If vice-president Kamala Harris defeats Donald Trump in November, most of America’s allies will greet her victory with thinly veiled delight. “If she wins,” says an official from one of its long-standing Asian partners, “we will have a national holiday!” The official was barely joking, such are the worries in many capitals over the presumed unpredictability of a second Trump term.
Initial relief, however, over the prospect of a Harris administration would soon be followed by searching questions over her worldview and how it might differ from President Joe Biden’s. Her allies talk enthusiastically about how she, as America’s first post-baby boomer president, would bring fresh and “modern” thinking to America’s role in the world, and to a host of issues including the use of artificial intelligence and outer space for defence.
Her advisers also stress her doughty apprenticeship: in Biden’s four years in office she has met 150 heads of state, addressed the Munich Security Conference three times, and sat in on Biden’s key geopolitical telephone calls.