"Well, Kamala Harris, of course, hasn't had a lot of experience in foreign policy, but she's learned a lot at the side of President Biden as his vice president."

"So we're sort of guessing a little bit about her vision and her views. I think our general assumption is that she's pretty close to where Biden is, and I think it's safe to assume that she is basically a pretty conventional center left Democratic, foreign-policy thinker. I mean, to the extent that she brings her own individual perspective, it probably comes from her time as a prosecutor and a lawyer that she believes in the international rules-based order. So she looks at foreign policy in the sense of who is following the rules, in effect, in terms of whether it be trade security or economics."

Said Peter Baker on "Alliance vs. Isolation: Harris and Trump’s Competing Views on Foreign Policy," today's episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast (transcript and audio at that link)(I've tweaked some punctuation, etc.).

How are we to understand Harris as anything other than a continuation of Biden? That's what Peter Baker is doing.

And here's how he contrasts Trump:

Well, high level, he's the opposite, right? He is a disruptive force when it comes to international affairs. Proudly so.

An intensity shows up in Baker's voice when he talks about Trump. He gets gruff on those words I've italicized, and that's a vocal mannerism I associate with Trump. 

If there's anything he believes, it's this idea that other countries are shafting the United States.... And so he's often been much harder on America's allies than he has on been on America's adversaries....

The interviewer, Sabrina Tavernise, inserts a new idea — "Right? He's drawn to these strong men in a way"— then asks Baker to compare the candidates with respect to Israel: "Maybe let's start with this killing of Hassan Nasrallah, which plunges us directly into the unknown when it comes to Israel and Iran.... When we're looking at the candidates here, how do each see Iran?"

Baker says: 

Well, definitely Trump sees Iran as the main malign force.... He's willing to say nice things about Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un in North Korea. Not one good word, obviously for Iran. I think Harris obviously sees Iran as a malign force as well. But she has been part of an administration that was willing to at least try to restart negotiations over their nuclear program. Now, that didn't go anywhere. That ended up fizzling. And right now we are at odds with Iran. We have sanctioned Iran. We are not part of an agreement with Iran, and doesn't look like one is happening anytime soon. So where Harris wants to take the policy with Iran right now is a little unclear.....

About Israel, Baker says:

[Trump] likes to boast of being Israel's great friend during his first term.... Now, it's fair to say, there's probably never been a president who's been more willing to give Israeli leadership what it wanted than Donald Trump, right? He moved the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which is something that the previous presidents had all declined to do. He recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which again, no president had done up until that point. He closed the Palestinian office in Washington and cut off aid, and he wasn't even on speaking terms with Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority. So in Trump, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is getting an awful lot of what he wanted. 

But when it comes to the war on Gaza itself, Trump has been relatively quiet. He really hasn't given any kind of extended analysis or interview to explain how he sees the war in Gaza. And in fact, if anything, when he has talked about it, he has said things that Israel supporters are uncomfortable with, like Israel needs to get this over with.... There's too much killing. Not that he is expressing concern for those who are being killed, but, but because he says is hurting Israel's reputation in the world.... 

And he doesn't particularly like wars. I mean, I think that's one thing he has expressed pride about — not starting any wars while he was President.... I don't know what he would be willing to do to stop it or how far he would be willing to go to pressure Netanyahu, but I don't think Netanyahu can count on a hundred percent unvarnished support like he had in the first three years of Trump's presidency.... 

He's the opposite of Teddy Roosevelt, right? Teddy Roosevelt was speak softly and carry a big stick. Trump is speak loudly, but carry a small stick. Yeah. So he is actually somebody who has not been eager to pull the trigger, even though he speaks very gruffly and... bellicosely....

In Harris, Baker detects an emphasis that sounds like empathy:

Kamala Harris has stuck close to President Biden's policy, but she sounds different, right? At times.... When she describes the situation there, it's a matter of emphasis.... you hear more empathy, it sounds like, to people for the suffering of the civilians, at least in Gaza, who are paying a price....

