Diplomat-in-chief Kamala Harris: Why the Vice President is leading the charge on the Ukraine crisis

Harris will visit Romania and Poland to reassure allies as the vice president emerges as a key foreign policy emissary, Eric Garcia writes

(Getty Images)

Vice President Kamala Harris will visit Romania and Poland in the coming days as part of the United States’ response to Russia’s assault on Ukraine, and part of Ms Harris’s increasingly visible foreign policy role in the Biden administration after months of negative criticism.

Ms Harris has emerged as the president’s main foreign policy emissary, both before and ahead of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraine. Last month, Mr Putin’s unprovoked invasion, she spoke at the Munich Security Conference and met with multiple heads of state.

When she heads to Warsaw and Bucharest, she will serve as President Joe Biden’s voice, including when she meets with Poland’s President Andrzej Duda and Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, as well as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. On Friday, she will meet with Romania’s President Klaus Iohannis before returning to Washington.

“My impression is that the administration is actually being thoughtful about her role,” Aaron Mannes, a lecturer at the University of Maryland who focuses on the vice presidency, told The Independent. Mr Mannes said the fact that Mr Biden served as Barack Obama’s vice president and that the 79-year-old president very much sees Ms Harris as his successor.

The meetings, and Ms Harris’s role, has also allowed the vice president to project an image of chief diplomat for the administration amid a flurry of stories about her staff leaving or her being isolated within the administration. Similarly, during the Biden administration’s exit from Afghanistan, which led to the American-allied government falling rapidly to the Taliban and 13 US service-members dying in an explosion, Ms Harris was in Vietnam and Singapore.

“I think the Afghanistan situation unfolded in ways the administration wasn’t prepared for,” Mr Mannes said, compared to the way the Biden administration was prepared for the war in Ukraine.

Joel K Goldstein, a professor emeritus at Saint Louis University School of Law who is an expert on the vice presidency, told The Independent that Ms Harris’ presence is also important given her historic nature as the first woman of colour to hold the office.

“Because Vice President Harris is a historic figure, she’s the first woman elected to national office in the US, there’s interest in her both domestically but in some ways I think even more globally, than would have been attached to any of her predecessors,” he said.

A senior administration official said Ms Harris “will coordinate with these close Allies about how we continue to do that – to effectively implement these sanctions”.

The visit allows Ms Harris to burnish her foreign policy credentials. Prior to joining Mr Biden’s presidential ticket as his running-mate, Ms Harris had little foreign policy experience, having mostly worked in domestic politics as a prosecutor and district attorney before winning two terms as California’s attorney general before she won her election to the Senate in 2016.

During her time in the Senate, she mainly focused on domestic issues and didn’t sit on the committees in which many presidential aspirants serve, such as the Armed Services or Foreign Relations Committees. At the same time, she joined the Senate Intelligence Committee shortly after it was revealed that Russia intervened in the 2016 presidential election.

“This is part of the administration really making an effort,” Mr Mannes said. “They’re absolutely building up her credentials.”

Halie Soifer, who served as a national security adviser in Ms Harris’ Senate office for the first part of her term, said that experienced helped “specifically in terms of understanding Vladimir Putin’s belligerence and intransigence as it relates to attacking democracy.”

“That experience is certainly applicable to the work she is doing now in helping to announce our response to Putin’s war,” she said.

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris disembarks from Air Force Two upon arrival at Warsaw Chopin Airport in Warsaw, Poland, Wednesday, March 9, 2022, as she travels on a 3-day trip to Poland and Romania for meetings about the war in Ukraine. (Saul Loeb/Pool via AP) (AP)

Ms Soifer also said that while Ms Harris earned plaudits when she questioned former FBI director James Comey and former Attorney General Jeff Sessions about his contacts with Russian officials, that was only part of the job.

“But the majority of her work took place behind the scenes,” she said. “That was going through intelligence and as we now know that committee was focused for years on investigating Russia’s role in interfering our presidential election.”

