Vice President Kamala Harris’s Real-World School of Foreign Policy

Seventy-six countries have had at least one woman president or prime minister, and 118 have not. The United States is among the latter group, but that may finally change with the presumptive nomination of Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic Party’s candidate. The historic nature of this event cannot be overstated, due to the many barriers that women in politics must surmount. Should Harris win, her success will be based on her performance as a candidate and her merits for the office, which is as it should be—not because of her gender but despite her gender. 

Many features of the U.S. presidential system, its electoral college, and its winner-take-all electoral rules, have made it difficult for a woman to reach the top office, despite women’s economic, professional, and educational accomplishments. The lack of national childcare and family leave and male-dominated political parties and fundraising networks count among the many structural impediments that prevent women from competing on a level playing field. But one of the most significant impediments to women winning the presidency is a persistent belief by almost half (49 percent) that men are better equipped to lead countries, simply because they are men. Digging deeper, a central component of this prejudice is skepticism that women can handle the existential life-and-death decisions posed by foreign policy crises—arguably the most critical single role of the chief executive and commander in chief. According to the Pew Research Center, 37 percent of those surveyed say men are better at national security and defense versus five percent who say women do better.   

For the past three and half years, Vice President Harris has been in training for the job of leading this country. She has helped conduct U.S. foreign policy and international crisis management at the highest levels, with the explicit assignment of being ready to lead both should circumstances require her to become the pilot rather than the wing-woman. That is literally the job of the vice president. The issues that the Biden-Harris administration has faced during this term could not be more existential: Russia’s nuclear saber-rattling, the first conventional war on European soil since World War II; strengthening and expanding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance; confronting a rising China with strong defense and a strategy to manage the most competitive geopolitical rivalry of our time; and grappling with rapid technological and climate change that is altering the foundation and fabric of life, to mention a few of the daily challenges. 

Much of the news coverage about Vice President Harris over the past three and a half years has been more trivial than substantive, and often played into sexist and racist stereotypes. The social media screeds have been even more lamentable, and some of the more egregious slurs have been propagated by the Republican ticket. The deluge in the first week of her presidential campaign prompted House Speaker Mike Johnson to admonish his fellow Republicans to avoid such slurs and focus on her and the administration’s record. So to set the record straight, the degree to which the vice president has been front and center in the daily tasks of governing a country can be summed up in a few metrics: she has regularly participated in Cabinet meetings and emergency meetings in the White House situation room, and held frequent lunches with the president to discuss and advise him on the most pressing issues of the day. 

As with her predecessors, Joe Biden, George H.W. Bush, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, and Harry Truman, Harris has been given critical substantive foreign policy portfolios to manage as vice president. As vice president, Biden handled the immigration portfolio, and he bequeathed it to Harris. Immigration is a complex issue that has evolved well beyond Central American migration in the last three years to include a deluge from failed and autocratic states like Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, as well as a historic surge from non-Latin American countries reflecting global turmoil and a record number of refugees. Given that the pull factor of a broken immigration and asylum system requires congressional action to fix, the administration focused on ameliorating the “push factors” as well as stop-gap executive actions to address the border with help from origin and transit countries. The vice president led a $5 billion increase in private investment and bilateral aid to address root causes of crime, poverty, and unemployment that propel migration and set up offices in origin countries to allow asylum seekers to apply there rather than attempt the life-threatening journey through jungles alone or with coyotes who prey on the vulnerable. In the course of this work, Harris met with the heads of Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras and led the U.S. delegation at the 2022 Summit of the Americas. 

Far less noticed have been the roles that Harris has played in cutting-edge issues that affect U.S. national security, its competitive edge, and a values-based foreign policy. She chairs the National Space Council, which orchestrates policy across civil, commercial, and national security domains ranging from space exploration and the space industrial base, to threats emanating from China’s burgeoning investment in satellite and anti-satellite capabilities that are pivotal to modern warfare as well as daily communication and commerce. Harris has also taken the lead in several initiatives on the safe and responsible development and use of artificial intelligence (AI), enlisting both the tech sector and philanthropies, which she announced at the AI Summit in London last winter.  

Harris has visited seven Asian countries, met with dozens of Asian leaders including Chinese President Xi Jinping and major U.S. allies Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia, and Thailand. She represented the United States at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and East Asia summits, reassuring and building ties with the nations most affected on a daily basis by China’s growing economic clout and geopolitical bid to control the South China Sea. She discussed a limited free-trade deal with the president of Indonesia and issued a joint statement with Japan and Philippine leaders to signal their trilateral cooperation in maritime security.  

Harris made a weeklong visit to Africa last year, to follow up on the U.S.-Africa summit and U.S. initiatives to bring private sector investment, financing, and digital transformation in a not-so-subtle competition with China, which has become Africa’s largest trading partner and investor. As America’s first Black vice-president, Harris received a warm reception not seen since Obama’s visits during his presidency. 

Among Harris’s meetings with 150 heads of state and government, her meetings this year with embattled Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky have been among her most significant in terms of substance and timing. In a joint news conference following her address at the Munich Security Conference in February, she publicly assured Zelensky and Europe of the administration’s commitment, amid a bruising battle with Republicans in Congress, to provide urgently needed aid to stop Russian advances in its war of attrition in Ukraine. She met with Zelensky again in June at the Global Peace Summit convened in Switzerland to declare U.S. support for a just and lasting peace and deliver humanitarian and reconstruction aid as Russia opened a new front outside of Kharkiv.  

Harris will be running on the Biden-Harris record, and thus in line for criticism of its failures as well as achievements which include building and holding together a fifty-country coalition to support Ukraine, gaining increased European contributions to NATO, an array of bipartisan legislative victories to strengthen American competitiveness, recover from the pandemic, confront climate change, and engineer a soft landing for the economy following a painful fight against inflation. Harris as presidential candidate will also step out from that record to identify her priorities and next steps for building on the administration achievements and areas where she will strike out in new directions. One adaptation will likely be a stronger policy of supporting Palestinian needs and rights while maintaining support for Israel’s defense, albeit with stricter conditions to prevent civilian harm.  

In sum, Harris’s foreign policy experience has been wider and deeper than many past and present candidates, and now that she has stepped into the race, voters will be listening closely for her to speak about her priorities and proposals for the future. While she will not likely break with central features of the Biden campaign, she is likely to make concerted overtures to show that she is in touch with the concerns of the younger electorate and fully cognizant of the systemic risks that climate, technology, and geopolitical tensions pose for all. If she meets that test, she may succeed in surmounting longstanding biases and doubts about a woman president. The many Americans who have said they would vote for a qualified woman will have a chance to do that—dispelling their own lingering doubts that they might see such an outcome in their lifetimes.