US Vice-President Kamala Harris starts a tour of Asia on Sunday in a bid to recapture the Biden team’s foreign policy momentum after the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan.
The White House has been rocked by the fall of Ashraf Ghani’s administration, with comparisons made with the trauma of the US experience in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, especially the chaotic 1975 US evacuations from a CIA roof in Saigon in 1975 as the Viet Cong took the city. Harris therefore faces a potentially difficult tour in the coming days, with the second leg of her itinerary being in Vietnam after first visiting Singapore.
The pressure on Harris on this trip, however, is not only because of the US setback in Afghanistan and the intense international criticism that has followed. In addition, she is perceived to have made an uneven start as vice president with wobbly domestic poll ratings as her unfavorable numbers continue to outweigh positives.
This worries some Democrats who see her as potentially the party’s nominee in 2024 if Joe Biden decides not to seek re-election when he will be in his early eighties. And it is in this troubled context that Harris will therefore seek to use the tour, in which key issues will include regional security, the pandemic, China and climate change, to raise her profile as she seeks to become an effective international interlocutor.
In seeking to carve out a strong role for herself as vice-president, Harris is following a pattern in the past quarter of a century whereby several of the recent incumbents of her job — Biden, Dick Cheney, and Al Gore — all enjoyed sizeable influence in not just foreign policy but in domestic affairs, too. Indeed, Cheney, who was a predominant voice in many of George W. Bush’s international decisions, including the US-led invasion of Iraq, is widely viewed as the most powerful holder of the office.
Biden and Gore also played a major role in US foreign and domestic policy. Biden was, for instance, a key player in encouraging Barack Obama to secure the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. A good example of Gore’s influence in Bill Clinton’s administration was the driving force role he played in the international negotiations that led to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to help tackle climate change.
Only Mike Pence in this period was an exception to this pattern. He had a troubled relationship with Donald Trump and his influence in the White House ebbed and flowed significantly, reflecting the up-down relationship between the two men.
Given that the ancestral home of the maternal relatives of Harris is India, one international area in which she will try to make a big contribution is Asia policy. And it is therefore likely that she will make several further visits to the region in the coming years, including India itself, with the Biden team continuing to make countering China the centerpiece of its foreign policy.
Part of the reason why Harris could be such a key figure in this administration’s international affairs is that Biden was, last November, the oldest person ever to win the presidency. This elevates the possibility that, especially if he wins a second term in 2024, Harris may be required to assume office upon the incumbent’s unanticipated death or incapacity.
History underlines the crucial role that vice presidents stepping up to the presidency have played and it is perhaps Harry Truman who best exemplifies this. Truman was vice president from just January to April 1945 before assuming the presidency after Franklin Roosevelt died.
Within weeks of assuming office, Truman made several huge decisions, including the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That year he also attended the landmark Potsdam conference with the Soviet Union and the UK to decide how to administer the defeated Nazi Germany.
Even if Biden sees out that next four, or even eight years if he is re-elected, Harris could assume a growing array of foreign policy responsibilities, and may even succeed him in office through the ballot box. This is because the vice-presidency has become perhaps the single best transitional office to the Oval Office in recent decades.
Since 1960, four sitting vice-presidents (Richard Nixon in 1960, Hubert Humphrey in 1968, Walter Mondale in 1984, and Al Gore in 2000) won their party’s presidential nomination but then lost the general election. Moreover, three sitting or former office holders have been elected president (Nixon in 1968, George H.W. Bush in 1988, and Biden in 2020).
Harris hopes that she will be able to add to this list in 2024, 2028 or possibly even in the 2030s, a fact that will not be lost on her hosts in Singapore and Vietnam. Given the likelihood of her making such a presidential run, her international influence is only likely to therefore grow given the non-trivial possibility that she may well occupy the Oval Office herself in coming years.
*The writer is an Associate at LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics.
August 22, 2021
The viewpoints expressed by the authors do not necessarily reflect the opinions, viewpoints and editorial policies of Aequitas Review.
