If Joe Biden is inclined to step aside as president (granted, a big if), don’t expect him to do so until after Thursday. That will be the last day of the NATO summit in Washington, celebrating the 75th anniversary of the North Atlantic alliance. Biden will make sure to host that event, even if it’s (literally) the last thing he does as leader of the free world.
The summit, which starts Tuesday, will be a grand convocation of the Western leaders, with splendid rhetoric to match. The agenda is well planned; the concluding document is prebaked: It will welcome Sweden as the latest of the alliance’s 32 members. It will proclaim that, for the first time, the alliance overall has met its pledge to spend 2 percent of gross domestic product on defense. It will reaffirm, and considerably boost, military support for Ukraine. It will lay out a road map to welcome Ukraine into the alliance at … well, some point in the not-too-distant future.
Finally, the assembled leaders, in their opening or farewell speeches, will thank Biden not just for convening the summit but for his huge role in making its accomplishments possible.
And they will be telling the truth. Biden has done much to revitalize NATO after the four years of Donald Trump’s neglect and hostility. More broadly, Biden has made foreign policy the centerpiece of his half-century-long political career, as senator, vice president, and president. Throughout, he has touted alliances as key to an effective foreign policy, and he has heralded NATO as the central alliance, without which American interests and values could not long survive in a turbulent world.
So, President Biden will be there, and he will be there as President Biden.
However, the summit—true to the word’s origins—may be the peak of Biden’s idealization of NATO, and the downhill slope on the other side may be steep, especially from the vantage of Biden’s political future.
There will almost certainly be postsummit news stories reporting that several of the leaders or their aides were “shocked” or “stunned” by Biden’s “frailty” or “mental decline,” even compared with just a month ago, during the get-together at Normandy marking the 80th anniversary of D-Day. Reporters will avidly seek out leaders and their aides, asking questions designed to evoke such observations (off the record or on background, of course).
Unless Biden truly is in as much denial as he has appeared to be these past few days, he must know that these stories will be written—that his closest foreign allies, who will have just lavished him with praise and glory in public, will proceed to express wincing doubts in private about his suitability to serve four more years in the White House.
If Biden does plan to step down (and that’s, again, a big if), he might do so soon after the summit, before these harsh verdicts take their toll—so that, as in respectful obituaries, the effusive tributes get the high-up paragraphs.
A swift departure may also ensure a wave of Biden nostalgia in the history books—no small consideration to a man like Biden, who studies history and mulls his own legacy. This may be the last completely harmonious NATO summit, and that harmony will be linked to Biden, especially if it’s his final summit as president.
If Trump is back in power at the next summit, he will almost certainly throw some wrench into the works. He is known to have no love for entangling alliances in general—and no appetite at all for the idea of activating Article 5 of the North Atlantic treaty, which regards an attack on one NATO member as an attack on all. He admires Vladimir Putin and mocks Volodymyr Zelensky. His plan for ending the war in Ukraine quickly is simply to halt all aid to Ukraine. The leaders of the Baltic states, Poland, and every other member wonder how concerned he is about their security. Some of these leaders will conclude that they must go their own way (despite lacking the resources to do so) or make accommodations with Moscow. Trans-Atlantic ties will be frayed. Biden could be remembered as the last trans-Atlantic American president.
Even if Trump doesn’t win, the future cohesion of NATO is in doubt. The alliance’s most prominent leaders are unpopular at home. The French parliamentary elections this past weekend dealt a thumping blow to the far-right National Rally party led by Marine Le Pen, but the center and left parties—which cooperated to block Le Pen’s ascent—didn’t win a majority. Awkward coalitions will have to be formed, and Macron himself did nothing to boost his own party’s standing. Some are predicting deadlocks in policymaking, which will only further alienate voters.
Meanwhile, Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, a onetime democratic reformer who now ranks among the continent’s most avid authoritarians and friends of Putin, is now—by the rules of random rotation—the president of the European Council. The post doesn’t give him enough power to sway European policy, but it may enable him to stymie or block moves to strengthen the European Union’s stance toward democracy and a common defense.
A somehow-revitalized Biden, or some successor who shares his values and priorities, might slow down or reroute some aspects of this trend but probably won’t be able to halt it.
What follows might induce wispy meditations by future memoirists and historians about Biden’s presidency as a golden age—but only if he gets out at its high point, before the deluge.