The Grand Strategist Who Has Kamala’s Ear

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s SitRep. We bade farewell to Robbie this week after a hall-of-fame eight-year tenure at FP—his very first job in journalism—that saw him report from more than a half-dozen countries, from the Amazon rainforest of Brazil to the inner sanctums of the Munich Security Conference. He’s now one of two FP alums with his face printed on a sock. We will miss you, RG.

Most of our readers probably already know Amy Mackinnon from her long track record of FP scoops and deep dives, including her on-the-ground reporting from Israel this year and her phenomenal feature on the Western components fueling Russia’s war machine, as well as from her frequent contributions to SitRep itself. She’s now SitRep’s full-time co-anchor, so you can expect more of that good stuff right here every week.

Alright, here’s what’s on tap for the day: We profile Kamala Harris’s most important foreign-policy strategist who you probably haven’t heard of, the arrest of Telegram’s founder kicks off a global free speech fight, and the U.S. military posts a weird flex—on Tinder.

Harris’s Other National Security Hand

There is an old saying in Washington that “personnel is policy.”

With Vice President Kamala Harris saying little publicly about her vision for the United States’ role in the world beyond the basics, attention has turned to her coterie of advisors in a bid to map out in greater detail what her foreign policy may look like. Harris’s national security advisor—Philip Gordon, who has served in the past three Democratic administrations—has been the subject of a series of profiles. Less examined is Harris’s deputy national security advisor, Rebecca Lissner, a scholar of U.S. grand strategy who is described by those who know her as a brilliant but pragmatic thinker.

“She’s an incredibly talented strategist. She’s a deep thinker and someone who is very thoughtful about the nature of U.S. power and the role of our alliances,” said Sasha Baker, the former acting undersecretary of defense for policy. Baker hired Lissner to serve as a director in the National Security Council’s (NSC) strategic planning directorate at the beginning of the Biden administration.

Alongside Baker, Lissner played a leading role in drafting early versions of the Biden administration’s National Security Strategy, and she was thanked by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan when the document was released after some delay in October 2022.

Baker described Lissner as “absolutely persistent” in her work. “It was not uncommon for me to have to tell her to go home at the end of the day,” she said.

The Office of the Vice President did not make Lissner available for an on-record interview.

America’s changing foreign-policy role. Lissner had other influential allies in the Biden administration, including Mira Rapp-Hooper, who later became the NSC’s senior director for East Asia. Their 2020 book, An Open World: How America Can Win the Contest for Twenty-First-Century Order, argued that the United States should move away from efforts to remake the world order in its image and instead invest in maintaining a free and open world in which it can thrive.

“Insisting upon the United States’ international leadership role but departing from reliance on primacy as the cornerstone of a messianic liberal mission, a strategy of openness departs from post-Cold War liberal universalism, Cold War-style containment, and the traditional alternative of retrenchment,” they wrote.

Lissner graduated from Harvard University and holds a Ph.D. in government from Georgetown University. As an area of study, grand strategy is known for high-level theoretical debates rife with “isms,” said Daniel Nexon, a professor at Georgetown who sat on Lissner’s dissertation committee.

“She’s not in that camp—grand strategy was not an excuse to talk about old-style big IR [international relations] theory like it is for a lot of people,” Nexon said.

Pragmatic thinking. Lissner’s graduate work looked at how America’s overseas military interventions shaped its grand strategy in the post-World War II era, which became the basis of her 2021 book, Wars of Revelation: The Transformative Effects of Military Intervention on Grand Strategy. While out of government, she criticized the Trump administration for focusing on splashy tactical successes and lacking a grand strategy, as well as for only cooperating with allies “when narrow self-interests exactly align,” she wrote for Foreign Policy with the Council on Foreign Relations’ Micah Zenko in 2017.

Other scholars of U.S. grand strategy familiar with Lissner’s work describe her outlook on the world as one of a pragmatic liberal internationalist. “She’s very conscious of the flaws in American foreign policy,” said Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center and an FP columnist. “But I don’t believe that she is willing to or wants to throw out absolutely everything in order to make change. I think it’s about trying to make a more pragmatic U.S. foreign policy,” Ashford said.

“I think she is somebody who does a good job of being a kind of arbiter between some of the more progressive currents in foreign policy and some of the more mainstream Democratic currents,” said Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Tiger team. On the NSC, Lissner directed the Russia-Ukraine “tiger team” that was established before the full-scale invasion to game out the ramifications of a potential war and its impacts on longer-term strategic planning.

In April 2022, Lissner left the NSC to join Harris’s team as a deputy national security advisor. A White House official said that Lissner has covered the full spectrum of national security issues alongside Gordon and has traveled with the vice president on all international trips since she joined her staff.

It’s unclear what role Lissner could hold in a potential Harris administration, but if personnel truly is policy, the world can perhaps prepare for a less arrogant America, our colleague Michael Hirsh wrote in a recent review of Lissner and Rapp-Hooper’s as well as Gordon’s books.

Let’s Get Personnel

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has called off the appointment of Gwyn Jenkins, the former vice-chief of the armed forces, as national security advisor.

