Vice President Kamala Harris was flummoxed by a question about the economic burden being borne by the public as she visits Eastern European partners grappling with the brunt of the humanitarian crisis created by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.
Harris paused, looked around, and then spoke for about three minutes regarding the threat Putin posed to several countries, such as Romania, given their proximity to the conflict, when she was asked how long the United States should be prepared to deal with “historic inflation” and “unprecedented gas prices.”
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“All you have to do is look at the map and see that where Romania exists geographically, and as is the case for our allies on the eastern flank, that there are potential vulnerabilities,” she said Friday morning during her joint press conference with Romanian President Klaus Iohannis in Bucharest, Romania.
REPORTER: “How long should Americans expect — how long should we be bracing for — this historic inflation and some unprecedented gas prices?”
KAMALA HARRIS: …………… pic.twitter.com/HdpRgcjIJn
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) March 11, 2022
Harris did acknowledge President Joe Biden’s State of the Union, warning that “there is a price to pay for democracy.”
“Got to stand with your friends,” she said. “And as everybody knows, even in your personal life, being loyal to those friendships, based on common principles and values, sometimes it’s difficult. Often it ain’t easy. But that’s what the friendship is about, based on shared values. So that’s what we’re doing.”
Harris is on a whirlwind tour of NATO’s eastern flank members Poland and Romania as they welcome some of the more than 2 million refugees who have fled Ukraine after only two weeks of fighting.
Harris’s uneven performance abroad has been criticized, including by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s former press secretary, after the vice president laughed during an awkward moment in her joint appearance with Polish President Andrzej Duda.
The travel has been a high-stakes mission for the foreign policy neophyte, who previously sat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. The Polish leg was considered particularly important to smooth over the diplomatic flap caused by Biden’s rebuff of Poland’s offer to send MiG-29s to the U.S. Ramstein Air Base in Germany. The idea was that the Soviet-era airplanes could then be deployed to Ukraine.
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“Our assessment is based on … how to prevent a world war,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said this week. “I don’t think we have held back in any capacity in providing assistance, having the backs of the Ukrainians, but we are not going to do things that we think are not in the interests of the United States or our NATO allies.”
