Hi Intriguer. This could be a big few days for the Harris-Walz campaign:

• ~45,000 port workers at 36 ports across America are threatening to go on strike next week (we covered this in Thursday morning’s edition of our flagship International Intrigue briefing). If a port shutdown happens, there’s almost no way to spin it as positive for the Harris campaign and it will make her efforts to sell her economic plan that much harder.

• New York City Mayor Eric Adams was indicted yesterday on federal charges related to bribery and foreign influence. Republicans will try to tie Adams (a Democrat) to Harris, but unless some evidence emerges suggesting they had a close relationship, Adams’s legal troubles won’t hurt Harris.

• And, as I hit send on this newsletter, Hurricane Helene is battering Florida and making its way north through Georgia and the Carolinas. We’re right in the middle of the US storm season so I expect FEMA to be well prepared to respond to the inevitable damage, but if I’m wrong and the Biden administration botches its response, it would be disastrous for the Harris campaign (not to mention the folks affected, of course).

Any of those issues could dominate next week’s news cycle and I see only potential downside for the Harris campaign. It’s also very possible that by this time next week, the strike will have been averted, the Hurricane will have come and gone with minimal damage, and Eric Adams will be the former mayor of New York City.

All that aside, Kristen and I sat down this morning to discuss Biden’s final speech to the UN General Assembly, how Israel’s strikes against Hezbollah in Lebanon could change the US election, and why I think a controversial opinion piece published in Politico Magazine entitled “Don’t Listen to Pompeo, O’Brien and McMaster. Trump’s Foreign Policy Was a Failure” misses the appeal of Trump’s foreign policy positions for many Americans.

- John Fowler & Kristen Talman in Washington DC

Listen to this week’s podcast here, and if you’re not signed up for our flagship daily newsletter, International Intrigue, you can fix that here!

THE CONVERSATION

Does Joe Biden’s legacy matter? Maybe for Kamala.

A summary of this week’s podcast:

1. Joe Biden’s farewell speech. In his final address to the UNGA, President Joe Biden outlined his view of the challenges facing the world. There was nothing shocking in the speech; Biden encouraged support for Ukraine, reiterated how critical AI is to the future of the world (he avoided saying US leadership of AI, but we read between the lines), and nodded in the direction of UN reform. Given we expect Harris to largely continue Biden’s foreign policy, at least initially, his speech was a useful summary of Harris’s views as well.

We think the big stumbling block for Harris between now and the election will be convincing the American people that Biden’s failure so far to secure a cease-fire in the Middle East isn’t a failure of their administration. We expect Trump to capitalize on the administration’s perceived inability to influence world leaders and the pervasive sense among American voters that the world is on fire and needs a strong leader to sort it out.

2. Republicans are furious over Zelenskyy’s trip to Pennsylvania. Last weekend, President Zelenskyy and his Ambassador to the US, Oksana Markarova, visited an armaments factory in Pennsylvania.

Republicans slammed President Zelenskyy’s meeting with Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro (who signed a missile during a photo op — when did that become a thing?!), calling it, “essentially a campaign event for Kamala Harris”. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson even demanded Zelenskyy fire Ambassador Markarova.

What was Zelenskyy thinking? Was he trying to subtly signal his support for Harris by reminding Pennsylvanians that providing weapons to Ukraine has been good for the local economy? Or was this a genuine case of misreading the political climate? He wouldn’t be the first foreign leader to be eaten up by American politics in an election year.

Presumably keen to clean up the mess, President Zelenskyy met former President Trump this morning at Trump Tower in New York. It went about as you’d expect:

3. Will Israel’s strikes against Hezbollah affect the election? Benjamin Netanyahu uncorked a forceful speech at the UN General Assembly this morning, saying there would be no immediate truce in the rapidly escalating conflict with Hezbollah, and that Israel was preparing for a potential ground incursion. Netanyahu also warned Iran that “there is no place in Iran that the long arm of Israel cannot reach, and that is true of the entire Middle East.”

Netanyahu continues to frustrate the Biden administration’s efforts to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and now in Lebanon. It’s true that Hamas began this war on October 7 but it’s also true that Netanyahu and his allies have expanded the original mission of destroying Hamas to include destroying Hezbollah as well.

