What does Kamala Harris know about foreign policy? More than that, what has she done as vice president in an administration that’s brimming with foreign-policy heavyweights, not least President Joe Biden himself, who has spent his entire political career—nearly half a century—immersed in global politics?

It’s a legitimate question. But it turns out she knows, and has actively been involved in, a lot more than has been reported during her three and a half years in office.

The White House press office has not served as her most avid publicist. Spokesmen now reel off some statistics—she has visited 21 countries on 17 foreign trips, met with more than 150 leaders, and led the U.S. delegation at three Munich Security Conferences—but this doesn’t mean much. Did she shake hands and read a speech, or did she engage in substantive diplomacy?

Some of her trips amounted to rote bits of protocol, but according to several knowledgeable sources, some of them among her entourage but also a number of independent close observers, quite a few of these foreign visits broke ground and even made impact.

And though most of the positions that she has formed on foreign policy match those of Biden’s (news reports frequently say that there’s “no space between them”), her slant is distinctive enough in some respects that the policies of a Harris presidency—on climate, on human rights, and in areas such as Africa and the Middle East—could be quite different.

One crucial fact: According to several officials, Harris has attended almost every National Security Council meeting and, more important still, almost every President’s Daily Brief, during which a senior intelligence officer lays out, both in writing and in an oral presentation, the threats and other developments affecting U.S. interests across the world. Biden receives four or five PDBs a week. These are not passive exercises; they often last an hour or more, with Biden, Harris, and other officials asking follow-up questions; sometimes the president calls in senior Cabinet secretaries or military advisers to discuss these issues at still greater length.

Even if Harris had remained quiet at these meetings, her mere presence would have exposed her to more information—to a fuller picture of the world in its broadest........

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