Harris holding steady on Southeast Asia trip
HONOLULU — In Singapore, in between a foreign policy speech and a roundtable talk about supply chain issues, Vice President Kamala Harris stopped to smell the flowers.
Specifically, she checked out an orchid that the country named after her — a light fuschia hybrid named Papilionanda Kamala Harris.
“Oh, this is extraordinary,” she marveled as she took a brief tour of the lush Flower Field room of Singapore’s iconic Gardens By the Bay on Tuesday.
It was a brief — and rare — moment of normalcy for Harris during a diplomatic trip chock full of extraordinary circumstances.
Harris’ weeklong trip to Singapore and Vietnam was shadowed from start to finish by the crisis in Afghanistan. Questions about the messy U.S. withdrawal dominated her first few days in Singapore, and the attack that killed 13 Americans outside the Kabul airport caused her to nix a planned visit to California on her way home.
In the middle, Harris delayed by a few hours her travel to Vietnam because of concern about potential health attacks against U.S. diplomats there.
And the trip itself played out against the backdrop of a global pandemic that kept Harris hemmed in by the carefully choreographed stagecraft of diplomatic meetings.
But those very crises may in fact have contributed to what analysts say was the overall success of the trip.
“Buffeted by these concerns about things that were happening both in Hanoi and elsewhere, they held pretty steady,” said Ted Osius, who served as U.S. ambassador to Vietnam under former President Barack Obama.
“They delivered key messages to our partners and showed both continuity and a future for the relationships, by the fact that they had steady nerves and they continued with the trip, even despite these challenges.”
Amid the withdrawal from Afghanistan, one of Harris’ top tasks for the trip was to reassure U.S. allies that America can be trusted to stand by its commitments. Osius said the Vietnamese now “know that we trust each other enough to be able to carry on, even in turbulent, unusual times.”
In Singapore, and again in Vietnam, Harris repeated administration talking points about the evacuation effort being the White House’s “highest priority” and avoided getting bogged down in recriminations over what went wrong.
On confronting China — the trickiest diplomatic issue for Harris during the trip — the vice president struck a balance in delivering a rebuke of what she called China’s “bullying” in the South China Sea while also offering a more constructive vision for the U.S. relationship with Singapore and Vietnam.
While her visit offered up a number of new opportunities for cooperation between the U.S. and its Southeast Asian allies, it lacked engagement with local people.
With the coronavirus pandemic surging again across much of Southeast Asia, Harris and her entourage were largely confined to their hotel rooms. Upon arriving in both Singapore and Vietnam, the entire delegation received COVID-19 tests and had to quarantine until the results came through.
“Just like we had to reinvent domestically what a political campaign looks like — official travel is now subject to that same upheaval,” said Eric Schultz, who served as principal deputy press secretary for Obama. “Building cultural relationships is person to person. When you take that out of the equation, it just becomes harder.”