To those of us who have covered him for decades, Joe Biden’s career has always unfolded on a split screen.
On one side there is the Biden who has long been widely admired, on both sides of the aisle, as a master of foreign policy. This was the Biden who was, for example, named floor manager by both political parties in 1998 when NATO faced a crucial U.S. Senate vote on the Western alliance’s first expansion since the Cold War, bringing in Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic. This was the Biden, too, who for decades repeatedly pressed NATO members to pay more for their defense—long before Donald Trump ever appeared on the scene.
And this week, as President Biden hosts the NATO leaders in Washington for the 75th anniversary summit, it’s clear that no one in U.S. politics understands the alliance better, or has done more to revitalize NATO at a moment of maximum peril for Europe.
On the other side of the screen, however, there was Biden the bumbling gaffe machine, the hail-fellow-well-met guy who stammered and misquoted and was sometimes hard to take seriously.
This was the Biden who, when he was chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and invited reporters up to Capitol Hill, would often ramble and go into long digressions and make every point at least three times. Biden’s talk, even then, was regularly marred by unfinished sentences, with new sentences rising like uncertain phoenixes from the ashes of the half-articulated ones. Sometimes, sitting around the long conference table in his office, many of us (the journalists that is) would look at each other with raised eyebrows, then at our watches, and smile in exasperation as Biden went on talking, all of us sharing the same thought: Will he ever shut up? When can we get the hell out of here?
It was this same Biden who failed repeatedly and abysmally in presidential runs—except for one perfect-storm moment in 2020, when he found himself running against a uniquely hated president, Donald Trump, and the only Democratic alternatives were unelectable far-left candidates like Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
And it’s this latter Biden, of course—now in apparent physical and mental decline at the age of 81—whose fitness for office is being intensively debated inside his own party. In the weeks since his now infamous debate performance on June 27, many prominent Democrats—including a handful of congresspeople and senators—have mounted an unprecedented effort to persuade Biden to stand aside even though he is already effectively the Democratic Party’s nominee for reelection.
What to think? Certainly, based on what happened on June 27, there is ample reason to question whether Biden is up to a second term—or even equal to completing his first. But let’s have a little perspective here. When it comes to a race against former President Trump, how bad is bad? And is “Biden bad” really that bad even now, considering there may be plenty of “good Biden” left despite his obvious diminishment?
Recall that the “age problem” was a big factor in the runup to 2020 as well. Many Democratic grandees said even then Biden would be too old to enter office at age 78. “There is no question that what has propelled Vice President Biden to clear front-runner status is his unparalleled experience in contrast to his primary counterparts, but am I hearing gargantuan concerns among Democratic insiders about Biden’s advanced age?” one pollster, Fernand Amandi, told Politico in 2019.
Indeed, one reason billionaire Michael Bloomberg briefly entered the race in 2020 was because Democratic donors (many of whom are currently calling on Biden to drop out) were then also worried about Biden’s performance behind closed doors. Well, setting aside his disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, Biden became an effective president after that. Many Democrats believe he has been an outstanding one.
And some of those who have known Biden a long time say that even a slowing and aging president is leagues ahead of Trump, given Biden’s unparalleled institutional knowledge. “A diminished Biden is far better than Trump on his best day,” said Norman Kurz, his former Senate spokesman.
Added Michael Haltzel, Biden’s former Senate aide on Europe and NATO issues: “That debate was painful to watch, but is he capable right now? Absolutely, I have no doubt about it at all. What will he be like in two or three years? God only knows. Obviously it’s a risk.”
But compared to Trump, who is a convicted felon and has repeatedly suggested that he would deploy the Justice Department to go after his political enemies? “I would vote for Joe Biden if he was in a coma,” Sarah Matthews, Trump’s disaffected former deputy spokeswoman, said on CNN on Tuesday.
So here is the Biden dilemma. He appears to be damaged goods, not to put a fine point on it. But it’s not as if there is a clear alternative, and when it comes to critical issues such as facing down Russia and China, arguably no one comes even close to Biden.
