Can Biden Prove His Doubters Wrong at NATO Summit?

Much is riding on President Joe Biden this week. NATO leaders descended on Washington, D.C., on Wednesday to discuss the future of the Western alliance, all while quietly questioning the future of the Biden campaign. 

The NATO summit is overlapping with calls for Biden to step down as the presumptive Democratic nominee for president after a disastrous debate performance cemented fears that Biden, 81, is losing cognitive abilities.

It is not just Democratic elites like George Clooney who want Biden to move aside – a new Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll found that 67% of U.S. adults (and 56% of registered Democrats) want Biden to drop out of the race.

Since the debate on June 27, Biden’s actions and interactions have been under a microscope. The president has only spoken publicly sans teleprompter once, in an interview with ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos, which was meant to inspire confidence in his base that he is capable of winning a challenging campaign against former President Donald Trump and subsequently serving another four years, until the age of 86.

Stephanopoulos has since been caught on video saying “I don’t think [Biden] can serve four more years.”

The NATO Summit, then, is a chance to prove the masses wrong – or right. The Washington Post reported that NATO’s leaders have been comparing notes of their impressions of the president “in an effort to build as complete a portrait as possible of the most important alliance leader.”

It’s not just allies who are paying attention. Adversaries, too, are hyper-focused on Biden since his debate-night implosion. CNN reported that one Arab diplomat said “Trump ate [Biden] alive” at the debate.

Hu Xijin, a nationalist Chinese commentator, posted on X that the debate was an embarrassment for both Biden and Trump. “Objectively speaking, the low-quality performance of these two old men was a negative advertisement for Western democracy.”

Biden must rehabilitate his image as the leader of a great Western democracy, and the NATO summit offers him the perfect opportunity to do so. It will be up to him to convince American voters and his allies that he is the man to stand up to Russia and protect Ukraine in the name of national sovereignty. 

Trump, for his part, has said he would allow Russia to do “whatever the hell they want ” to any NATO country that doesn’t spend enough on defense. While America’s fellow NATO members likely fear a Trump-led United States, they are also concerned that Biden is not up to the task of leading the alliance through a period of global turmoil. Much like American citizens, the world is not happy with its options.