President Joe Biden had the benefit of decadeslong personal relationships with world leaders as he sought to restore U.S. credibility on the global stage.
Vice President Kamala Harris, if elected president, would enter the White House with a fraction of Biden’s experience – raising questions about how she would navigate all the diplomatic and geopolitical challenges that would immediately confront her. The next president will have to jump into issues ranging from a tense relationship with China, to the war in Ukraine, to a powder keg in the Middle East.
But Harris isn’t coming in cold. As vice president, she has engaged with more foreign leaders than might be expected of a one-term U.S. senator and former California attorney general and prosecutor.
POLITICO reviewed more than 100 of Harris’ publicly available calls and meetings with world leaders as vice president and found interactions ranging from extensive discussions with members of the Israeli government to a meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
A look at who Harris talks to, and how often, provides a window into her existing strengths in foreign policy — and where she may have some cold calls to make.
Harris has most often handled calls and meetings with leaders in Asia and the Middle East, and has spoken with a limited cross-section of European, Latin American and African heads of state. Her call logs lack any engagement with complicated U.S. allies and partners such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan or Hungary, and she has yet to meet with Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
But she has deep ties with Israeli leaders, and her meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his visit this week will not be their first encounter.
She has also spoken frequently with the leaders of Japan, Mexico, Jordan and the Philippines. And Harris would be no stranger to Kyiv. She’s had multiple meetings with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Harris still has a lot of people to convince that she’s built up a robust foreign policy resume.
“It’s been hard to track her influence from the outside,” said John Hannah, who worked as a foreign policy aide in both Democratic and Republican administrations and served as Vice President Dick Cheney’s national security adviser.
“It’s possible that Vice President Harris has played a similarly influential role over the past three and a half years — but if she has, it’s certainly been one of Washington’s best-kept secrets,” said Hannah, who is now a senior fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America.
But National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said Harris has been core to the Biden administration’s international strategy.
“She brings her own gravity to these discussions and to these relationships,” said Kirby. He also said that Harris and Biden have worked together to send a “unified message” to allies and adversaries alike.
Asia on speed-dial
Some of Harris’ closest ties are with Indo-Pacific heads of state, and with Israeli and Ukrainian leadership.
Harris stepped in for Biden at summits with Asian and Pacific island heads of state, and she also traveled to the region following House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s August 2022 visit to Taiwan, which saw tensions flare between Washington and Beijing. The White House explained that the purpose of the visit was to show the U.S. was not “intimidated” by Chinese saber-rattling at the time.
A White House official, who like others was granted anonymity to discuss Harris’ role in sensitive foreign policy decisions, said the vice president is seen inside the White House as an “integral player in the Biden-Harris administration’s China policy.”
While she’s met with all the leaders of Washington’s treaty allies in the Indo-Pacific, she’s had the most interactions with Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. Since Marcos took office in the Philippines, Harris has met with him six times, and the two have developed “a close personal relationship,” with him, per the official. She has also met with his vice president, Sara Duterte, and visited Palawan, a Philippines island in the South China Sea.
Meanwhile, Harris has met with Kishida five times since he became prime minister and hosted a luncheon alongside Secretary of State Antony Blinken during Kishida’s April state visit. She also led the official U.S. delegation to the September 2022 funeral of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
That relationship-building with Tokyo and Manila, the official added, helped bring Japan and the Philippines closer on efforts to combat China in the Indo-Pacific.
She has also met or spoken with the leaders of Vietnam, India, Thailand, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Singapore and South Korea over the last three years.
Multiple contacts in Israel
Among Middle Eastern countries, Harris has the closest connections with Israeli leaders. She’s met with and spoken with a litany of high-ranking Israeli officials, including former Prime Minister Yair Lapid, opposition leader Benny Gantz and Netanyahu since taking office.
Harris also sits in on Biden’s calls with Israeli officials, and she’s either been on the line or sitting in the room during Biden’s calls with Netanyahu, the White House said.
But her closest relationship is with Israeli President Isaac Herzog, the ceremonial leader of Israel. They met when she was a senator and he was then-opposition leader. Herzog gave her an extensive tour of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, during that trip, where he showed Harris the building’s art and sat with her in the gallery. According to Halie Soifer, who served as Harris’ national security adviser at the time, the two hit it off instantly.
“There was an instant rapport with Herzog,” said Soifer, who now serves as chief executive of the Jewish Democratic Council of America. “I know that they forged a connection that day, and that they have built upon that now that she’s in the White House, and he obviously is president.”
Harris has spoken to Herzog regularly following the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel. They have held five calls since October, and she met with him in person at the Munich Security Conference this year.
In terms of Israel’s neighbors, Harris has met and spoken with the leaders of Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar and Egypt, among other Middle Eastern countries.
Chats with Zelenskyy
Harris has met with Zelenskyy six times. She met with him on the eve of Russia’s invasion at Munich and “shared our latest intelligence and strategized with Zelenskyy on how Ukraine should prepare for the imminent invasion,” per the White House official.
Harris was the last official to meet with Zelenskyy before Russia invaded in February 2022.
