U.S. President Joe Biden speaks at a ceremony to mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day at the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial in Colleville-sur-Mer, France, on June 6.Benoit Tessier/Reuters
On Thursday, U.S. President Joe Biden received a piece of bittersweet advice from one of the D-Day veterans he greeted on Omaha Beach in Normandy, where they had all travelled to mark the 80th anniversary of the Allied invasion that liberated France from the Nazis.
“Don’t get old,” he told the 81-year-old Mr. Biden, before settling back into his wheelchair.
It is too late for that, of course. Mr. Biden may still seem sprightly to a century-old veteran of the Second World War. But he is, in the devastating assessment of special counsel Robert Hur, an “elderly man with a poor memory.” He may be in remarkable mental and physical shape for someone who has survived more than five decades in the brutal arena of U.S. politics, but time has caught up with him – and it is showing.
The Wall Street Journal this week published a long article providing ample, though anecdotal, evidence of the President’s declining mental acuity. It is not just that he mixes up names and places, a relatively minor and common slip that almost everyone makes. When he met with congressional leaders in January to press them to pass a US$60-billion aid package for Ukraine, he “paused for extended periods and sometimes closed his eyes for so long that some in the room wondered whether he had tuned out.”
Such is the nightmare Democratic strategists are facing five months before the election. Like it or not, their candidate is hobbled by the age question to an extent his Republican rival is not. Donald Trump may not be much younger, and may have a rap sheet to boot. But far more swing-state voters consider him physically and mentally better-suited for the presidency than Mr. Biden, according to a recent Journal poll.
That is not just Mr. Biden’s problem. Eighty years after D-Day, the world is again facing many of the same threats that the Allies went to war to eradicate back then. The United States is still the only country with the might required to tip the balance in favour of the forces of liberty and democracy. It is still the indispensable nation.
“We know the dark forces that these heroes fought against 80 years ago; they never fade,” Mr. Biden said on Omaha Beach. “Aggression and greed, the desire to dominate and control, to change borders by force – these are perennial. The struggle between dictatorship and freedom is unending.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s presence at the D-Day commemorations, and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s absence, drove that point home. Eight decades on, it is Mr. Putin who threatens a return to the bad old days of world war. Who will be left to stop him if Mr. Biden loses to Mr. Trump in November?
Mr. Trump last year boasted that he could end the war in Ukraine in “24 hours.” But his plan, as The Washington Post revealed in April, involves forcing Ukraine to cede the Donbas region and Crimea to Russia – as if that would satisfy Mr. Putin for very long. As Mr. Zelensky this week told The Guardian, the Russian President would, after a pause, “go further.” In the absence of U.S. deterrence, other global tyrants would emulate him.
Mr. Biden made a similar point in a far-ranging interview with Time magazine that was published this week. “[I]f we let Ukraine go down, mark my words: you’ll see Poland go and you’ll see all those nations along the actual borders of Russia, from the Balkans and Belarus, all those, they’re going to make their own accommodations.”
No wonder the European leaders gathered in Normandy embraced Mr. Biden so tightly. The prospect of his defeat is terrifying for them, as it should be. They know they cannot stop Mr. Putin, and his wannabe emulators on their own continent, without American assistance. They rightly fear that Mr. Trump would not provide it.
“There’s not a major international meeting I attend that, before it’s over … a world leader doesn’t pull me aside as I’m leaving and say, ‘He can’t win. You can’t let him win,’ ” Mr. Biden told Time. “And so name me a world leader other than [Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor] Orban and Putin who thinks that Trump should be the world leader in the United States of America.”
Mr. Biden is the indispensable president. Had it not been for him, all of Ukraine might already be in Russian hands. He is laying the groundwork for a postwar future in Gaza that would, if he can get whoever governs Israel by then to agree, lead to a two-state solution for the Palestinians. He has created new alliances in the Indo-Pacific region to contain China.
Unfortunately, at 81, he is running out of time. That is his tragedy, and ours.