What Could a Harris Administration Mean for Southeast Asia?

Ever since Vice President Kamala Harris broke onto the stage as the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party for president, analysts have been replete with speculation about what her administration may mean for the future of the United States’ foreign policy and international engagement. Of particular interest has been what a Harris administration may mean for Southeast Asia, an area of the world where the United States finds itself vying for influence in a great power competition with China.

Relatively inexperienced in the area of foreign affairs, Harris has boosted her policy credentials during her tenure as vice president with the help of Philip Gordon and Rebecca Lissner, two aides respectively serving as her national security adviser and deputy national security adviser. While neither Gordon nor Lissner are “Asia hands” – D.C. parlance for officials with deep expertise on the region – they have both pushed Harris to take a leading role in implementing the Biden administration’s Asia policy and diplomatic engagement with Southeast Asian countries.

As a result, Harris has been placed at the center of White House engagement with Southeast Asian leaders and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Jakarta. She has traveled to a total of five countries (Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia) across three trips to the region. Due to her outsized role in attending regional fora and promoting the Biden administration’s signature policy initiatives, Harris has actually traveled to the region more often and met with more leaders than President Joe Biden himself – demonstrating a deeper commitment to Southeast Asia than any other vice president in modern history.

But while Harris has demonstrated a somewhat unique commitment to Southeast Asia, a key question surrounding her possible administration is whom she may tap to lead engagement with the region should she be elected president. While most analysts expect Harris to stay the course, enacting policies and making appointments that broadly align with the Biden administration’s current approach, Harris herself is planning a major shake-up of the administration’s core foreign policy team should she win in November.

In July, The Wall Street Journal reported that Harris is likely to scrap key members of Biden’s team, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, raising questions about whether senior Asia-focused national security officials would retain their current posts as well. Of particular note is Dr. Kurt Campbell, the current deputy secretary of state, a key architect of the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia” strategy, and the Biden administration’s Asia policy lead.

Since 2021, Campbell has won bipartisan praise for his management of the Biden administration’s Indo-Pacific policy and many of its key achievements, including the AUKUS nuclear submarine agreement with Australia. Campbell’s relative success stands in stark contrast to the Biden team’s handling of foreign policy in other regions of the world, particularly in the Middle East and Europe, where a haphazard U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, the outbreak of war in Ukraine, and a worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza have led to criticism of Biden’s foreign policy team in Washington.

Some experts have particularly bemoaned how successive crises in other regions of the world have “distracted” the Biden administration and led to a lack of focus on the Indo-Pacific, and Southeast Asia in particular, where attempts to counterbalance China’s growing regional influence have increasingly fallen flat. Among Southeast Asian leaders, there are also major concerns that the United States remains insufficiently invested in the region.

There is perhaps no better example than in May 2021, when Blinken failed to show up to his first-ever scheduled meeting with ASEAN foreign ministers, citing a “technical glitch” while he was aboard a plane to Israel. Many of the attendees viewed the “technical glitch” as a political slight, and a sign the United States was not serious about bolstering its commitment to the region.

A few months later, however, when officials considered canceling or postponing a planned trip to Singapore and Vietnam in the midst of the Biden administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, Harris reportedly urged the administration to move forward with the trip, saying that she didn’t want to “pull the plug” on Southeast Asia – demonstrating her growing foreign policy acumen.

Throughout her tenure as vice president, Harris has tried to honor her commitment to the region. Of the few international issues she was tasked with at the White House, her engagement of Southeast Asian leaders has arguably been her most successful. Although some say that Harris was an insufficient substitute for Biden, particularly at multilateral forums like the East Asia Summit, where a head of state is expected to attend, Harris’ existing familiarity with and interest in the region may present leaders with a unique opportunity should she be elected.

At a policy level, when compared to the Trump years, U.S. relations with Southeast Asia markedly improved under the Biden-Harris administration, with major accomplishments including the revival of a consequential defense agreement with the Philippines, an upgraded comprehensive strategic partnership with Vietnam and the ASEAN Secretariat in Jakarta, and the first-ever U.S.-ASEAN Summit being hosted at the White House with most major Southeast Asian leaders.

Despite these achievements, however, a major irritant that continues to persist in U.S. relations with Southeast Asia remains the perceived lack of U.S. economic engagement in the region, as China’s economic clout continues to grow. In 2022, the Biden administration attempted to address this vulnerability with the launch of its so-called Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF), an economic grouping of 14 countries that includes seven ASEAN member states.

Unlike a traditional free trade agreement (FTA), however, IPEF includes no market access provisions, making it a non-starter for many ASEAN countries that are seeking preferential access to the U.S. market. Moreover, IPEF itself was designed as a workaround of the U.S. Congress, meaning that any negotiations could be easily withdrawn if the Republican Party took back control of the White House – something political observers and ASEAN leaders still consider to be a distinct possibility.

While Harris’ positions on trade policy are not well understood, it remains unlikely that she would re-enter the United States into the Comprehensive Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), as Southeast Asian leaders and trade experts hope. On the flip side, a Harris administration would almost certainly finalize negotiations on IPEF, keeping up the momentum on agreements on issues including supply chain resilience, anti-corruption, and the clean economy.

Questions still remain, however, about how Harris would modify IPEF and approach trade with the region more broadly. As a U.S. senator, Harris was a trade skeptic who voted against the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), the renegotiated North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. She also indicated that if she had been in the Senate at the time, would have voted against both the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the forerunner of the CPTPP, and the original NAFTA.

As one of only 10 senators to vote against the USMCA, Harris pointed to the FTA’s failure to adequately address climate change and strengthen labor protections. This broadly aligns with the “worker-centric” approach to trade adopted by Biden’s U.S. Trade Representative, who has pushed for the United States to use trade policy as a tool to advance non-trade objectives, such as human rights, and could be prescriptive of Harris’ future approach.

During her first trip to Vietnam, Harris surprised some observers by meeting with gay rights activists and highlighting the importance of both labor and human rights protections in meetings with regional officials. But while a Harris administration would be more likely to promote human rights priorities across the region, such advocacy would not seek to derail existing relationships, as there is a recognition that the United States needs to forge stronger partnerships with countries that do not necessarily align with its political system or values to gain a greater foothold on the region.

Fundamentally, a Harris administration is likely to pay much closer attention to Southeast Asia, and is poised to engage a region the vice president is intimately familiar with. At the same time, Harris is unlikely to stray too far from Biden on policy, and may face many of the same challenges, particularly when it comes to trade policy – where domestic politics continues to stymie more robust U.S. economic engagement.