Harris's South-east Asia tour may well help her cement her VP role

KAMALA Harris is in the midst of a tour of Southeast Asia in a bid to recapture the Biden team's foreign policy momentum after the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, yet it could also help cement herself in her role as US vice-president after a shaky start in office.

Her trip has two distinctive components. The 'safer' leg has been in Singapore since Sunday, while Vietnam could be more volatile from Tuesday afternoon.

In Singapore, Ms Harris has had meetings on the pandemic, the digital and green economy plus regional security with what is a longstanding ally. The two nations' strong relationship is founded, in part, on a 2003 bilateral trade agreement, and last year the United States overtook Europe as Singapore's largest investor, with more than 50 per cent of the nation's fixed asset commitments.

This is supplemented by a deep security relationship under the US-Singapore Strategic Framework Agreement. This allows US forces to use Singapore's air and naval assets, and on Monday she visited Changi Naval Base and the USS Tulsa ship.

Her visit, which builds from President Joe Biden's trip to Singapore as the-then vice-president in 2013, saw her on Monday greet President Halimah Yacob, followed by a meeting with Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. On Tuesday, she delivers a policy speech and participates in a business community forum.

From Tuesday afternoon, Ms Harris becomes the first sitting US vice-president to visit Vietnam, in what could potentially be a significantly trickier stop-off. This is despite the fact that the two countries now have a much improved relationship following the normalisation of diplomatic relations in 1995; the approval in 2007 by the US Congress of Permanent Normal Trade Relations for the two countries; and a lifting of an arms embargo in 2016.

Part of the reason this may not be an easy stop-off is that the Biden administration has said that there are limits to bilateral relations until Hanoi makes progress on human rights. Vietnam has undergone sweeping economic reforms and social change in recent decades, but the Communist Party retains a tight grip over media and tolerates little dissent.

Moreover, last week's fall of former president Ashraf Ghani's Afghan administration means many comparisons have been made with the trauma of the US experience in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. Especially the chaotic 1975 US evacuations from the roof of a CIA safe house in Saigon as the Viet Cong took the city, and current scenes in Kabul.

The pressure on Ms Harris in this trip, however, is not only because of the US setback in Afghanistan. In addition, she is perceived to have made an uneven start as vice-president with wobbly domestic poll ratings as her unfavourable numbers continue to outweigh positives.

RAISING PROFILE

This worries some Democrats who see her as potentially the party's nominee in 2024 if Joe Biden decides not to seek re-election when he will be in his early 80s. And it is in this troubled context that Ms Harris will therefore seek to use the tour to raise her profile as she seeks to become an effective international interlocutor.

In seeking to carve out a strong role for herself as vice-president, Ms Harris is following a pattern in the last quarter of a century whereby several of the recent incumbents of her job - Mr Biden, Dick Cheney, and Al Gore - all enjoyed sizeable influence in not just foreign policy but also domestic affairs too. Indeed, Mr Cheney, who was a predominant voice in many of George W Bush's international decisions, including the US-led invasion of Iraq, is widely viewed as the most powerful ever holder of the office.

Mr Biden and Mr Gore also played a major role in US foreign and domestic policy too. Mr Biden was, for instance, a key player encouraging Barack Obama to secure the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. A good example of Mr Gore's influence in Bill Clinton's administration was the driving force role he played in the international negotiations which led to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to help tackle climate change.

Only Mike Pence in this period was an exception to this pattern. He had a troubled relationship with Donald Trump and his influence in the White House ebbed and flowed, significantly, reflecting the up-down relationship of the then-president and vice-president.

Given that the ancestral home of the maternal relatives of Ms Harris is India, one international area in which she will try to make a big contribution is Asia policy. And it is therefore likely that she will make several further visits to the region in coming years, including India itself, with the Biden team continuing to make countering China the centrepiece of its foreign policy.

Part of the reason why Ms Harris could be such a key figure in this administration's international affairs is that Mr Biden was, last November, the oldest person ever to win the presidency. This elevates the possibility that, especially if he wins a second term in 2024, Ms Harris might be required to assume office upon any contingency.

History underlines the crucial role that VPs stepping up to the presidency have played and it is perhaps Harry Truman who best exemplifies this. Mr Truman was VP from just January to April 1945 before assuming the presidency after Franklin Roosevelt died.

Within weeks of assuming office, Mr Truman made several huge decisions, including the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He also attended that year the landmark Potsdam conference with the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom to decide how to administer the defeated Nazi Germany.

Even if President Biden sees out that next four, or even eight years if he is re-elected, Ms Harris could assume a growing array of foreign policy responsibilities, and may even succeed him in office through the ballot box. This is because the vice-presidency has become perhaps the single best transitional office to the Oval Office in recent decades.

PARTY'S PRESIDENTIAL NOMINATION

Since 1960, four sitting VPs (Richard Nixon in 1960, Hubert Humphrey in 1968; Walter Mondale in 1984; and Al Gore in 2000) won their respective party's presidential nomination but then lost the general election. Moreover, three sitting or former office holders have been elected president (Mr Nixon in 1968, George HW Bush in 1988, and Mr Biden in 2020).

Ms Harris hopes that she will be able to join this list, a fact that will not be lost on her hosts in Singapore and Vietnam. Given the likelihood of her making such a presidential run, her international influence is only likely to therefore grow given the non-trivial possibility that she may well occupy the Oval Office herself in coming years.

• The writer is an associate at LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics