Vice President Kamala Harris will meet with French President Emmanuel Macron and other world leaders in Paris next week, dispatched by the White House to mend fences in the wake of a diplomatic row.
Harris will attend two conferences in Paris, with her visit coming on the heels of President Joe Biden’s meetings with Macron at multilateral summits in Rome and Glasgow.
In an address to the Paris Peace Forum on Nov. 11, a summit on global governance issues, Harris is expected to focus her remarks “on some big, converging global crises … in particular, the challenge of rising inequality and the need for leaders around the world to join together and take bold action,” a senior administration official said. The vice president will join Macron and other global leaders for dinner following the summit.
Harris’s participation will allow for “candid conversations on all of these challenges, including the need to reinforce global institutions and to shore up democracies in the face of authoritarianism,” this person said.
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Officials on a call with reporters this week declined to say whether Harris’s attendance, which will make her the most senior U.S. official to attend the summit since its start in 2018, would have occurred pending the spat.
“I don’t have a crystal ball here. I’m not going to play the ‘what if’ game,” a senior official said. “There are things that happened three months ago that I wouldn’t have predicted three months before that.”
Harris’s visit shows Washington’s commitment to U.S. partners and allies, this person said, including cooperation on fighting COVID-19 and climate change.
“What I can tell you is the vice president is looking forward to this trip. This trip is extremely important,” this person continued. “And … again, as our world has become more interconnected and more interdependent, this alliance specifically, between the U.S. and France, is more important now than it has ever been.”
Said the official of Harris’s slew of engagements, “There is, though, a common thread. The vice president is exercising American leadership on consequential global challenges and issues.”
Harris will attend a summit to express international support for elections in Libya, which has suffered political instability and violence for years. There, she will join 20 heads of state and government at the event, including Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, and U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.
“The vice president is attending to show U.S. support for the Libyan people as they work to reestablish their sovereignty and establish lasting peace,” a second senior administration official said. “We want to show our support for the Libyan people as they move towards national elections and as they focus on the importance of the withdrawal of foreign forces and mercenaries and fighters.”
Harris will voice “deep concern for human rights and the situation of migrants and refugees,” the official said.
Tasked by President Joe Biden with stemming the flow of migrants arriving at the southern U.S. border, migration issues are a part of Harris’s portfolio as vice president.
During a visit to Guatemala earlier this year, Harris was pressed by NBC News’s Lester Holt in an interview on whether she planned to visit the U.S.-Mexico border, where the number of people apprehended crossing into the country illegally has surged this year.
The vice president appeared to grow frustrated.
“And I haven’t been to Europe,” she retorted, setting off a media storm over what some viewed as a flippant response to a serious issue.
Now, Harris is traveling to Europe for the first time as vice president, charged with a new diplomatic mission. She will meet with Macron at the Elysee Palace in the White House’s latest effort to smooth the trans-Atlantic relationship after a U.S. nuclear submarine alliance with Australia and Britain roiled a French defense contract worth billions of dollars. Another senior administration official called the engagement “forward-looking” in a nod to the lingering dispute.
France blamed the United States and Australia for the latter’s decision to cancel a $75 billion order for diesel-powered submarines from France’s state-owned Naval Group. France temporarily recalled its ambassador to Washington in protest, with the Biden administration working to smooth the quarrel.
At France’s Vatican embassy in Rome last week, Biden met with Macron and acknowledged that the rollout of the deal had been “clumsy.”
“It was not done with a lot of grace,” Biden said. He did not concede that it was a mistake, however.
Asked by a reporter whether he should apologize, Biden responded, “To whom?”
Pressed again, Biden said, “We’ve already talked,” referring to two conversations he had with the French leader as the controversy unfolded.
Washington has pushed to mend the relationship, Harris’s visit is the latest and most high-profile overture yet.
An official said the vice president would seek to bolster U.S. ties to France “in concrete ways” but declined to provide specific deliverables to measure the cooperation.
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According to the official, Harris and Macron will hold “wide-ranging discussion across a range of issues to include the bilateral relationship, European security, the Indo-Pacific, global health, space, and a number of other subjects.”
Harris will begin her trip on Nov. 9 with a tour of the Institut Pasteur, where her mother, a scientist, once conducted breast cancer research.
The vice president will also visit the Suresnes American Cemetery on the eve of Veterans Day in the U.S. and Armistice Day in France.
