WASHINGTON — When foreign leaders come to the White House these days, Vice President Kamala Harris is often among the first officials they see.
Harris and President Joe Biden are taking a divide and conquer approach to meetings with world leaders in which Harris regularly greets and holds separate sessions with heads of government before they meet with Biden in the Oval Office when they visit Washington.
The vice president had separate meetings in her ceremonial office on the White House complex this week with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi prior to their bilateral talks with Biden. Harris also met first with the leaders of South Korea, Japan and Germany during their visits this year.
“It is new and different,” said Barry Pavel, who was senior director for defense policy and strategy on the National Security Council under two previous presidents.
“It kills two or three birds with one stone, where she gets to start establishing these relationships more, where he can save some time in terms of protocol and continue advancing his very, very busy domestic agenda, as well as other foreign policy issues,” said Pavel, the senior vice president and director of the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council.
Senior administration officials say the sequencing of the meetings usually comes down to scheduling, and they are not making an effort to put Harris in front of world leaders before those dignitaries meet with the president.
Solo meetings such as the one she had this week with Modi are meant to “dive much deeper” into issues such as democracy, climate change, human rights, global health and regional security that are important to the administration, one official said.
“She wants to meet with leaders when it works for both of their schedules, and to reinforce the agenda that this administration has across the board,” a second official added.
But it is a departure from the prior administration, when former President Donald Trump typically ushered visiting leaders into the White House through the north entrance that connects to the West Wing or the south one that leads visitors through the Executive Residence.
Lisa Curtis, the senior director for South and Central Asia at NSC in the Trump administration, said that when former Vice President Mike Pence met with world leaders, it was usually because the president was unable to meet with them.
“It’s a slightly different model than we saw during the Trump administration, with the vice president having a completely separate meeting with a high-profile foreign leader the day before the president meets with a foreign leader,” said Curtis, a senior fellow and director of the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security.
Curtis said that Harris’ meeting with Modi this week, prior to the Quad Leaders Summit that Biden was hosting on Friday, is helpful to the promotion of U.S. interests. Harris is in a unique position, given her Indian heritage, to discuss respect for human and minority rights, said Curtis, while Biden is better positioned to focus on security issues in his conversation.
“I see it more as a way to sort of divide and conquer the enormous amount of issues, important issues, that we have with India,” she said.
In at least one instance, a foreign government sought a separate meeting with Harris. The United Kingdom requested the meeting with Harris that took place earlier this week, a UK official said.
The vice president’s office declined to say who requested the meeting.
Senior Biden administration officials said that Harris had a wide range of conversations with foreign officials this week, talking in her meeting with Johnson, for example, about issues from COVID-19 to global security. The U.S. official said Johnson and Harris had a particularly in-depth conversation about climate initiatives.
“Whether the vice president meets with a leader before the president or after the president, we are closely in sync,” the official said. “So we were very happy to do the meeting with the UK prime minister, and it gave the vice president an opportunity to raise things that are very much on the president’s agenda and to amplify sort of what our objectives are.”
GREATER EXPOSURE
It has helped to elevate the foreign policy profile of the vice president, who had limited exposure on the world stage prior to the White House.
“Foreign countries want to establish relationships with her, as well as with the president, both because a vice president is a prospective president,” said Joel Goldstein, a professor emeritus at Saint Louis University School of Law who has written books on the vice presidency.
It is not uncommon for a vice president to hold meetings with visiting leaders instead of the president, which Harris has also done on several occasions. She held talks with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei in her office before she visited those nations on her first foreign trip.
This week she also hosted Ghana President Nana Akufo-Addo and Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema at the White House. The conversations with the African leaders were said to focus on strengthening democracy in those countries and economic development.
Many foreign leaders were in New York this week for the United Nations General Assembly, and a handful traveled to Washington while they were in the United States.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga and India’s Modi were to be at the White House on Friday for the Quad Leaders Summit. Harris was to meet with them on Friday afternoon.
Harris has twice hosted foreign leaders for breakfast at the vice president’s residence at the Naval Observatory, a setting that is more intimate but not always convenient for visiting dignitaries — especially if they have a meeting immediately afterward with Biden at the White House.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel became the first foreign leader to dine with Harris at her home in July. Jordanian King Abdullah II also visited Harris’ home that month.
Rachel Rizzo, director of programs at the Truman Center and the Truman National Security Project, said she sees significance in Harris inviting Merkel, a strong female world leader, to her home, and there is a “camaraderie” of sorts between them.
Harris’ meetings with dignitaries are also a way of demonstrating the more equal partnership that Biden has committed to having with his vice president, Rizzo said.
“She doesn’t have these long relationships like Biden does, and I think for a lot of people, the Kamala Harris’ of the world are the future of the Democratic Party, in a way,” Rizzo said. “Making foreign leaders more familiar with some of the newer faces in the Democratic Party, I think it’s part of that strategy.”
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