MUNICH — Speaking at the Munich Security Conference on Friday, Vice President Harris tried to allay concerns among European allies about American resolve in major conflicts, while also sending a message to voters at home: Electing Donald Trump in November would destabilize the global order and weaken the United States.
“I know there are questions here in Europe and around the world about the future of America’s role of global leadership,” she told the conference on Friday afternoon. “These are questions the American people must also ask ourselves.”
Harris’s speech — which marks her third appearance at the annual confab of world leaders and policy and security officials — precedes a busy weekend in which she will meet several European leaders, including German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Speaking just days after Trump set off new anxiety by saying he would encourage Russia to attack NATO allies that underspend on defense, Harris may find it difficult to reassure Washington’s transatlantic partners, who are keenly aware of the electoral uncertainty of this year’s presidential contest.
But Harris argued that a worldview that includes isolationism and support for authoritarian governments only weakens the United States and hurts its people.
“That worldview is dangerous, destabilizing and indeed shortsighted. That view would weaken America,” she said.
It is in many ways a global spin on President Biden and Harris’s reelection message that Trump would undo the progress the administration has made on rebuilding trust in Washington.
There is much more to discuss at this weekend’s gathering in Munich: worrying reports of Russian advances from the front lines of eastern Ukraine; Israel’s plans for a potentially devastating ground assault on Rafah; and an unspecified “space threat” from Russia, for starters.
At the top of her speech Friday, Harris responded to news that Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny had died in prison.
“This would be a further sign of [Vladimir] Putin’s brutality,” Harris said. “Whatever story they tell, let us be clear, Russia is responsible.”
Part of Harris’s speech was attended by Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, who spoke after the vice president, urging the gathered leaders to “come together and we should fight against this evil.”
“I said ‘should I stand here before you or should I go back to my children,’ and I thought, what would Alexei have done in my place?” she said, speaking through a translator. “And I thought that he would be standing here on this stage.”
“We should fight this horrific regime in Russia today,” she added, her remarks bookended by standing ovations.
Through all of Friday’s drama, a large question has hung over this year’s Munich Security Conference: What, exactly, is happening in the United States?
For months, Europe’s political, security and intelligence establishment has watched nervously as critical Ukraine aid became mired in domestic politics. American interlocutors assured the Europeans that, ultimately, the bill would pass and money and military equipment would continue to flow.
But the protracted fight over the funding, combined with former president Trump’s claim that he would encourage Russia to attack U.S. allies for meager defense spending, has jolted Europe, renewing doubts about whether the continent can count on the United States — and what to do if it can’t.
In public remarks and private conversations over the next two days, Harris will try to combat that skepticism from allies deeply unsure if she will even be vice president a year from now.
As the race for the White House barrels toward a two-person contest, Biden has struggled in some polls against Trump. Questions about Biden’s age and mental fitness continue to be a drag on his favorability ratings.
Harris’s advisers hope a strong performance on the world stage will help blunt questions about her ability to perform in the nation’s top job — an important requirement for the understudy to the oldest president in U.S. history.
For Harris, who is widely expected to seek the White House herself at some point, the trip to Germany is also an opportunity to cement her foreign policy bona fides and to strengthen relationships with allies.
In Munich, Harris and Secretary of State Antony Blinken will try to convince European allies that the U.S. commitment to Ukraine and NATO remains steadfast. But there appear to be few promises they can make about the next few months, let alone the next years.
They will be joined in Germany by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who is fresh off an unprecedented impeachment that has made him a symbol of U.S. political dysfunction to some here. A group of U.S. senators flying over for the event, meanwhile, will face questions about why Republicans seem to be “owning” Trump’s message about abandoning Ukraine.
Some of those questions could come from Zelensky, who will swing by Munich after stops in Berlin and Paris on Friday. Those trips are aimed at shoring up longer-term support for Ukraine’s fight — and signaling European resolve.
Europe, for its part, will be doing its best to show U.S. officials — and a certain presidential candidate — that they are holding up their side of the transatlantic bargain.
In Brussels this week, for instance, senior officials, including NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, played up recent increases in defense spending by NATO members.
In remarks to the media, Stoltenberg insisted that critics such as Trump have a “valid point” when it comes to defense spending, but that the alliance is already moving toward spending more.
“It’s a point and a message that has been conveyed by successive U.S. administrations that European allies and Canada have to spend more, because we haven’t seen fair burden-sharing in the alliance,” Stoltenberg said. “The good news is that this is exactly what NATO allies are now doing.”
NATO saw an 11 percent real increase in defense spending across Europe and Canada last year. This year, 18 of 31 allies will meet the target of spending 2 percent of their GDP on defense, Stoltenberg said.
European leaders recognize the limits of their influence in the U.S. political debate, although many of them are trying to push the conversation anyway.
In recent months, a stream of foreign and defense ministers and senior European officials have undertaken visits to Washington that follow a predictable itinerary. Meetings with administration officials plus whichever congressional Republican lawmakers are amenable. Then they do an event at a conservative think tank, such as the Heritage Foundation or the American Enterprise Institute, trying hard to sway the opinions of the surging isolationist wing of the Republican Party and to bolster the party’s faltering foreign policy hawks.
Many E.U. diplomats hold out hope that the United States will come around, in part because they don’t wish to ponder the alternative. “We believe that the defeat of Russia in Ukraine is a common interest,” said a senior E.U. diplomat, speaking on the condition of anonymity to brief the media.
“From what we understand from our U.S. colleagues, there is still a possibility that Congress approves,” the diplomat continued. “We hope so — their support will remain much needed over the next months and years.”
But Harris sought to project confidence that the United States would lead the global community indefinitely, stressing that it was not in America’s best interests to pursue isolationist policies, and that the U.S. commitment to its NATO allies was “ironclad.”
“History has also shown us if we only look inward, we cannot defeat threats from outside,” she told the crowd. “Isolation is not insulation. In fact when America has isolated herself, threats have only grown.”
The case for U.S. global engagement was not a tough sell at the security conference.
“She was singing to the choir,” said Nathalie Tocci, the head of the Italian Institute of International Affairs, who was in the audience.
It was “a speech for the voter in Michigan rather than the globalist crowd in Munich,” Tocci said.