When Philip Gordon arrived at the White House to be Barack Obama’s top Middle East hand in 2013, he advocated arming Syrian opposition forces as part of a grand strategy to topple Syria’s autocratic president, Bashar al-Assad.
But he soon had second thoughts. Just months after joining Obama’s national security team, he decided the White House’s hopes of a moderate opposition prevailing were doomed. He later described himself as one of the first to “buck the trend” on efforts to change the regime.
Gordon’s time as Obama’s top Middle East policymaker — a job he assumed after decades spent as one of Washington’s foremost experts on Europe — offered a crash course in the limits of American power.
It also offers a window in the thinking of a man who could be the central foreign policy player in Kamala Harris’s presidency — if the Democratic nominee wins November’s presidential election — in a period of major turmoil in international politics and huge questions about the US’s place in a changing world order.
For the past four years, Gordon has been the vice-president’s low-profile point person on foreign policy, her most important aide on global affairs and, since 2022, her national security adviser.
Those close to Gordon say the Syria crisis, a US foreign policy failure that haunted Obama, was formative for the Atlanticist, tempering the outlook of a thinker who was already considered more pragmatic than many in the Democratic establishment.
“He is judicious, careful, moderate, whatever the opposite of ideological is,” said former Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass, a veteran of Republican state departments who has known Gordon for more than three decades.
That pragmatism can also frustrate interlocutors. One western diplomat worried that he was “not an unlocker”: unable to be creative or move things through the bureaucracy.
While he has been close to Harris, his views are often more closely associated with Obama: sceptical of the ability of American power to shape events, willing to negotiate with autocratic regimes, suspicious of idealism in foreign policy.
This does not mean he is someone who wants to see America turn inward, those who know him said. He is an internationalist who values US alliances such as Nato.
But Colin Kahl, who served with Gordon in the Obama and Biden administrations and spent countless hours in the situation room with him, said it was unfair to pigeonhole him.
“I never found Phil reluctant to employ military force,” Kahl said. “But where Phil asked the right question is: ‘To what end?’ Is it an end that’s realistic and achievable and are we overemphasising the military instrument and not complementing it with other tools to policy, economic statecraft?”
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Emily Haber, a former German ambassador to Washington who first met Gordon when she was political director in Berlin’s foreign ministry, added: “He takes the world as it is and tries to figure out how to move forward and achieve American interests; I have seen [other] American operators focusing on the premise of what the world should be.”
He would immediately need to apply that to Ukraine, where the US is pouring money into Kyiv’s war effort against Russia’s full-scale invasion, and the issue of China, America’s pre-eminent threat in Asia.
Gordon, 61, had no pre-existing relationship with the vice-president before he began advising her when she ran for the Democratic nomination against Joe Biden in 2020.
Now he is part of a small national security team around Harris that includes deputy national security adviser Rebecca Lissner and Dean Lieberman, another deputy and foreign policy speechwriter.
While Harris is a relative newcomer to the world stage, Gordon has worked in every Democratic administration since Bill Clinton’s and as a top scholar at the Brookings Institution and the Council on Foreign Relations.
But he has been more circumspect in his current role. While Biden and his team sometimes argued against Obama’s foreign policies, Harris’s and Gordon’s stance on Biden’s decisions in Ukraine, Israel and Afghanistan are less known.
Born at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland while his father served in the US Air Force, Gordon held teaching positions in the US and Europe before joining the government in 1998, handling European affairs for Clinton’s national security council.
At a time when many in Washington were beginning to look to the Pacific as the US’s geostrategic priority, Gordon remained what one friend called a “dyed-in-the-wool transatlanticist”.
Gordon wrote his doctoral thesis on French defence policy and later translated a book by former French president Nicolas Sarkozy. He speaks French, Italian and German, reads Spanish, and has studied Middle Eastern languages. He watches European football, basketball and tennis, which he regularly plays with colleagues.
Gordon’s most important political decision may have been domestic: backing Obama, a relatively unknown Illinois senator, for president in 2008 while the Democratic foreign policy establishment was lining up behind Hillary Clinton and her combustible foreign policy adviser, Richard Holbrooke.
The decision to work for Obama was risky, given rumours that Holbrooke would blackball anyone who worked for a rival if Clinton won. Obama rewarded Gordon with the top European affairs role at the state department.
In that post, he helped oversee the US response to the Eurozone debt crisis, an effort to reset relations with the Kremlin after Russia invaded Georgia, and dealt with revelations that US intelligence had wiretapped European leaders.
But the Middle East was Gordon’s crucible during the Obama years. His involvement in the Syrian crisis started when he was still heading European affairs at the state department and urged Clinton, then secretary of state, to attend 2012 peace talks between Assad and opposition groups in Geneva.
Michael McFaul, an ambassador to Russia under Obama, said the trip meant co-operating with Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin just as relations with Moscow were deteriorating. Gordon wasn’t optimistic, but wanted diplomacy to have a chance. The talks failed.
“I remember Phil saying, ‘Yes, it’s a risk, it might not work out, they might just be pulling us into some sort of trap’,” McFaul said.
Obama’s handling of the Assad regime, which is still in power despite years of civil conflict and human rights abuses, remains one of the most contentious foreign policy crises of his presidency.
Gordon’s move from the state department to the White House in 2013, gave him oversight of a region still in turmoil after the Arab Spring in 2011.
In Losing the Long Game, published in 2020, Gordon wrote that he came to see the US’s ineffectual efforts at regime change across the Middle East as failures that were often fuelled by naive optimism and flawed assumptions. He argued instead for more modest aims and measures such as deterrence, targeted sanctions and diplomatic pressure.
Gordon’s role in the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran — co-ordinating the agreement from the White House — will also now draw scrutiny, given Donald Trump’s decision to scrap the agreement and his claims that Democratic administrations have been soft on Tehran.
Critics have accused Obama’s team of ignoring Iran’s support for militant proxy groups in the region to secure the deal — a criticism that fits with some depictions of Gordon as a so-called restrainer, wary of using American power in service of promoting human rights and democracy.
Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who has known Gordon for more than a decade, said that view misinterprets his approach.
“Oftentimes, people who advocate for American restraint paint a benign portrait of our adversaries, whether that’s Iran or Putin’s Russia or North Korea, and strengthening the argument about restraint,” Sadjadpour said. “I don’t think Phil does that — he has no illusions about the nature of the Iranian regime.”
Since becoming Harris’s top foreign policy aide, Gordon has either attended or helped her prepare for meetings with more than 150 world leaders, including China’s Xi Jinping and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Differences between Biden and Harris on major international issues have been largely in degrees of emphasis. Gordon was instrumental in crafting her more sympathetic tone for the plight of Palestinians in Gaza even while reaffirming the US’s commitment to Israel’s security.
But there is little sign that Harris will take a substantively different approach from Biden to Israel’s war in Gaza, even if Gordon becomes her pivotal adviser as she weighs crucial foreign policy challenges such as Ukraine and China.
“He’s clearly earned her confidence and trust,” Haass said. “His low-key style serves him well.”