By james art 
Kamala Devi Harris will be the first president of the United States after the pandemic. Unless, of course, he loses to the man who was a failed pandemic leader.
Covid-19 has changed the world. We are more digitally connected. We realized how interdependent our world is and how much we rely on Greek ships and container cargo. We’ve learned that China can lock down and take over a protesting Hong Kong without firing a shot or making many jokes. Moscow rushed to Kyiv. All this between 2020 and 2022.
Enter Kamala Harris. Elected vice president during the pandemic, she instantly joined the world’s most privileged pandemic group—a group that literally had her at the elbow of President Joe Biden on a daily basis. Never in the history of the United States has a vice president gone through a presidential training program with such unrestricted access and concentrated foreign policy training.
Biden’s long years as leader of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — and later Barack Obama’s vice president — make him one of the few experts on foreign policy.
Only George HW Bush rivaled Biden as a seasoned military politician. Bush, however, did not pass on much of his global experience to Vice President Dan Quayle. Not a bit.
But Harris attended the pandemic Zoom meetings, cabinet sessions, tough conversations, tough decisions. She was often the first and last person in the Oval Office with POTUS as the rest of us spent our time at the kitchen table and in the home office.
What does all this exposure and experience mean for Europe and Greece?
Harris observes and participates in Biden’s positive and engaged approach to the transatlantic relationship, NATO, democratic norms and inviolable borders. She has also put these American interests and values on full display in many places, most recently at the Munich Security Conference. There have been no doubts about Article V’s collective defense guarantees. She has built strong personal relationships with a host of European leaders from Macron to Mitsotakis. If she is president, Mark Rutte becomes more empowered.
What if Donald Trump wins? He will recharge his mobile phone and go back to his autocratic friends on speed dial, Putin and Erdogan, and delete his contacts for von der Leyen, Tusk, Scholz, Starmer and Zelensky. If Trump wins, Viktor Orbán will be accepted as the king of Europe.
Pandemics come once a century. Populist leaders are a dime a dozen. They come and go. President Kamala Harris will take what she’s learned about pandemics, populists, and politics and use that experience to try to calm current conflicts and prepare for the global challenges ahead.
Markos Kounalakis is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and teaches political science at Stanford University.