Harris Meets With Zelensky, Anticipating a Handover of Global Crises

Harris Meets With Zelensky, Anticipating a Handover of Global Crises

The meeting signaled that the White House was preparing her to take over a thorny diplomatic relationship should she win the election in November.

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By Katie Rogers and Zolan Kanno-Youngs

Katie Rogers is a White House reporter covering Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. Zolan Kanno-Youngs is a White House reporter covering President Biden and his administration.

Vice President Kamala Harris met with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on Thursday at the White House, a sign that President Biden’s administration is positioning her to take over a politically fraught diplomatic relationship if she wins the election in November.

The meeting, held shortly after Mr. Biden announced $8 billion worth of military support to the war-torn country, was Ms. Harris’s second this week with a key world leader — even as she runs a presidential campaign focused on domestic issues.

Ms. Harris, who has met with Mr. Zelensky a half-dozen times since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, said at the White House on Thursday that she would “ensure Ukraine prevails in this war,” adding that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia “could end the war tomorrow.”

Ms. Harris said that those who would have Ukraine trade territory for peace were supporting “proposals of surrender” — a dig at former President Donald J. Trump, her Republican opponent, and his skepticism of aid for Kyiv.

She added that the fight in Ukraine “matters to the people of America,” and framed the conflict as one that the American people should recognize as highly consequential.

“The most important moments in our history have come when we stood up to aggressors like Putin,” Ms. Harris said, warning that the Russian leader would not stop with Ukraine, and would possibly even look into encroaching on NATO territory, if he succeeds in his campaign.

“History is so clear in reminding us,” Ms. Harris said, “the United States cannot and should not isolate ourselves from the rest of the world. Isolation is not insulation.”

Neither Ms. Harris nor Mr. Zelensky took questions from reporters after about nine minutes of joint remarks.

The vice president is not scheduled to hold any meetings with other major allies before the election, advisers said, the starkest sign yet that she will turn her energy to swing-state barnstorming and focusing on issues that voters have said will decide this election: the economy, abortion and immigration.

But later on Thursday, she delivered Rose Garden remarks about curbing gun violence alongside the president.

Her campaign argues that she has already demonstrated more global leadership as vice president than Mr. Trump did as president. Officials pointed to the support she has received from hundreds of national security officials, who said they believed that Mr. Trump posed a threat to national security and democracy.

“Vice President Harris understands that the American people stand on the side of freedom, democracy and rule of law,” Morgan Finkelstein, a national security spokeswoman for Ms. Harris’s campaign, said in a statement. “She knows that if America walks away from Ukraine, Putin would be sitting in Kyiv with his eyes on the rest of Europe and our NATO allies.”

For his part, Mr. Trump has waded into international affairs at campaign events, often veering off message to nurture grievances or attack perceived opponents.

As he gave a speech on Wednesday in North Carolina that had been promoted as focusing on the economy, he spent much of his time telling supporters that Iran might have been behind the two assassination attempts against him. U.S. officials have said there is no evidence to link them to Iranian threats.

Mr. Trump on Thursday said he would meet on Friday morning with Mr. Zelensky at Trump Tower in Manhattan, a meeting Mr. Zelensky had requested.

At his event on Wednesday, Mr. Trump spent several minutes discussing the war in Ukraine, criticizing Mr. Zelensky for “making little nasty aspersions” about him, and musing aloud that he did not understand why the Ukrainians did not cede territory to the Russian invaders.

“If they made a bad deal, it would’ve been much better,” Mr. Trump said. “They would’ve given up a little bit and everybody would be living and every building would be built and every tower would be aging for another 2,000 years.”

What voters might end up taking away from the dueling events is not much about policy but about the differing personalities of the candidates, said Suzanne Maloney, the vice president and director of the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution.

“There have simply been fewer opportunities to engage in serious reflections around their approach to the world and specific remedies they propose for the tough international challenges,” she said.

And, according to recent polls, foreign policy is not what will drive votes. In a national poll conducted by The New York Times and Siena College in early September, just 3 percent of likely voters said foreign policy decisions would influence their vote, compared with 22 percent who said the economy would be a deciding factor, 15 percent who said the same about abortion, and 12 percent who said immigration policy would drive their decision-making.

“Voters typically base their decisions on issues closer to home, especially those policies that impact their pocketbooks,” Ms. Maloney said.

Still, Ms. Harris’s advisers said that the meetings this week allowed her to showcase the experience she has gained as a vice president who found her footing as an emissary for Mr. Biden and may inherit many of the global crises he has tried to navigate.

Allies and critics say that her views on foreign policy — and particularly on Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip — will continue to be a topic of interest for voters on the campaign trail. Even as Democrats try to sell Ms. Harris as a change candidate, she has largely embraced Mr. Biden’s policy platform.

On foreign policy, Ms. Harris’s more empathetic tone toward Palestinian civilians killed in Gaza has raised expectations among some voters that she could take a tougher stance against Israel if elected. But Ms. Harris’s allies say there is little chance she breaks from the president’s approach.

“I have heard nothing that suggests to me that Vice President Harris and Governor Walz are on the verge of some break between the United States and Israel,” said Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, a top Democratic ally of Mr. Biden. “I think she’s firmly committed to the defense of Israel, its right to exist and its right to defend itself.”

Abbas Alawieh, a founder of the Uncommitted National Movement, which is pushing for an arms embargo to Israel, said her current policies would not be enough to sway fellow pro-Palestinian voters in Michigan, an important battleground state. Many of them lodged “uncommitted” protest votes against Mr. Biden in this year’s Democratic presidential primary race and, Mr. Alawieh said, they continue to see the war in Gaza as a top issue.

“Tell us what the policy is or give us a proactive message that we can go and take to ‘uncommitted’ voters,” Mr. Alawieh said. “If you can’t differentiate your own policy from President Biden’s, at least tell us how you’d be different than Trump. Help us educate our community about what Trump has planned.”

The group said last week that it would not endorse Ms. Harris over concerns about her approach to the conflict.

Ms. Harris’s supporters point to the work she is doing on several political fronts. As a candidate, they say, she spent the week meeting with key allies, traveling to battleground states, delivering an interview and a speech on her plans for the economy — all before planning a trip to the U.S.-Mexico border on Friday.

Ricardo Zúñiga, who served as the State Department’s special envoy for Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador and worked with Ms. Harris on policy approaches to immigration, said that the vice president was “a pragmatist” who did not “put idealism ahead of practical results” on border policy.

He said he expected her to point out that she and Mr. Biden have both supported bipartisan legislation that Republicans had once insisted on to stem the flow of migrants at the border. Republicans abandoned the initiative over political pressure from Mr. Trump.

“She’s trying to make things function,” Mr. Zúñiga said. He disparaged Mr. Trump’s campaign proposal to deport tens of millions of immigrants as not really much of a plan at all.

“That’s not a realistic thing,” he said. “She’s about the end result.”