Similarly, Rebecca Bill Chavez, who was a foreign policy adviser to Ms Harris’ presidential campaign, also said how Ms Harris is familiar with the troubles that Ukraine faces, as she was a senator when the House impeached Donald Trump for trying to force Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to dig up dirt on Joe Biden in exchange for military aid.

“Of course the particular role she played in the Senate ... really explains why she’s focusing so much on this,” she said. Similarly, Ms Bill Chavez said Ms Harris was intensely focused on Nato and working together with allies in her presidential campaign.

“Just the overall kind of malign global influence of Russia is something she’s talked about a long time,” she said.

Ms Harris’ pronounced role also allows her to move past some previous criticisms. When Ms Harris visited Latin America in response to child migrants arriving at the US-Mexico border, she was criticised for laughing when NBC News’s Lester Holt asked why she hadn’t visited the border.

Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a meeting with Estonia's Prime Minister Kaja Kallas, Latvian President Egils Levits, and Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda, during the Munich Security Conference in Munich, Friday, Feb. 18, 2022

Mr Biden also charged her with passing a new version of the Voting Rights Act, which the Supreme Court had significantly weakened in 2013. But the Senate failed to pass a new version in January after Democratic Sens Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia joined Republicans to oppose a change in the filibuster.

Part of Ms Harris’ challenges came from the fact Mr Biden served in Washington in the Senate for 36 years and eight years as vice president, giving him significant experience negotiating in Congress and on the global stage.

Mr Mannes said in the past, Americans have elected outsiders whose vice presidents are insiders, as was the case with Mr Obama, who served the same length of time in the Senate as Ms Harris before his presidential election, with Mr Biden as his No 2.

“We now have the opposite,” he said. “Biden is a deeply seasoned insider and VP Harris is the outsider. I think it’s interesting that despite that, she’s playing this critical high-level role.”

Similarly, stories have abounded in multiple publications of staff leaving her office, or the workplace mired by chaos. All of these elements led to her average approval rating going down to 39 per cent, according to FiveThirtyEight.

But she has also taken a more prominent role in recent weeks, having travelled to sell the bipartisan infrastructure bill that Congress passed and Mr Biden signed.

Similarly, she was involved in the president’s nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, having interviewed the judge before Mr Biden did, according to a questionnaire Ms Jackson sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Mr Biden specifically cited Ms Harris’ experience on the committee, which he also led when he was a senator.

That doesn’t mean that Ms Harris won’t face significant challenges. She will be heading to Poland just after the United States rebuffed its offer of allowing MiG-29 fighter jets to be placed at a US military base in Germany. A senior administration official said that they have “been in dialogue with the Poles for some time about how best to provide a variety of security assistance to Ukraine. And that's a dialogue that absolutely will continue up to and as part of the vice president's trip.”

“And so we expect that we will continue talking about how to achieve this really important objective,” they said on the condition of anonymity. “A number of people have had a variety of ideas, and we think all of them are worth discussing. And that's what we're going to continue doing.”

Similarly, ahead of Russia’s invasion, Mr Zelensky expressed frustration and questioned Nato’s commitment to Ukraine joining the alliance during his address to the Munich Security Conference.

“It doesn't happen overnight,” she said in response in February. “No one country can say ‘I want to be, and therefore I will be.” And no one country can say ‘You can't be.’ And isn't that at the heart of the very issue we’re presented with in terms of Russia's aggression, or stated aggression, toward Ukraine?”

At the same time, Mr Mannes said that Ms Harris as vice president has the ability to make a significant impact in her trip to Europe, specifically because Mr Biden has to be in Washington during the international crisis.

“It would be unwise for him to be leaving,” she said.

Ms Soifer said it was clear her role in the administration did not start with Munich and won’t end with Munich.

“She provided critical assurance to our allies stood with them in the face of Russian aggression,” she said. “Now she’ll return to Eastern Europe amid this war to provide similar assurances.”