Will he or won’t he? The burning question in U.S. politics these days is whether President Joe Biden is going to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race. He’s defied calls to do so thus far, but it’s anyone’s guess what he (and the Democratic Party) will ultimately decide—or how that will affect the election in November. Political punditry has been the main beneficiary of all this hoopla, and commentators from across the political spectrum have been scribbling overtime since the now-notorious June 27 debate.
Will he or won’t he? The burning question in U.S. politics these days is whether President Joe Biden is going to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race. He’s defied calls to do so thus far, but it’s anyone’s guess what he (and the Democratic Party) will ultimately decide—or how that will affect the election in November. Political punditry has been the main beneficiary of all this hoopla, and commentators from across the political spectrum have been scribbling overtime since the now-notorious June 27 debate.
A question that’s received much less attention in the wake of Biden’s debate performance is whether his physical and/or cognitive limitations—real or perceived—will have any impact on U.S. foreign policy itself. Assuming that he does not resign the presidency in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris (a scenario I regard as highly unlikely), Biden is going to be president at least until Jan. 20, 2025. There are roughly six months between now and then, or one-eighth of a presidential term. Might adversaries or even some U.S. allies try to take advantage of a president whom they believe is no longer bringing his best game to the table?
A glance at history offers a mixed verdict. Then-President Woodrow Wilson suffered a debilitating stroke in October 1919, but his wife and physician concealed his condition, and foreign powers never tried to exploit Wilson’s incapacity.
On the other hand, President Franklin Roosevelt was in evident decline for several years before his fatal stroke in April 1945, and his declining powers may have made him a much less effective negotiator at the Yalta summit that took place two months earlier. Dwight Eisenhower suffered a serious heart attack in September 1955, but government operations were unaffected, he went on to win reelection in 1956, serving out a successful second term. John F. Kennedy suffered from Addison’s disease and several other serious ailments, but this hidden condition seems not to have interfered with either his public or his private activities.
President Richard M. Nixon was reportedly too drunk to take a call from then-British Prime Minister Edward Heath during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, leaving key decisions to be made by U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and other officials. And Ronald Reagan may have been in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease during his second term in office, but there’s little evidence that the condition had much impact on U.S. policy or on the actions of other states.
These examples remind us that presidential impairment may not be as serious an issue as people initially think. Although U.S. presidents are obviously important, they are never solely responsible for formulating or implementing policy. All presidents have a team in place; policy options and likely responses to different scenarios are often discussed in advance of implementation; and subordinates (e.g., the secretaries of state and defense, the directors of national intelligence, the National Security Council chairs) will step up and take over if a president is somewhat impaired.
It’s also worth remembering that even young and highly energetic presidents cannot tame every aspect of the foreign-policy machinery; the “Blob”—the nation’s foreign-policy establishment—has many ways of diluting, resisting, or redirecting what a president tries to do. As a result, even if a president were operating at less than 100 percent, an adversary could not be confident that the United States would not respond to a direct challenge. Indeed, an administration is as likely to overreact to a challenge as it is to underreact, merely to show that the president’s condition could not be exploited.
Biden’s condition—whatever it may be—is also less significant because other states are already hedging their bets. Given the current state of polarization in the United States and the sharp differences between Democrats and Republicans on some key foreign-policy issues, no foreign leader is going to put much weight on any pledges that the Biden administration might make between now and November, and especially if they are it at odds with where former President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, seems to be headed.
Biden could do 50 pushups and recite the first 50 decimals of pi from memory in front of the entire White House press corps tomorrow, and other governments would still wait for November before making commitments on the basis of U.S. assurances. And you wouldn’t expect the administration to launch any big foreign-policy initiatives between now and the election, even if Biden were 30 years younger.
I can think of two scenarios where a less-than-fully functioning president might have a significant impact. Imagine that the United States faced a prolonged, high-stakes challenge akin to the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and the president was incapable of leading the sort of protracted and intense deliberation that Kennedy conducted through the ad hoc “ExComm?”
A less engaged president might eventually make different choices (i.e., Kennedy’s decision to impose a naval quarantine on Cuba was much less escalatory than the initial inclination to launch airstrikes), but it’s impossible to predict what those choices would be. To repeat my earlier point: Potential challengers have to consider the possibility that the U.S. response would be more forceful if a president wasn’t actively guiding the internal debate. A weakened president does not necessarily imply a weaker response; to believe otherwise is to assume that presidents will always be more hawkish and resolute than the people that serve them, and no sensible adversary should assume that.
Second, obtaining broad-based international support sometimes requires a lot of effort, and presidents are sometimes able to herd the cats through time-consuming personal diplomacy. President George H. W. Bush performed this task effectively in the run-up to the first Gulf War, for example, and Biden and his team did much the same following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
A less energetic, focused, or capable president would have to delegate more of that effort to his or her subordinates, and even an experienced and able negotiator—such as current CIA Director William Burns—could not speak with quite the same authority as a president can. The difference here is likely to be a matter of degree, however. Even if the president couldn’t spend a lot of time working the phones, U.S. diplomacy would not come to a standstill.
Moreover, perceptions that the person at the top is erratic can sometimes be an advantage. If some U.S. negotiator is trying to get an opponent to make concessions, they could tell their counterparts, “You know, the president is old and set in his ways, and his views on this issue just aren’t going to change. Unless you give me something more, there’s just no way I can get him to budge.” In some cases, therefore, the perception that the president is past his prime might be something clever that U.S. diplomats could exploit.
Finally, doubts about Biden’s ability to do the job over the next six months must be balanced against the qualities that Trump exhibited when he oversaw U.S. foreign policy. Insider accounts of Trump’s first term portray him as erratic, mercurial, uninterested in details, and incapable of giving most foreign-policy problems sustained attention. Although he had some good instincts (such as the need to confront China, get out of Afghanistan, and get Europe to do more on defense, etc.), his views on other issues (e.g., the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Iran nuclear deal, etc.) were ill-informed and many of the policies he adopted either failed to deliver as promised or left the U.S. in a weaker position.
If “cognitive capacity” is your litmus test for a president’s ability to serve, in short, it’s hard to get enthusiastic about either of the two leading candidates, which may be why so many Americans (67 percent, as of January) wish they had another choice—and why the Democrats might be wise to offer them one. (No, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. doesn’t count.) The good news is that presidential infirmity isn’t going to make that much difference between now and January 2025. After that, all bets are off, no matter which party wins in November.
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