HONOLULU (AP) – In Singapore, amid a foreign policy speech and a roundtable discussion on supply chain issues, Vice President Kamala Harris stopped to smell the flowers.
Specifically, he checked an orchid that the country named after him, a light fuschia hybrid called Papilionanda Kamala Harris, a diplomatic honor also given to former President Barack Obama and then Vice President Joe Biden during previous visits to the country.
“Oh, that’s extraordinary,” he marveled as he made a brief tour of the lush Flower Field Hall 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 full of extraordinary circumstances.
Harris ’weekly trip to Singapore and Vietnam was overshadowed from start to finish by the crisis in Afghanistan. Questions about the disorderly withdrawal from the United States dominated his early days in Singapore and the attack that killed 13 Americans outside Kabul airport made him live in California on his way home. .
In the middle, Harris delayed his trip to Vietnam by a few hours due to concerns about possible health attacks on US diplomats.
And the trip unfolded in the context of a global pandemic that kept Harris surrounded by the carefully choreographed articulated scenery of his diplomatic meetings with leaders and some roundtables and speeches.
But in fact, these same crises may have contributed to what analysts say was the overall success of the trip.
“Overwhelmed by these concerns about things happening both in Hanoi and elsewhere, they remained fairly stable,” said Ted Osius, who served as U.S. ambassador to Vietnam under Obama.
“They delivered key messages to our partners and showed continuity and future for relationships by having constant nerves and continued the journey, even in the face of these challenges.”
In the midst of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, one of Harris ’main tasks during the trip was to reassure U.S. allies who can be trusted in the United States to meet their commitments. Osius said the Vietnamese now “know that we trust each other enough to be able to continue, even in turbulent and unusual times.”
Faced with numerous questions about Afghanistan, Harris generally showed a more disciplined message than during his first trip abroad, to Guatemala and Mexico. There, he called on Democrats to warn immigrants not to come to the United States and Republicans to reject questions about his decision not to visit the southern U.S. border.
In Singapore, and again in Vietnam, Harris repeated administration’s discussion points about the evacuation effort as the White House’s “top priority” and avoided getting involved in recriminations for what went wrong. .
“There was really nothing to clean up, which obviously differs from this trip from Guatemala and Mexico,” said Democratic strategist Joel Payne.
Still, Republicans took the opportunity to go find Harris, both a nod to his possible political future, and Biden’s alleged successor if he decides not to run in 2024, and an attempt to take advantage of its generally divisive profile among U.S. voters. .
Chris Martin, executive deputy director of the opposition GOP America Rising research group, said on Twitter that “all the work that Kamala Harris has done since the vice president has failed miserably,” including her latest efforts to reassure the American allies.
But Payne said Harris had shown a more polished, focused approach on his last trip.
“My sense is that the vice president’s team has tried to correct a little bit and simplify the message and simplify the task,” he said.
Facing China – the most complicated diplomatic issue for Harris during the trip – the vice president took stock of blaming what she called China’s “harassment” of the South China Sea at the same time. which offered a more constructive view of the U.S. relationship with Singapore. and Vietnam.
While his visit offered a number of new opportunities for cooperation between the U.S. and its Southeast Asian allies, he did not miss an important touchstone of the typical diplomatic trip: engagement with local people. .
When Biden visited Singapore as vice president, he stopped at a bustling street vendor store to look for a draft. When Obama visited Vietnam, he met a large number of Vietnamese who cheered after sharing a meal and a beer with Anthony Bourdain in a small noodle shop, and showed up with the young Vietnamese.
With the coronavirus pandemic crisis back in much of Southeast Asia, Harris and his entourage were largely confined to their hotel rooms. Arriving in both Singapore and Vietnam, the entire delegation received COVID-19 tests and had to quarantine in their hotel rooms until the results arrived.
In Vietnam, a country with one of the lowest vaccination rates in the region and registering high infections in recent weeks, the streets of Hanoi were strangely empty as Harris ’caravan accelerated its events. Instead of a spontaneous moment on the streets of Vietnam, Harris held a small roundtable with LGBTQ and climate change activists.
“Just like we had to reinvent at the national level the look of a political campaign: official travel is now subject to the same disorder,” said Eric Schultz, who served as Obama’s deputy chief press secretary.
“Building cultural relationships is person to person. When you take that out of the equation, it gets harder. ”
Gregory Poling, a senior member of Southeast Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that while the pandemic complicated Harris ’trip, it also created opportunities to show U.S. commitment to the region. In fact, Harris deployed U.S. vaccine diplomacy to Vietnam, where it announced the delivery of one million additional doses of the coronavirus vaccine and 77 freezers to help store the doses.
“It limits the number of commitments, it limits your commitment to civil society and others, it makes it harder to travel outside the capital, but it also helps reinforce the message that you are really investing in relationships,” he said.