U.S. President Joe Biden’s decision this weekend to step down from the race leaves Vice President Kamala Harris as the almost-certain Democratic candidate. As vice president, Harris has largely focused on domestic issues such as labor rights and gun violence. Since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs vs. Jackson decision, the matter of reproductive rights has emerged as Harris’s signature issue—but her record on international affairs and her use of the office’s power, such as it is, offer important clues as to how she might use her potential role as president.
But what exactly are the criteria for being a good foreign-policy vice president?
Since the late 1970s, when then-President Jimmy Carter and Vice President Walter Mondale reinvented the office so that the vice president could be a governing partner and not just a spare leader in case of disaster, vice presidents have had access to both the policy process and the president. But that vice-presidential power and influence are completely derived from the president’s compliance, without any constitutional or legal force. While serving as vice president, Biden himself once said, “I’m the highest-paid staff officer in the government.”
A good staffer makes their principal more effective, identifying gaps and weaknesses in the administration and filling them. Recent vice presidents have been across-the-board advisors who have balanced policy with politics, acted as surrogates and messengers, and taken charge of critical issues or task forces. Mondale helped Carter with legislative affairs, while his relationships with Israel and U.S. Jewish communities were critical in Carter’s signature foreign-policy achievement, the Camp David Accords.
George H.W. Bush was a utility infielder with a range of administrative experience as vice president, plugging gaps in then-President Ronald Reagan’s chaotic national security process. Vice President Al Gore played a key role in the Clinton administration’s Russia policy as co-chair of the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission. Vice President Dick Cheney, among other things, was the architect of the post-9/11 domestic intelligence operations. As a former White House chief of staff, member of the House Intelligence Committee, and secretary of defense, Cheney and his staff developed the Terrorist Surveillance Program while keeping it secret from much of Congress and the government. And Biden played “devil’s advocate” during then-President Barack Obama’s Afghanistan policy review process in order to help prevent the president from being boxed in by the Defense Department.
Harris has faced significant barriers to helping Biden. Since the expansion of the vice-presidential role in the late 1970s, most presidents have been outsiders to Washington, D.C. These presidents tended to select experienced D.C.-insider VPs and turned to them for advice and help with Congress and international affairs. Biden, with 36 years in the Senate (during which he focused on foreign affairs) and eight years as vice president, had little need for assistance.
Further, he has a deeply experienced staff, some of whom have worked with him for decades. Harris, meanwhile, was new to D.C. four years ago. She is an experienced politician—but primarily in the context of California and domestic politics, meaning that she had limited opportunities to fill the gaps, few as they were, in Biden’s experience. Nor did she have a deep bench of experienced staffers who knew both her and Washington. The early turmoil on her staff—along with some of her poor public appearances—was the result.
But the turnover in personnel eventually produced a solid and capable team in a town where personnel is policy. Harris’s first national security advisor (VPNSA), former Ambassador to Bulgaria Nancy McEldowney, left the position in March 2022. The deputy VPNSA, Philip Gordon, then took the top spot. Gordon had worked as an assistant secretary of state and a senior National Security Council staffer in the Obama administration—and he had many options to serve in the Biden administration. His choice to remain at the vice president’s office suggests that it is not a policy backwater.
Under Obama, the VPNSA also held the title of deputy assistant to the president (the second tier in the hierarchy of White House staffers). However, Gordon is instead described by the Biden administration as an assistant to the president—the top tier of White House staffers. Gordon’s deputy is Rebecca Lissner, who had previously been the acting senior director for strategic planning on the National Security Council, where she oversaw the development of the Biden administration’s National Security Strategy. Harris also has a speechwriter dedicated specifically to foreign-policy issues as well as a military advisor.
Harris was never cut out of the process, and she had input to major decisions. Members of Biden’s team, many of whom also served under him when he was vice president, have publicly acknowledged the challenges that she faced. Vice presidents, however, are expected to be discreet in advising the president to ensure that there are no damaging leaks, and the Biden White House ran a tight ship—so until memoirs are written and documents are declassified, it is difficult to know the extent of her influence.
The foreign-policy issue that Harris is best known for is immigration and the border. The matter highlights her strengths and weaknesses. Biden assigned her to help mitigate illegal immigration after she offered suggestions for working with Central American countries to address the root causes of immigration. She had not sought the assignment, and when she received it, she tried to distance herself from the related issue of border security.
This did not prevent Republicans from dubbing her the “border czar,” and it led to a disastrous interview with NBC News anchor Lester Holt, in which she tried to avoid talking about the border. Holt pressed Harris about not having visited the southern border, and she replied, “And I haven’t been to Europe. I don’t understand the point you’re making.”
Her efforts to evade being tagged with the border issue only heightened her association with it—and her sometimes maladroit communication skills. But over time, she built relationships with players in Central America that paid dividends. The public-private Partnership for Central America that she led helped generate more than $5.2 billion in private sector commitments to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. These efforts also supported the administration’s successful effort to ensure a peaceful transition of power after a contested election in Guatemala.
Other successes are more far-reaching. Trump reestablished the National Space Council (a traditional vice-presidential assignment) early in his term, and Harris succeeded Vice President Mike Pence as its chair. In that role, she has overseen the highly technical process of developing regulations for space commerce while doing yeoman’s work quintupling the signatories to the Artemis Accords, an agreement that encourages common standards of behavior in space, from the original eight. On April 18, 2022, Harris made a bold diplomatic stroke by announcing a unilateral U.S. commitment to not carry out anti-satellite weapons tests—which create debris that crowds the atmosphere and threatens the use of space. This was a much-lauded move to create norms for space activity, and it places China and Russia, which have not committed to a test ban, on the defensive.
Harris has also represented the U.S abroad. Vice presidents have long been high-level diplomatic envoys—not just seat-warmers at funerals. Almost exactly 45 years ago, for instance, Mondale gave a speech in Geneva that galvanized the world into action to rescue the “boat people” driven out of Vietnam. His vice presidential successor, George H.W. Bush, led the diplomatic efforts to gain European support for new intermediate-range missile deployments.
In November 2021, Harris visited France—officially to commemorate Armistice Day, but also to smooth over tense Franco-American relations. The French were perturbed by a deal between the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia that had ended a lucrative French submarine contract with Australia. While there, Harris enjoyed a good rapport with French President Emmanuel Macron and successfully persuaded the French to sign the Artemis Accords, facilitating collaboration in space. Since then, she has met innumerable foreign leaders abroad and at home, including when she represented the United States in 2022 and 2023 at the Munich Security Conference.
This limited survey of Harris’s foreign-policy work does not indicate a grand strategy or worldview. Instead, her work has been about developing a skill set of policymaking and implementation, as well as learning and using the tools available to her office.
Should Kamala Harris become president, this experience will be critical.
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