The new senators in In the US, presidential candidates and current vice presidents are often advised to talk as little as possible about foreign affairs so as not to distract the American public, which should be quiet about these matters, writes "Chatham House".
That left reporters, think tanks and foreign diplomats scrambling to figure out where presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris might differ from President Joe Biden.
A few things are certain: Harris represents a significant generational shift. She adopts the globalized perspective one would expect from a daughter of immigrants who spent part of her childhood in Canada. She will take office with an experienced team around her. And aside from Biden, Americans have to go all the way back to George H. W. Bush in 1989 to find a president with more experience in foreign affairs than her to take office.
Harris has spoken and written frequently about her immigrant parents, invoking her mother's South Asian folk sayings on the campaign trail and retracing family trips to Africa during her official tour.
Harris shares this experience not only with former President Barack Obama, but also with a large and growing share of the US population. As of 2019, more than one in ten US citizens - and a quarter of American children - have at least one immigrant parent.
It's a change for a world accustomed to American presidents invoking their Irishness - Biden and Obama, and Clinton, Reagan and Kennedy before them - even though it's only been 65 years since a Democratic Party worried that Kennedy was too Irish to be elected.
Changed perspective and significant experience
Biden's deep emotional commitments to NATO and Israel reflect the American preoccupations of his youth. But Harris connects with a population for whom these responsibilities are two of many, with claims on US attention and resources that are undoubtedly strategic but not necessarily sacrosanct. Notably, concern about threats emanating from specific other countries peaks among the oldest Americans and declines steadily among younger ones, unlike concerns about climate change and human rights.
Harris may not be like his predecessors as he is as comfortable with young artists in Ghana as he is at the Munich Security Conference.
As a senator, she served on the Intelligence and Homeland Security committees, overseeing some of the most highly classified and controversial aspects of US national security policy. She was known for arriving at hearings prepared and offering challenging cross-examinations of witnesses, as would be expected of an experienced federal prosecutor.
She didn't raise any major international issues during her time in Congress -- but any political adviser would say that's a plus, not a minus, in the US media landscape.
Vice Presidential Achievements
As vice president, Harris made 17 foreign trips in three and a half years, reflecting both President Biden's view of her role and his own limited travel. Some of these trips were very important. Harris attended the Munich Security Conference shortly after Russia launched its full-scale war against Ukraine in 2022, as well as the APEC and ASEAN summits and the 2023 COP climate summit in Dubai.
Other engagements have been diplomacy that consumes the calendars of senior officials - trips to Mexico and Central America as part of her migration program and a trip to three countries in Africa in fulfillment of a White House pledge.
Attending a meeting is, of course, not the same as making the final decision on US foreign policy. But that experience — and the hours of meeting and studying that go with it — sets Harris apart from new presidents of the past three-plus decades.
Donald Trump had never represented his country before a foreign government before he was elected. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush led international trade missions as governors. Barack Obama, like Harris, traveled occasionally during his four years in the Senate. But we have to go all the way back to George HW Bush, who served as vice president, CIA director and member of Congress, to find a president before Biden who began his first term with more experience than Harris.
Harris has a stable and respected foreign policy team in his role as vice president. Her national security adviser, Phil Gordon, and his deputy, Rebecca Lissner, are experienced Washington officials who have served in previous administrations. Both have published books that suggest a subtle departure from America leading the world aggressively and alone.
As Jim Lindsay of the Council on Foreign Relations notes, Harris' foreign policy platform during her 2020 campaign for the Democratic nomination was not prominent in the party's mainstream. While vice president, she staunchly supported Ukraine and led the response to former President Trump's threats not to protect NATO allies.
Although she has not been as forthright on Indo-Pacific issues, she has met with Xi Jinping and her itineraries to Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines underscore her commitment to Biden's security and economic agendas in the region.< /p>
She will also inherit Biden's challenge of supporting deep economic engagement in the region while maintaining faith in local organized labor and activists who are deeply skeptical of traditional free trade approaches there -- a view she reaffirmed as opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership. (During the Trump administration, Harris also voted against the USMCA, NAFTA's successor trade agreement, saying it lacked sufficient environmental provisions. The Biden administration has used the USMCA aggressively to address competition, worker rights, and environmental concerns. )
Gaza
Harris' reticence is made all the more remarkable by the fact that she has allowed her disagreements with Biden to become public on just one issue -- the war in Gaza.
As recently as last December, there were leaks from the usually tight-lipped White House that the vice president wanted a tougher stance on the conduct of the war than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In public appearances in December and March, she took a harder line. She also publicly acknowledged the human cost of the conflict to Palestinian civilians in ways that Biden struggled to do.
This episode is small -- it doesn't appear to have resulted in significant policy changes for Biden -- but it can teach us a few things about Harris's approach more broadly.
She was careful but firm about the message she wanted to convey and the change she proposed was well-tailored to the views of the American public, and particularly younger voters, on the conflict.
American presidents tend to evolve their thinking about foreign policy as they grow into the role. In this regard, Biden and Trump were the exception. The American people, who tend to approach foreign affairs with a mixture of idealism and skepticism, may be ready for a president who does the same.
Still, the fact that she has quietly stood her ground on the Gaza issue in recent days - choosing to attend a campaign event rather than Netanyahu's address to Congress on Thursday - offers one signal of a shift in foreign policy The US we can expect. That half the Democrats in Congress have since followed her lead provides a clue to how she might implement her views.