Vice President Kamala Harris has been “a leading voice for American foreign policy” under President Joe Biden, according to Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
“These last three and a half years, I’ve been able to observe her very closely in the Situation Room, in the Oval Office, around the world as a leading voice for American foreign policy and for our diplomacy,” Blinken told reporters Tuesday. “I’ve seen her command the room full of world leaders from not only across Europe but across the world.”
Blinken vouched for Harris in response to a question about whether she would be “an able replacement” for Biden. Her emergence as the presumptive Democratic standard-bearer in the 2024 presidential election will allow the party to pursue the presidency unburdened by the doubts about physical fitness that sent Biden’s candidacy into terminal decline, but it also has put a sudden pressure on Harris’ team to establish her credentials as possible head-of-state.
“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.
Blinken, a longtime aide to Biden during the Delaware Democrat’s career in the Senate and the White House, argued Harris has been involved in U.S. foreign policymaking regarding major theaters “across the world,” from the migration crisis to Europe and the Indo-Pacific.
“I think she’s made four trips to the Indo-Pacific, helping to lead our diplomacy there. She’s deeply engaged in the Middle East, in trying to find a peaceful path forward. Helping to drive investment in countries in our own hemisphere so that people have opportunity in the countries that they come from so that they don’t have to make a hazardous journey to the United States seeking a better life because they can get in their own country,” he said. “In each and every one of these areas, she’s been a leading voice in our administration.”
Blinken offered that assessment amid reports that Harris does not intend to retain him as top diplomat if she wins the White House.
“According to Harris’s office, [Blinken]; White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan; spokesman for the Security Council National in the White House John Kirby; and U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin will leave,” YNET News reported. “And Harris’s national security adviser, Philip Gordon, is expected to be appointed to a key role.”
Gordon, who worked at the State Department and the White House National Security Council during former President Barack Obama’s presidency, has a reputation for being “on the progressive wing of the national security continuum.”
Harris, whose first week as Biden’s heir-apparent coincides with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s controversial visit to the United States, is treading carefully while signaling to Israeli officials and the Democratic voters that she has “deep concerns about the humanitarian situation in Gaza and the loss of innocent life” and wants the war to end.
“Obviously, there’s the most immediate challenge of all, which is, you know, the fighting that is going on in Gaza and the humanitarian consequences of that fighting, which we can get to in a policy sense,” Gordon told the Council on Foreign Relations in May. “The path that we have laid out for some time is still essentially the only path, which starts with a hostage and ceasefire deal that gets converted into a longer-term ceasefire, with measures taken to prevent Hamas from ever being in a position again to rule Gaza … Our longer-term goal is a negotiated version of a Palestinian state. “And then, the last piece of that path and vision would be the normalization arrangement with Saudi Arabia.”
Biden assured his former campaign staff that he intends to pursue those objectives during his final months in office.
“What he’s intensely focused on is the work that remains over these next six months to continue the efforts, the work that we’ve been doing, particularly trying to bring peace to the Middle East, ending the war in Gaza, putting that region on a better trajectory,” Blinken confirmed Tuesday. “So he’s determined to continue that work, and I’m determined to continue it with him.”
Blinken’s praise for the vice president dovetailed with the support of about 350 “former national security leaders” who affirmed that Harris “requires no on-the-job training,” as they put it in an open letter. Yet Blinken’s commentary is also congenial of former President Donald Trump’s apparent intent to argue that Harris and Biden have the “same record of failure,” particularly with respect to the southern border.
“She’s the same as Biden, [but] more radical,” Trump said Tuesday. “She’s a radical person, and this country doesn’t want a radical left person to destroy it. She’s far more radical than he is. She wants open borders. She wants things that nobody wants.”
Other Republicans have dubbed Harris the “border czar” of the administration based on Biden’s decision to task her with coordinating with Latin American governments on “stemming the migration to our southern border,” as he put it in 2021. Yet Harris’ team was careful to distance her from the border crisis itself.
“After the announcement, Harris’s aides appeared to ‘panic,’ according to one of the officials, out of concern that her assignment was being mischaracterized and could be politically damaging if she were linked to the border, which at the time was facing a growing number of arrivals,” CNN reported at the time. “One of the officials said Harris appears eager for a portfolio that will allow her to achieve political victories, especially in foreign policy, an area where she is far less experienced than Biden.”
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In any case, Blinken maintained that she’s a skilled practitioner of foreign policy.
“I would say in my experience it very much is her forte because, as I said, I’ve seen her not only around the world, but I’ve seen her on the most critical foreign policy questions of our time in the Situation Room,” he said. “What I’ve seen is someone who is already deeply experienced and very, very effective around the world.”