Carlotta Spare has joined the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute as its new deputy director.

Michael Kimmage is now the Richard C. Holbrooke fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

On the Button

What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.

Telegram founder charged. Prosecutors in Paris charged Pavel Durov—the billionaire founder and CEO of tech platform Telegram—with several crimes on Wednesday, four days after arresting him when he landed at the city’s Le Bourget airport. The charges include complicity in operating an online platform that facilitates illicit transactions (which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison); enabling the distribution of child pornography, drug trafficking, and money laundering; as well as providing cryptology services without a declaration.

Durov was released from custody after posting bail of $5.5 million but is barred from leaving French soil and must report to a police station twice a week. The Paris prosecutor cited an “almost total lack of response” from Telegram to French inquiries during an investigation opened earlier this year as a factor in Durov’s arrest. A lawyer for Durov told news outlets that it was “absurd” to hold tech executives responsible for the content posted on their platforms.

Durov’s arrest has kicked off an intense global debate around online speech, privacy, and tech companies’ legal liability, as well as a broader diplomatic dust-up involving France, Russia, and the United Arab Emirates (all countries of which Durov is a citizen). Our colleague Rishi Iyengar has more on the implications of Durov’s arrest for Telegram and the global internet.

Pressure campaign. In one last FP story for the road, Robbie reports on how Harris’s foreign-policy team helped spearhead efforts to pressure former Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei to step aside and accept the election results that saw Bernardo Arévalo de León win the presidency, sending an eleventh-hour delegation to Guatemala City in January to help negotiate the transition of power—even as Trump confidantes reportedly threw support behind the defeated Giammattei.

The big meet. Chinese leader Xi Jinping met with U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan today on the final day of Sullivan’s three-day visit to China. While the outgoing Biden administration did not rack up any major policy deliverables from the trip, it was largely an effort to keep lines of communications open between Washington and Beijing as tensions continue to bubble, including over ongoing Chinese harassment of Philippine ships in the South China Sea. Biden and Xi are expected to have a call in coming weeks, and they could have an in-person meeting later this year, The Associated Press reported.

Crash. One of six U.S.-provided F-16 fighter jets crashed in Ukraine on Monday during combat, killing the Ukrainian pilot. The Wall Street Journal reported that Oleksiy Mes, better known by his call sign “Moonfish,” died while helping to repel a Russian missile attack, though initial reports indicate that Mes’s plane was not downed by enemy aircraft or fire. Before Ukraine received the F-16s, Mes traveled to Washington to advocate for the United States to send the jets. His death comes a little more than a year after another prominent Ukrainian pilot, Andriy Pilshchykov, known by the call sign “Juice,” died during training in a midair collision that killed two other pilots.

Snapshot

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer talks to members of the media after a joint press conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz (not pictured) after talks at the Chancellery in Berlin on Aug. 28, 2024. This is Starmer’s first official visit to Germany since he became prime minister. Justin Tallis – WPA Pool/Getty Images

Put On Your Radar

Thursday, August 29: Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, are set to give their first interview since Harris launched her candidacy, with CNN’s Dana Bash.

Friday, Aug. 30: U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell is set to lead the American delegation to the U.S.-New Zealand strategic dialogue in Auckland.

Sunday, Sep. 1: Azerbaijan holds early legislative elections.

Monday, Sept. 2: South African President Cyril Ramaphosa is set to visit China.

Tuesday, Sept. 3: United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres visits China ahead of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation Summit in Beijing.

Thursday, Sept. 5: Chinese leader Xi Jinping is set to speak at the China-Africa summit.

Quote of the Week

“When the door opened, I thought, there is nothing more I can do or say. Just jump.”

—102-year-old British military veteran Manette Baillie, who became Britain’s oldest skydiver this week, beating the previous record set by then-101-year-old Verdun Hayes in 2017.

This Week’s Most Read

• Trump’s Foreign-Policy Influencers by FP Staff
• Congressional Gridlock Leaves Key National Security Posts Vacant by Robbie Gramer
• How the Russian Establishment Really Sees the War Ending by Anatol Lieven

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Swipe right. If you opened Tinder in the Middle East last week, it probably wasn’t a potential hot date that caught your eye. U.S. Central Command took out Arabic-language advertisements on the dating app last week to warn would-be swipers who might have a bone to pick with Uncle Sam to “not take up arms against the United States or its partners.” The ad pledged that the top U.S. military command in the Middle East was prepared to employ fighter jets and aircraft in the region as tensions with Iran and its proxies remain on high.

Weird flex, but OK. The military command declined to comment on the post, citing information operations—which is a frustrating response coming from them but one that we think more people should use in response to questions about their dating lives.

“[H]ard to imagine a guy who was gonna take up arms but changed his mind after reading the Tinder ad,” journalist Alex Press responded to Séamus Malekafzali, who had posted a screenshot of the ad on X. “I was gonna head out on the town tonight, but you guys, it seems like the US is pretty serious,” Malekafzali quipped back.