My gender sensors itch. 

And so people assume because of that, that she will be tougher on Netanyahu than Biden has been, that she would have less patience for Netanyahu and put more pressure on him.

The softer person will be tougher and pushier? Why? Are we just guessing she'll put more pressure on Netanyahu? And is that what we should want? Let her be clear, then, so we can vote on it. 

Next topic, Ukraine. Baker again characterizes Harris as a continuation of the Biden:

Well, I think the Harris administration would continue a lot of the policy that we've seen in the last two and a half years since Putin's full scale invasion. She is invested in that.... She's met with Zelensky now seven times, including the meeting they had together late last week. And so whatever she might have thought about it coming in, she's very much a part of the Biden policy and is unlikely to make large scale shifts.... She believes that Russia cannot be allowed to simply win. Because if Russia wins, it means that the whole international rules based order is out the window.... It means that a larger country can use force to rewrite the map without any regard to the rules, without any regard to sovereignty and independence. And in fact, she took a dig at Trump when she met with Zelensky calling what he is suggesting, a proposal for surrender.

As for Trump, Baker says:

I think he'd be vastly different.... He has said that he would end the war in 24 hours. Now how he would do that, he doesn't exactly say.... Not a single person I know who knows anything about Russia and Ukraine thinks it's possible, right? A, it's not realistic. And B, it's just a complete and utter reversal of where the United States has traditionally stood, which is you don't reward aggression that you don't give in to international bullies.... And when he is asked as he was at the debate, whether he wants Ukraine to win... he always ducks the question.... So even last week, while Zelensky was visiting... Trump refused to condemn Russia for the war. Instead, he suggested that Putin wants the war to end and refused to give any assurances to Zelensky for American support....

Unless he sees it as an immediate American benefit, [Trump] doesn't want to have anything to do with it. A lot of people would argue, of course it is in America's interest to stop countries from invading each other. But he doesn't see it that way. In his telling of it, we have no business being involved unless we get something out of it....

I won't quote from the discussion of China. You can check that out for yourself. I just want to jump to the end, where they talk about unpredictability.

Tavernise says she's struck by "just how different Trump is from his party... while Harris in many ways is very much the product of her party." Baker credits Trump with "changing his party" and characterizes Harris as "a product of hers." But, Baker says:

It's it's it's really about predictability and unpredictability. In other words, Harris represents a much more stable way of looking at the world. And other leaders have a much better sense of where she will come out on things. And he's volatile and he's mercurial. He threatens to leave NATO one minute and has to be talked into staying in the next....

But could unpredictability work? Baker immediately jumps to "the madman theory":

The madman theory, if you will, of foreign policy. Now, Richard Nixon famously used this tactic. He told Kissinger to tell foreign leaders that he, Nixon was kind of crazy, and therefore they ought to do whatever Kissinger was asking, because I have no idea if I can control the boss.... In some ways Trump does the same thing. But with Nixon, it was a tactic. With Trump, it's just who he is, right? He is in fact somebody who will decide on the spur of the moment to do something drastically different on foreign policy without a big process and a committee meeting and so forth. So traditionally, of course, America has preferred to have predictable and stable relations with other countries, but Trump is again, as always the outlier who challenges that thinking.

Tavernise casts a shadow on Harris: "Just to play this out: If Harris were to win... then there's... four more years of the same — or at least, a very similar — foreign policy to Biden might also be problematic considering that all of these wars that we find ourselves pretty closely related to and very difficult to find our way out of."

Baker chooses predictability: "In a world where you have adversaries who have nuclear weapons, the argument from the Biden side is better... A Trumpian unpredictability is a deterrent on some level, but it's better — from their point of view anyway — to have predictability, because outcomes could be a whole lot worse... It used to be that the United States was the reliable actor. You pretty much knew where the United States was going to fall on major issues in the world, and other countries responded accordingly. Didn't mean that everybody did what the United States wanted them to do by any stretch, but that that predictability, that reliability, was central to at least a broad sense of order in the world....."