Will Iran hit back? They plan to, according to Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, who told the UN General Assembly on Tuesday that Israel’s strikes against Hezbollah “cannot go unanswered.” Whether they have the capability to is a very different question.

The events of the past week in the Middle East all play neatly into Trump’s foreign policy approach of “peace through strength”. Trump regularly says that none of this would have happened if he were president, and irrespective of whether you think that’s ludicrous or accurate, the more the Biden administration tries and publicly fails to secure peace in the Middle East, the more Trump’s assertions hit home for average Americans.

We think Trump’s perceived strength versus Biden’s perceived weakness is a real political problem for Harris, with the caveat that we have no idea how many genuinely undecided voters actually care about foreign policy.

4. Which leads us to Trump’s foreign policy record… Trump-era officials, including former National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Elbridge Colby, and former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, have been hitting the media lately to talk up President Trump’s foreign policy record.

Yes, they’re almost certainly angling for plum positions in a Trump 2.0 administration, but do they have a point?

Not according to former US ambassador Michael McKinley, who was also a senior adviser to Mike Pompeo, who published an opinion piece in Politico this week arguing that Trump damaged America’s alliances and diminished America on the world stage. We discussed the article and whether it was likely to give the Harris campaign political ammunition to attack Trump.

You can listen to our full conversation by subscribing to our podcast feed below!

WHERE IN THE WORLD IS…

• President Joe Biden is headed to Scranton, Pennsylvania, in the morning for the funeral of a personal friend and then to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.

• Vice President Kamala Harris will visit the US-Mexico border in the battleground state of Arizona today.

• While the details are “still being worked out,” Democrat Vice President nominee Tim Walz and Republican Vice President nominee JD Vance will take the debate stage on Tuesday.

• Republican nominee Donald Trump is campaigning in Michigan on Friday, giving remarks in Walker and hosting a town hall in Warren. Trump met with Ukrainian President Zelenskyy in New York on Friday morning.

• Secretary of State Antony Blinken is in New York for UNGA, meeting with a flurry of foreign ministers, including China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi, at 1:30 pm. He will speak to the press at 3:30 pm.

This week’s newsletter is supported by Polymarket

WORLD VIEW

How the world reported on Lebanon-Israel

Both Harris and Trump have said they will continue to stand behind Israel and its right to defend itself, but international papers have grown increasingly critical of US support for Israel in the wake of its attacks against the terrorist organization Hezbollah in Lebanon.

🇫🇷 Has the window closed for Joe Biden in the Middle East?  -France24, Paris, France

• Intrigue’s take: While Biden is attempting to secure his legacy, French media is speculating whether his legacy might be an unresolved crisis in the Middle East. Without assigning blame or credit, his presidency will likely be remembered as a period of geopolitical chaos.

🇹🇷 'An all-out war is possible' in Middle East, says Biden  - Anadolu Agency, Ankara, Turkey

• Intrigue’s take:  While most newswires plucked out that US officials are working to reach a temporary cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon and calm tensions, Turkey’s Anadolu struck a more negative tone, reporting that Biden didn’t rule out a wider war.

🇶🇦 ‘Disastrous failure’: How Biden emboldened Israel to attack Lebanon - Al Jazeera, Doha, Qatar

• Intrigue’s take: The Qatari news agency commissioned its Washington-based writer to report the latest with a stateside spin, writing that the US’s failure to bring the war in Gaza to an end has led the conflict to spill over into Lebanon. This take is a great example of America being damned if it does, damned if it doesn’t when it comes to its Middle East policy.

LETTER OF THE DAY

As we noted above, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson wrote an open letter to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy demanding he immediately fire his Ambassador to the US, Oksana Markarova, after she arranged a tour of an armaments factory in the battleground state of Pennsylvania last weekend.

Republicans are accusing President Zelenskyy of appearing in support of a Harris victory. Zelenskyy also criticized Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, for being too radical in an interview published in the New Yorker this week.

President Biden announced a further $7.9B in security assistance for Ukraine early Thursday morning.

WHAT WE’RE READING

• OpenAI Pitched White House on Unprecedented Data Center Buildout

• Foreign Policy Issues Don’t Often Decide U.S. Elections. This Year Could Be Different

• What the U.S. Election Means for Ukraine

• Why Senators Don’t Often Become President

• Harris leads on foreign policy nationally, but Trump has edge in swing states: Poll

POLL