“Biden knows how the world works. After George H.W. Bush, he is the most internationally experienced president we have had,” said Ryan Crocker—one of America’s most experienced diplomats and dubbed “America’s Lawrence of Arabia” by President George W. Bush.
Crocker, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan and five other Mideast nations, was harshly critical of Biden for the way he handled Afghanistan, but apart from that he says Biden has been solid on preserving America’s place in the world.
“He is solidly in the tradition of post-World War II U.S. global leadership, understanding the value of alliances,” Crocker wrote in an email. “He led the international/NATO response on Ukraine right from the start, much as Bush did on Kuwait in 1990, but without committing U.S. troops. And he stayed with it, working the issue on the Hill. He was right on Israel, in spite of its unpopularity with his base. His work in Asia has been highly effective, bringing about an historic Japanese-South Korean rapprochement.”
True, the June 27 debate—when Biden visibly froze, lost his train of thought and often sounded incoherent—marked a new low point. But the issue of his advanced age had been thrashed out well before Biden rounded up nearly 3,900 delegates for renomination earlier this year—almost twice as many as he needed—in the primaries. As The New York Times reported back in 2022: “His energy level, while impressive for a man of his age, is not what it was, and some aides quietly watch out for him. He often shuffles when he walks, and aides worry he will trip on a wire. He stumbles over words during public events, and they hold their breath to see if he makes it to the end without a gaffe.”
A national poll revealed Tuesday, conducted by the firm Bendixen & Amandi, found that Biden trailed Trump by 42 percent to 43 percent. But the survey also showed that the most likely alternative to Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, did only slightly better—running ahead of Trump 42 percent to 41 percent.
No issue, perhaps, is more illustrative of the Biden dilemma than the question of NATO’s—and Ukraine’s—future. To many Americans, Trump has made a persuasive case that the United States can no longer afford to pay the lion’s share of NATO’s expenses, and the Europeans need to step up. He has also suggested he’ll cut a deal to end the war, which would likely include a pledge not to expand NATO into Ukraine.
But Haltzel, among others, argues that Biden has been on top of these issues for decades. “He really did his homework. When we had the first tranche of NATO enlargement [in 1998], he went out of his way to learn about the projected costs,” Haltzel said. “Every time we met with leaders of a NATO country Biden would always bring up what in those days was called burden sharing. The idea that Trump discovered the issue is bullshit.”
Trump takes credit for the fact that more NATO countries than ever are meeting the target of 2 percent of GDP spent on defense. But Jeremy Shapiro, research director for the European Council on Foreign Relations, told me that Russia’s aggression had much more to do with those budget increases than Trump did. “If you look at the trajectory of European defense spending, it started going up in 2014. And we know why: the Russian invasion of Ukraine. If you look at that trend line you don’t see it change much at all in the Trump administration. Then we see another big inflection point in 2022” after Moscow’s full-scale invasion.
Biden also understood that extending NATO into the former Warsaw Pact nations might be seen as a provocation by Moscow. Before that first expansion in 1998 he even flew to Moscow—“to personally assess the Russians’ interests,” Haltzel said. “We went over all the complaints and hang-ups the Russians had,” Haltzel added. “At the end of the day, while they were not happy, compared to the post-2007 rewriting of history that Putin has been engaged in, their complaints were minor.”
Biden weighed the larger strategic implications as well. “The single argument in favor of NATO enlargement that resonated most with Biden was the idea we can’t allow a gray zone of insecurity in the middle of Europe a la the 1930s,” which led ultimately to World War II, said Haltzel, who today teaches at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “The idea of moving the boundary of civility eastward in Europe was a big one. He knew the status quo wasn’t going to last.”
In a speech at the summit on Tuesday, Biden delivered strong remarks reading a teleprompter and, in an emotional moment that clearly won over the crowd of European leaders and statesmen, hung the Presidential Medal of Freedom around the neck of outgoing NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg.
Biden pointedly said: “NATO is an alliance of nations but it’s also made up of leaders.”
It was, very decidedly, a good Biden moment. “He’s always made his share of mistakes,” Haltzel said. “But the idea that Biden on his worst day is better than Trump on his best—of course that’s true.”
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