Ukraine is wasting no time in deepening its ties to Harris’ inner circle. Zelenskyy’s top adviser Andriy Yermak spoke on the phone with her national security adviser Phil Gordon on Tuesday. The two discussed conditions on Ukraine’s frontlines, Kyiv’s need for greater air defenses and the state of the peace process.
Limited engagement with adversaries and frenemies
Harris has only held one conversation with China’s Xi on the sidelines of the APEC summit in November 2022. And she hasn’t had any interactions with Russia’s Putin — though that’s in part due to the deteriorating nature of U.S.-Russia relations.
Still, that puts her at odds with some of her recent predecessors in the vice president role, who did have some interactions with U.S. adversaries. Vice President Mike Pence met with both Putin and Xi at the 2018 ASEAN summit and then-Vice President Biden met with Putin and Xi’s predecessor Hu Jintao during President Barack Obama’s first term.
She has also not met with the leaders of more tenuous U.S. allies and partners, including Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
The lack of engagement with Saudi Arabia is notable, given Harris’ criticism of Riyadh when she was a senator over Saudi Arabia’s role in the Yemeni civil war and the murder of journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. And it comes as the Biden administration continues to pursue an elusive deal on the normalization of diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel as part of its broader objectives to stabilize the Middle East.
Friends closer to home
Harris maintains working ties with leaders in the Western Hemisphere mostly in line with her role as the administration’s point person on solving the root causes of migration. She has had multiple meetings and phone calls with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and she has spoken with the presidents of Guatemala, Costa Rica and Honduras on migration challenges.
Harris and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau have had three official one-on-one meetings during her time in office, not to mention calls and other encounters on the world stage. They met on their respective trips to Poland just weeks after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Trudeau was the first call Harris made to a foreign leader as vice president in 2021, where the two discussed Canadians Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig. China had detained the two at the time, following Canada’s arrest of Meng Wanzhou, an executive at the Chinese telecom tech firm Huawei.
But Harris has not spoken with a single leader from South America, per the list of publicly available readouts of her calls. That includes Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a key player in the peace process for the Ukraine war and democracy in Venezuela. By contrast, Biden has spoken with Lula several times over the last few years, and national security adviser Jake Sullivan has on multiple occasions spoken with his Brazilian counterpart.
Another notable absence — calls or meetings with the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, even though El Salvador remains one of the biggest focal points for the region’s migration challenges.
Navigating Europe
Zelenskyy isn’t the only European ally Harris has met with. She’s met and spoken with French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellors Angela Merkel and Olaf Scholz, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, British Prime Ministers Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak and the leaders of many of NATO’s eastern members. The calls and meetings date back to her first weeks as vice president.
But Harris has not held calls or met with some key European leaders, including Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who increasingly is flexing her muscles within the European Union as a key interlocutor on Ukraine aid. And European allies haven’t exactly warmed to Harris.
While multiple European leaders have publicly praised Harris, some European officials criticized her for giving highly scripted speeches with little spontaneity at major forums. British officials, meanwhile, complained to the White House that Harris upstaged them at a conference on artificial intelligence in the United Kingdom last year.
Isabel Schnabel, an executive board member of the European Central Bank, was caught on a hot mic in February criticizing the vice president as “invisible” and predicting that she would never win if she ran for president in the future. The European Central Bank has said that Schnabel “never comments in public on political events.”
But some other European officials said that in private she has come off as charismatic and engaged — even if they’re still getting to know her.
“There is an argument that the EU should have made more of an effort to cultivate relations with Harris, given Biden’s age,” said one senior EU official. “But on the other hand, she didn’t exactly make that easy. It wasn’t easy to find occasions to meet Harris.”
Outreach to Africa
The Biden administration has struggled to respond to the rise of China in Africa and shore up partnerships on the continent. An anticipated Biden trip to Africa during his first term has fallen into limbo, and Biden has held fewer meetings and calls with African heads of state than expected.
A portion of the administration’s outreach to the continent has fallen to Harris, who is the highest-ranking administration official to visit Africa. During a March and April 2023 tour of the continent, she met the presidents of Tanzania, Zambia and Ghana.
Outside of her visit to the continent, Harris met with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in Washington, hosting him for breakfast at the Naval Observatory in September 2022. She also spoke on the phone with Nigerian President Bola Tinubu at the height of Niger’s post-coup faceoff with the Economic Community of West African States in July 2023.
Biden had pledged to visit Africa during the 2022 U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit, but that trip promise was amended for February 2025, after the November elections. And many on the continent saw Harris’ trip as a precursor to a Biden visit.
The delays have prompted disappointment and frustration among African leaders and the business community, who hoped Biden would restore a trend of American presidents visiting the continent. Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton all visited Africa; Trump broke the streak.
Asked for comment, the White House stressed that Harris’ visit was not supposed to be a substitute for Biden and that she likely would have traveled to Africa regardless.
Still, African leaders were left still wanting to see Biden make a follow-up trip to demonstrate U.S. commitment to the continent.
“We’re hoping that President Biden will also be here to restore that trajectory,” Ghanaian President Nana Akufo-Addo said at a joint event with Harris in March 2023.
Miles J. Herszenhorn and Kyle Duggan contributed to this report.