Former Congresswoman Jane Harman Discusses Array of National Security Challenges

The Honorable Jane Harman, a nine-term congresswoman, has a storied track record of making national security issues matter to the American public, and she’s not done yet. “The public is often clueless about how dangerous the world is,” said Harman, an Institute for Global Politics Carnegie Distinguished Fellow at a roundtable cohosted by the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies and IGP on October 10. The roundtable of 20 students was presided over by Peter Clement, an IGP-affiliated faculty member, and Page Fortna, director of the Saltzman Institute.

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The roundtable capped off a busy week of events for Harman at SIPA, including a visit to Clement’s intelligence class and a roundtable discussion with Matt Waxman, Columbia Law School professor and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs, where they discussed Congressional oversight and political opposition to the Intelligence Community.

Representing many of Los Angeles’ major ports and having served on the House Armed Services, Intelligence, and Homeland Security Committees, Harman told students her greatest challenge in Congress was finding the political will to anticipate and prepare for crises, whether from adversaries or hurricane disasters. “I was in the first class in Congress after the Cold War,” she observed. “We missed terrorism, we missed the rise of Russian grievances.”

After leaving Congress, Harman served as the first woman president and CEO of the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, DC. Most recently, Harman chaired the Commission on the National Defense Strategy from 2022 to 2024, a Congressionally-mandated bipartisan committee to examine the White House’s latest defense strategy, released in 2022. She commented that the strategy, which was drafted before the start of the Ukraine War and the conflict in the Middle East, has already been overtaken by events. The strategy named China a “pacing threat,” setting the U.S. to prioritize the Indo-Pacific and absorb risk in the Middle East, Europe, Africa, and Latin America. She disagreed, and the commission emphasized the U.S. must be prepared to deter conflict elsewhere.

She is particularly disappointed with the U.S. role in the Middle East, fearing that the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan will be a stain on our record. Reflecting on the conflict in Gaza and Lebanon, she explained, “I am pro-Israel, but we have radicalized as many as we took out.” Not shy about her own role in world events, she took responsibility for the part she played in past missteps, saying, “The Iraq War was a mistake – partly mine because I voted for it.”

Students asked her about difficult decisions she made, and she described losing the primary election for governor of California in 1998. “Learning how to take a punch is how you get stronger,” she advised. Her final advice to students was to learn how to engage and really listen, tactics she picked up on the campaign trail. “I kept looking at my feet,” she laughed, “but my feet weren’t going to vote for me.”