Kamala Harris heads to Vietnam while Afghanistan chaos rekindles the past

Vice President Kamala Harris will arrive next week in Vietnam at a moment when many Americans are again debating the final hours of the war there — with some comparing the recent chaos in Afghanistan to the fall of Saigon in 1975, when Americans frantically fled the U.S. Embassy by helicopter.

Biden administration officials did not anticipate the debacle in Afghanistan when they started planning Harris’ trip to Singapore and Vietnam, her second foreign journey as vice president, and they bristle at the comparisons.

But in some ways, analysts and experts say, the timing of the trip allows the United States to reassert its stature in the region at a moment when its reputation as a world power has been battered elsewhere.

Southeast Asia is a linchpin in America’s global competition with China, and leaders in the region have been impatient with the Biden administration’s failure to deliver more COVID-19 vaccines and the generally slow pace of high-level engagement with top U.S. officials. President Biden, for example, has yet to call leaders from any Southeast Asian country.

Vietnam, after years of estrangement, has become a popular destination for American presidents, who are generally greeted warmly, regardless of political party. Harris, whose mother was born in India, is the first American vice president and the highest-ranking American leader of Asian descent to visit Vietnam.

The Biden administration “spent the first six months really getting the crap kicked out of them” in the Southeast Asian press, with pundits condemning the U.S. president’s seeming indifference, said Greg Poling, a Southeast Asia specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonpartisan think tank.