The eyes of more than 30 heads of government will be trained on a single, croaky-voiced stiff-legged figure today as Nato celebrates its 75th birthday. Joe Biden is six years older than the organisation, which has declared its mission to be the defence of the West, and it’s difficult to escape the conclusion that both are under doctor’s orders.
For weeks — most acutely since the stumbling televised debate with the presidential challenger Donald Trump — the US leader’s mental and physical health has been under the microscope. The latest newspaper diagnosis, Parkinson’s disease, is based on frequent visits to the White House of a prominent neurologist. This has prompted the president’s personal physician to issue an unusually detailed denial. His last check-up revealed no sign of “cerebellar or other central neurological disorder”, said the doctor.
So, good to go? That’s what the Nato leaders gathered in Washington will want to find out (as will the intelligence agencies of Russia and China). It is an important moment. The health and age debate has been seen largely through the domestic prism of whether Biden can beat Trump in November. Nato leaders are of course concerned with this too — part of the summit’s mission is to quietly Trump-proof the alliance, ensuring it can survive the inevitable disruptions if he wins. But they will want to look beyond the physical and verbal stumbles.
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Does age-slowness matter in an alliance context? After all, foreign leaders found (often sycophantic) ways of working around Trump’s stranger habits and outbursts, just as they had got used to Ronald Reagan’s long naps. Trump’s election messaging frames Biden’s mishaps as if they were a failure of virility in a world of strongman leadership. And Trump reckons his own record in the presidency — the drone kill of the Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani, for example — shows he can make quick commander-in-chief decisions. But for Washington’s allies it’s about more than speed of decision-making. Even the 60-year-old leaders at the summit (young enough to be the children of Biden) will recall Reagan’s lament about the six minutes available to a president to respond to an incoming missile. “How can anyone apply reason at a time like that?” Reagan moaned in his memoirs.
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The allies are concerned about judgment, about wisely selected advisers. Does the president understand the time-sensitive facts put to him? How reckless would be his response?
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These are the factors weighing in the balance rather than fluency in debates. Crucially, allies value consistency of support. Many, and not only within Nato, were worried by Biden’s abrupt withdrawal from Afghanistan. And in Trump’s favour, he did at least telegraph future actions. It seems clear, however, that the government in Kyiv prefers the Biden approach even if his aid packages were waylaid by Republican congressmen. Ukraine’s doubts are rather about a combination of war fatigue across an increasing number of western allies and a US president who becomes risk averse with age.
This is Vladimir Putin’s autumn gamble: a drained Biden gives way to a Trump eager to score a quick peace deal with the Kremlin. The rise of pro-Russian hard-right parties in Europe is also sapping the consensus that Ukraine is a war worth fighting.
The Nato summit has thus not only to hedge against a Trump victory but also subtly to make it Biden-proof. That brings different agendas together. For a start there have to be more convincing European contributions to defence spending — 23 out of 32 allies are spending about, or more than, the pledged 2 per cent of GDP on defence. It needs to be more. Nato will promise $43 billion for a Ukrainian support package lasting a year. Nato is also set to co-ordinate military supplies to Ukraine through a dedicated agency, led by a US general. The point? To sidestep the kind of logjams that arose through congressional resistance this year. And Ukraine is to be offered a “bridge” to Nato membership, a degree of integration that still stops far short of joining the alliance.
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It won’t be enough if a new President Trump returns to his first term dogma (“I don’t give a shit about Nato,” he famously told his national security adviser John Bolton). Ukraine falls, Nato shrivels, if he gets his way. The Biden question is less apocalyptic. A sick president can still act as a war leader. As David Owen wrote in In Sickness and in Power, sometimes leaders find new strengths through coping with illness. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Winston Churchill (then 67) took the sleeper train to Scotland, boarded a battleship, crossed the choppy Atlantic, had dinner with Roosevelt, suffered a mild heart attack in his bedroom — and pretended nothing had happened.
Biden, though decades older than Churchill was, has had similar crushing routines — flying last year to Ramstein air base in Germany, then on to southern Poland, taking an overnight train to Kyiv, then holding hours of talks with Zelensky. No president since Lincoln has made his way into a combat zone where there is no US military presence.
Biden’s stamina thus seems to be holding out. The dilemma for Nato, if he wins another term as commander-in-chief, centres on how he will be in, say, 2027 if war breaks out in the Indo-Pacific, if China pushes for Taiwan and Putin is still on the prowl? How many 3am calls can you take? These are not just demands being placed on a man’s ageing body but on an alliance that guarantees the collective defence of the West. It’s beginning to look like a high-stakes gamble.
