard and high fence”) on these critical high-technologies to de-risk from China based on geopolitical and balance of power considerations.
Trump vs. Harris: Recognizing the Growing China Threats to Taiwan?
Harris’ rival in the 2024 election, former President Trump, has also refused to answer directly whether a second administration of his would send U.S. military forces to help Taiwan, arguing that revealing a clear position would undermine his negotiating abilities with Beijing. J.D. Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee largely concurred with Trump’s ideas.
Trump’s foreign policy instinct is reportedly motivated more by a transactional impulse. In his interview with Bloomberg Businessweek published in July 2024, the Republican standard bearer seemed “at best lukewarm about standing up to Chinese aggression,” the interviewer noted, adding that “Part of his skepticism is grounded in economic resentment.”
In the transcript, Trump is quoted as saying “Taiwan took our chip business from us. I mean, how stupid are we? They took all of our chip business. They’re immensely wealthy.” As in the cases of South Korea and Japan, Trump seems to think U.S. security guarantees only benefit the recipient. Thus he wants Taiwan to pay for protection: “Taiwan should pay us for defense,” he declared. “You know, we’re no different than an insurance company.”
Trump also raised doubts about the U.S. capability to defend Taiwan. “Taiwan is 9,500 miles away,” he told Bloomberg. “It’s 68 miles away from China.”
Notwithstanding his unsubstantiated claims that Taiwan has taken away U.S. semiconductor businesses and is not paying the United States enough for its weaponry, the implication is that a Trump 2.0 may further detach Washington from its longstanding global obligations – including a commitment to Taiwan’s defense.
Yet, during his first administration Trump recruited many China hawks, including Mike Pence, Matthew Pottinger, Robert Lighthizer, Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, Peter Navarro, and Robert O’Brien. Together, they convinced Trump to advance a forceful counterbalancing on Beijing while simultaneously rolling out a series of pro-Taiwan measures and initiatives.
Consequently, if Trump returns to the White House, his “America first” nationalism and deal-making inclinations may well be constrained again by some of those “peace through strength” hardliners. O’Brien, who served as Trump’s fourth national security advisor, interpreted the former president’s Businessweek interview as essentially calling for Taiwan to lift its own defense spending and deepen military cooperation with Washington to better deter Beijing.
Whether under a Kamala Harris or Donald Trump presidency in January 2025, competition between Washington and Beijing will only get intense. In the United States, a bipartisan consensus has been largely institutionalized on viewing China as posing the greatest threats and challenges to U.S. national interests and democratic values.
The U.S. backing for Taiwan is also unlikely to diminish. The new White House administration, whoever wins, will certainly have their own views on how best to go about rivaling China and backing Taiwan, but they ultimately would have to come to terms with the international strategic requirements. Reverting back to a conventional strategic ambiguity on Taiwan may no longer be palatable to U.S. interests considering the United States and China are locked in a contentious power struggle over power, values, and technology amid a new Cold War.