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EXPERT COMMENT

Were she elected president in November, the vice president would likely oversee significant continuity with Biden’s foreign policy – except, perhaps, on Gaza.

Freshman US senators, presidential candidates, and sitting vice presidents are frequently advised to say as little as possible about foreign affairs, in order not to distract an American public that supposedly cares little for them. 

This has left reporters, think tankers and foreign diplomats alike scrambling to discern where presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris may differ from President Joe Biden.

A few things are certain: Harris represents significant generational change. She embraces the globalized outlook one might expect of a daughter of immigrants who spent part of her childhood in Canada. She will take office with a seasoned team around her. And other than Biden, Americans must go all the way back to George H.W. Bush in 1989 to find a president who would take office with more foreign affairs experience than her. 

Harris speaks and writes frequently about her immigrant parents, invoking her mother’s South Asian folk sayings on the campaign trail and retracing family trips to Africa on her official travel. 

Harris shares this experience not just with former president Barack Obama but with a large and growing share of the US population. As of 2019, more than one in ten US citizens – and a quarter of American children – have at least one immigrant parent.  

This is a change for a world that is used to American presidents invoking their Irishness – Biden and Obama, and Clinton, Reagan and Kennedy before them – though we are only 65 years from a Democratic party that worried Kennedy was too Irish to be elected. 

Click here to continue reading the full version of this Expert Comment on the Chatham House website.