If Biden withdraws from the presidential campaign by next week, NATO leaders will give him a heartfelt pat on the back — even as they nervously eye the polls. A Donald Trump victory, many Europeans fear, could separate the United States from its European allies. What NATO touts as the world’s most successful military alliance would be adrift in stormy seas.
“The summit has gone from an orchestrated spectacle to one of the most anxious gatherings in modern times,” said the official, who requested anonymity to speak frankly about issues surrounding Biden that have transfixed Washington and the world.
The quiet concern among top national-security officials over the past week has been that a foreign adversary might seek to exploit a moment when the commander in chief is in political limbo and his administration is distracted. The two potential troublemakers that most concern U.S. officials are Russia and North Korea.
U.S. officials don’t see any imminent crisis. But it’s a fact that Russia and the United States have been moving up the escalatory ladder in Ukraine in recent months. Biden crossed two previous “red lines” when he approved shipment of ATACMS long-range missiles this spring and then authorized the use of such U.S. weapons inside Russian territory.
Russia has responded with a little-reported wave of sabotage attacks in NATO countries, striking at facilities that distribute weapons to Ukraine, but strikes on targets inside America haven’t been reported so far.
North Korea is another wild card. Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Pyongyang last month and announced a “breakthrough” partnership in which each country pledged to defend the other. Some analysts had warned me that North Korea might use this new Russian leverage to launch new provocations. But a Communist Party plenum in North Korea last week focused on economic issues rather than new military threats.
Past presidents have struggled with problems of old age, but public discussion has usually been suppressed. President Woodrow Wilson suffered a pre-stroke breakdown in late September 1919 (“I don’t seem to realize it, but I seem to have gone to pieces,” he said). Then came a debilitating stroke on Oct. 2. But Wilson officially served out the last year of his term, largely invisible. His wife, Edith, took control, writing in her memoirs that she decided “what was important and what was not,” according to biographer August Heckscher.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s frailty was obvious a year before his death on April 12, 1945. But, again, it was shielded from public view. Biographer Jean Smith writes that by the early spring of 1944, “the president was slowing down: the dark circles under his eyes grew darker; his shoulders slumped; his hands shook more than ever when he lit his cigarette.”
A doctor examined FDR that spring. His heart was enlarged; his blood pressure was 186 over 108. He was slowly dying, but his wife, Eleanor, and his inner circle pulled the veil of privacy tight. As FDR grew weaker, he made one decisive move: He replaced Vice President Henry Wallace with Harry S. Truman. It was one of the wisest and most consequential decisions of his presidency, for Truman turned out to be a president who could safeguard the future.
Biden on this Independence Day was shielded by his wife and advisers, much as his predecessors were. He admits to fatigue and poor debate performance but, for now, continues his campaign for a second term.
Surveying the trauma facing the nation, a senior administration official wondered aloud to me whether perhaps we misunderstand the meaning of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which we sing on this holiday and on so many public occasions. Our voices surge at the triumphal verses, about how amid the “rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,” our flag waves “o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.”
But if you read the words carefully, our national anthem is about resilience under pressure. The flag that onlookers had saluted at Fort McHenry “at the twilight’s last gleaming” had survived a ferocious bombardment and was somehow still “gallantly streaming” in the “dawn’s early light.” It’s not a victory anthem. It’s about surviving the night.
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