As Europe was waking up to news of U.S. President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance last week, one top Eastern European diplomat made an oblique historical reference.
“It’s important to manage one’s ride into the sunset,” Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski wrote on X (formerly Twitter).
It was a reference to the Roman Empire, not the United States, but the timing was unmistakable. And it summed up the mood on the European continent: worry that Biden’s trans-Atlantic way of doing business—revitalizing NATO and pumping billions of dollars in U.S. military aid to help Ukraine fend off Russia—would not survive the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
The cryptic nature of Sikorski’s response was also par for the course for European leaders who mostly didn’t want to be seen as interfering in the U.S. election. But although Biden appeared to rally the next day in North Carolina, where he acknowledged his poor debate performance against former U.S. President Donald Trump but did so as part of a far more energetic stump speech, among allies, the damage had already been done.
“It came as a bit of a shock,” said Camille Grand, a former assistant secretary-general for defense investment at NATO who is now a distinguished policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
NATO and European officials have been working for months to “Trump-proof” various policies and institutions, including securing aid guarantees for Ukraine, expanding the number of European troops available to defend the alliance’s soil against Russia, and boosting European countries’ defense budgets. As president, Trump tried to pull U.S. troops out of Germany, and earlier this year, he said he would encourage the Russians to “do whatever the hell they want” to any NATO country that doesn’t spend enough on its own defense. Biden’s lackluster performance served as another wake-up call that a second Trump term could once again upend trans-Atlantic ties and even threaten European security.
“All of those thoughts all of a sudden come closer to potential reality,” said Jim Townsend, a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for NATO who has been in touch with European officials since Thursday’s debate. “Now they’re starting to get nervous, if they’re along [Russia’s] frontier.”
However, experts said the general rule of thumb in Europe has been that the further away you are from Washington, and the further to the right you are politically, the more likely you are to feel that things wouldn’t be so bad with Trump back in power. “You don’t see the panic sweeping Europe the way you see the panic sweeping the Democrats,” Townsend said.
Some of Washington’s partners even further afield also refrained from making pronouncements either way. “That’s a purely U.S. domestic issue,” Alexander Tah-ray Yui, Taiwan’s representative to the United States, told Foreign Policy. “As foreigners, we obviously watch it with a lot of interest, but it is up to the U.S. population and the parties to decide.” Yui also stressed that U.S.-Taiwan relations are “bipartisan and bicameral” and will continue to grow no matter who wins in November.
India, whose relationship with the United States has significantly deepened under both Biden and Trump, expressed a similar sentiment. The Indian Embassy in Washington declined to comment on the record about the debate and its fallout and instead directed Foreign Policy to pre-debate comments made by India’s Ministry of External Affairs. “As far as we are concerned, there is bipartisan support on [the] India-U.S. relationship in the country and it was very well demonstrated by the visit of [a bipartisan congressional delegation] which came to India recently as well. So that is how we look at it,” ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal told reporters in New Delhi. “It’s for the people of [the] United States to decide what sort of democracy, what sort of political formation they would like to have as a government.”
But with the U.S. Department of Defense already warning of a possible terror threat against U.S. troops serving in Europe as the Paris Olympics approach at the end of the month, there are fears that any vulnerability in the Oval Office could be used by China, Russia, or terror groups to pounce. The U.S. military has raised alert levels at Patch Barracks in Stuttgart, Germany, the home of U.S. European Command, and at Ramstein Air Base over a possible wide-ranging terror threat.
“There’s always a moment when [U.S. adversaries] try to take advantage of lame ducks,” Grand said. “Because of the uncertainty around Biden’s health and campaign, they might think there is a window of opportunity.”
For instance, Russia’s five-day war with Georgia in 2008 took place during the last months of the George W. Bush administration. Grand cautioned that adversaries who try to test the U.S. national security apparatus might be disappointed to find it in good working order. But he added that allies that are in wait-and-see mode about Biden’s health after the debate would be eager to get an up-close reading on the U.S. commander in chief at the NATO summit in Washington next week, where all 32 allies will be represented.
“I’m sure there were a lot of troll farms across Russia, North Korea, China, and Iran that were really happy to see this, because it’s more material to work with,” Townsend said. “I wouldn’t call it a national security threat the way an invasion force would look, but certainly domestically, it’s a security risk for us if it really stirs people up.”
China’s state media took advantage of the moment, highlighting Biden’s apparent weakness and questioning the efficacy of the race itself. Chinese commentator Hu Xijin, the former editor in chief of state-run outlet Global Times, wrote that Biden’s “credibility began to waver” after the debate, in an op-ed titled: “US election is nothing more than entertainment.” Another Global Times piece weighed in on the potential of Biden being replaced as the Democratic candidate, quoting a Chinese expert dismissing suggestions that such a move would benefit China.
Since the debate, Biden has tried to turn the focus back to Trump and to project himself as a steady leader despite the occasional age-related stumble. At Thursday’s debate, Trump largely demurred on questions about whether he would exit NATO or slash U.S. military aid to Ukraine in a second term.
Biden’s supporters have also tried to make the case that despite his advanced age, the commander in chief has surrounded himself with the right team to get the job done.
“A presidency is more than just one man,” Jeh Johnson, the former U.S. secretary of homeland security during the Obama administration who was briefly considered for the job of Biden’s secretary of defense, told MSNBC. “I would take Joe Biden at his worst day at age 86 so long as he has people around him like Avril Haines, Sam Power, Gina Raimondo supporting him, over Trump any day.”
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