Since taking office last year, Vice President Kamala Harris has served as a dumping ground for miscellaneous tasks.
Harris was supposed to take charge of the U.S. Southern border crisis. She was tasked with leading the effort to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. Harris was tasked with advancing the Biden-backed bill to federalize elections. And she’s tried to reassure the public of the Biden administration COVID response.
Critics said Harris has failed them all and have gone so far as to call on her to resign.
Now, the vice president will face her highest-stakes foreign policy assignment yet this weekend in Germany, where she will try to keep European allies unified amid growing tensions with Russia.
She will attend the annual Munich Security Conference as President Joe Biden and other Western leaders claim that the threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine remains high despite Russian President Vladimir Putin’s statements that he is committed to further talks.
The Kremlin has claimed that some of the estimated 150,000 Russian forces encircling Ukraine have been pulled back to their garrisons. White House officials dispute that, saying intelligence shows Russia has instead added 7,000 additional troops near Ukraine in recent days and has stepped up preparations for potential false flag operations that could be used as a pretext to start a war.
Harris is scheduled to meet Friday with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg and lead a meeting with the leaders of the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia on the margins of the Munich conference. She’s scheduled to deliver a speech Saturday on the administration’s efforts to stop Russian aggression. After the speech, she’s expected to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters that Harris’ job would be to “convey to the rest of the world again our ironclad commitment to our NATO allies, our commitment to defending the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine, and our commitment to putting in place severe economic consequences should Russia invade.”
The Munich gathering has been used in recent years by both U.S. and Russian leaders to deliver messages to a who’s-who of trans-Atlantic leaders.
Then-Vice President Mike Pence in 2019 made a full-throated case for President Donald Trump’s “America First” policy. Hours later, Biden, then a private citizen and not yet a 2020 presidential candidate, snapped back that “this too shall pass” and “America will be back.”
In 2007, Putin used his own Munich appearance to deliver a broadside against NATO, accusing the alliance of putting “its frontline forces on our borders” and being aggressive. At last year’s conference, held virtually due to the coronavirus pandemic, Biden declared “America’s back” in an address that touched on economic and security concerns driven by adversaries Russia and China.
In the time it took Harris to fly to Munich on Thursday, Biden issued a stark new threat that an invasion could happen within “several days,” Russia expelled the second-highest U.S. diplomat in Moscow, and Russia’s Foreign Ministry handed over its formal reply to U.S. and NATO security proposals.
The public-facing efforts by the Biden administration throughout the crisis have largely been entrusted to the president’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who will also be in Munich.
Munich offers an opportunity for Harris to demonstrate foreign policy chops after what has been a sometimes choppy first year of her vice presidency.
“This is really an important moment for Harris and the administration,” said Heather Conley, president of the non-partisan German Marshall Fund of the United States. “I think if she can deliver a clear speech that reflects not just inspiration of U.S. leadership, but real action, real meat of what they are trying to do, it will make a big impression going forward.”
The conference, which begins Friday, will mark Harris’s fifth foreign trip as vice president. On past trips, she visited Guatemala and Mexico; Singapore and Vietnam; France; and most recently Honduras.
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The Associated Press contributed to this article.