Vice President Kamala Harris spent nearly four years working alongside a U.S. president for whom foreign policy is a passion bordering on political religion — one rooted in Cold War memories and a largely unchallenged U.S. global dominance.
Harris brings her own distinct worldview to the job of global leader — a next-generation outlook shaped instead by her life as a woman of color coming of age post-Cold War, a daughter of immigrants and someone who spent a career in law enforcement in California, the most diverse and progressive state in the U.S.
Specifics of Harris’ foreign policy have yet to be revealed; some aspects could become clearer during tonight’s presidential debate.
But those who know and have observed Harris anticipate a more modern outlook that embraces multilaterialsm even as it acknowledges the primacy of the U.S. role on the global stage.
They see Harris’ policies as driven less by dated political ideologies and more by ever-changing realities on the ground, but with a deeper emphasis on the core American values of rule of law and human rights, particularly when it involves women.
Two decades younger than Biden, Harris, 59, ascended onto the national political stage amid an era of threats and challenges to the U.S. that would put different issues to the fore in her foreign policy, current and former aides say, such as climate change, food security and the dangers of artificial intelligence.
Her background as daughter of a Jamaica-born economist and India-born cancer researcher has undoubtedly widened her aperture geopolitically. Such nuances could be observed amid the Israel-Hamas war. While affirming strong support for Israel’s right to self-defense, she has become the Biden administration’s loudest voice in support for Palestinians suffering in Gaza, inviting comparisons to America’s own civil rights struggle.
“Her upbringing, both as a daughter of immigrants but also the daughter of civil rights activists, did shape her, her political views and her worldview,” said Halie Soifer, who served as Harris’ national security advisor in her first two years as senator.
As vice president, Harris has focused efforts on the oft-neglected Caribbean region and its urgent struggles with climate change, where island nations are in danger of drowning in the sea.
Her first overseas trip as a U.S. senator was to a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan, where most of the desperate occupants were women and children. (She also visited U.S. military troops from California stationed in Iraq.)
She is the most senior official in the Biden administration to travel to sub-Saharan Africa.
“I expect to see her focusing more on parts of the world that traditional folks of European American background may be focused less on,” said Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former top State Department official under the Obama administration, during a recent Foreign Policy webinar.
Harris’ first foray on the global stage as vice president backfired badly.
Biden handed her the thankless task of attempting to curb illegal immigration by tackling the “root causes” of the northward exodus from Latin America. Although Republicans falsely brand Harris as the “border czar,” her mandate was never to control border crossings.
She was tasked with launching programs that would alleviate the suffering and lack of opportunity and basic rights of people living in the countries that were among those sending the largest numbers of migrants: El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.
Harris found she had no partners to work with. The governments of the three countries were riddled with corruption and un-democratic players, making honest negotiation impossible.
Biden, who often felt confident he could charm and cajole difficult leaders into concessions, might have taken them on despite their unsavory characteristics. Harris instead did not confront them publicly and sought out other partners to work with, like civic and business groups.
Some of her initial efforts have begun to bear fruit. She has chalked up more than $5 billion in mostly private-sector investment for the region. Meanwhile, illegal immigration from the three countries fell and shifted to other countries.
The difficulty of those dealings may have made her less willing to be bold in some initiatives, especially in foreign policy. She is not known for taking risks.
In speeches and actions, Harris has advocated for continued support of some of Biden’s marquee foreign policies, such as shoring up Ukraine in its fight against Russia and, with the same goal in mind, uniting and expanding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
She replaced Biden for three years running at the Munich Security Conference, a major decades-old annual meeting of world leaders in Germany to discuss peace. This year, she delivered a forceful address that acknowledged international jitters over the direction the U.S. might take under a new Trump administration.
Her government, she said, has “built and sustained alliances” that made the U.S. the most “powerful and prosperous” country on Earth — “alliances that have prevented wars, defended freedom, and maintained stability from Europe to the Indo-Pacific.”
She added a shout-out to advancing “rules and norms for outer space” and “to empower women around the globe.”
She has met with President Xi Jinping of China, mended fences with France’s Emmanuel Macron after a diplomatic blowup over a submarine contract, reassured Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine over continued supply of weapons and helped persuade NATO countries to welcome Sweden and Finland to their ranks.
She has traveled to 21 countries, including in Africa, and met with 150 world leaders, her office says.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, who attended the Munich meetings with Harris, said he has seen her “command a room full of world leaders.”
“And what I’ve observed is someone who asks time and again penetrating questions, who cuts to the chase and is intensely focused on the interests of the American people and making sure that our foreign policy is doing everything it can to advance those interests,” he said in July shortly after Biden dropped out of the presidential race.
“In my experience, [foreign policy] is very much her forte,” Blinken added.
It remains to be seen if Harris would be less willing than cold-warrior Biden to use military force against U.S. enemies — or if she might follow the more restrained practice of former President Obama.
One of Obama’s principal advisors, Phil Gordon, has served as Harris’ national security advisor for the last two years and is considered a leading candidate to follow a President Harris into the Oval Office in the same role.
Steeped in diplomacy in Europe and the Middle East, Gordon is generally placed in the progressive category of national security operatives. He served in senior European-affairs posts under both the Clinton and Obama administrations and more recently accused Trump of inflicting a “deathblow” on the U.S. alliance with NATO.
During the Obama administration, Gordon’s advice translated into a short-lived rapprochement with Russia, outreach to the Arab world and ardent support for the international Iran nuclear accord that curtailed Tehran’s nuclear program.
In a 2020 book, Gordon reviewed seven decades of failed U.S. interventions in the Middle East in scathing fashion, arguing that “regime change” rarely works and offers “false promise.” He advocated for a less hubristic and hegemonic U.S. role in the world and one with lower U.S.-centric ambitions.
He joined Harris’ national security team as the deputy advisor on her first day as vice president and was promoted to the top job 14 months later. Gordon, along with his deputy Rebecca Lissner, is said to have considerable influence on Harris in the formation of her foreign policy ideas.
Matthew Duss, a global affairs expert at the Center for International Policy, said Gordon and Lissner are likely to help Harris move foreign policy away from Biden’s Cold War prism of “America and the good guys versus the bad guys.”
“There’s an opportunity for her to diminish that kind of tension,” Duss said in an interview. “They have a different view of how America can act in the world. Not to say we want to withdraw or retrench from global affairs. … But part of using [U.S.] power effectively is being seen as legitimate when we use that power and influence, not doing so in just a completely self-interested, nationalist way.”
Times staff writer Noah Bierman contributed to this report.