President Joe Biden’s debate with former President Donald Trump was appointment viewing for diplomats and officials around the world, to their dismay.
“I woke up at 4 in the morning, Ukrainian time, specifically to watch because, you know, it’s not about elections only in the United States. It’s about [the] election of the most powerful person, on whom the fate of Ukraine also depends,” Ukraine’s foreign affairs chairman, Oleksandr Merezhko, told the Washington Examiner. “It was crushing.”
Merezhko meant that remark more as an assessment of Biden’s political prospects than an expression of his emotions. Other Western observers couldn’t help but hear, and echo, the unprecedented chorus of Democratic political strategists and liberal pundits wondering if, somehow, Biden might be replaced as the party’s nominee in 2024.
“Primarily, I’d love to see that the political parties and the American people could find a solution that would guarantee that the next U.S. president is morally and physically fit to lead America and the free world,” an ambassador from a NATO-allied country told the Washington Examiner. “However they reach this solution is obviously fully up to American people.”
U.S. allies in Western Europe, especially, have tended to view the 2024 presidential election as a choice between, on the one hand, a disgraced former president who seemed more comfortable at a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin than at summits of Western-allied leaders, and, on the other hand, a Democratic incumbent whose inauguration in 2021 prompted the top European Union politician to quote poetry: “In all beginning there dwells a magic force.”
Biden’s weak-chested and sometimes confused performance fractured that confidence even among some of the most committed Democratic partisans, leaving foreign observers with the sense that this, sometimes, is what it feels like to watch a historical milestone.
“I first thought I would rather sleep and watch the debate from a recording but eventually was happy/unhappy to see it live, while it happened, and suffered through it,” the official said.
Another senior European official offered a blunt analysis of the candidates: “One, a narcissist, thinks that he’s the master of the deals — and against him, there’s a KGB school of psychological evaluation and active measures for decades. And the other [candidate] is just too old.”
Biden has shown the risk aversion of his age already, the official implied, in the hesitancy with which he has decided which weapons to send to Ukraine over the last 2 1/2 years.
“He has been really soft, a bit too soft. Step-by-step, we went to the right direction, but it has taken time,” the official said. “OK, Ukraine is not a NATO ally. They have shown that they are fighting back … so they will still fight, actually; just the bleeding will be there.”
Merezhko searched for silver linings in Trump’s limited remarks on the war in Ukraine.
“I’m trying to look at it from the positive perspective: The good thing, what I really like, is when Trump said that he’s not going to accept conditions of Putin,” Merezhko said. “And, to me, it was one of the key phrases in his speech.”
CNN’s Dana Bash elicited that spare remark on Thursday evening when she asked Trump if he would accept Putin’s conditions for a peace deal in Ukraine, including “keeping the territory in Ukraine” that Russian forces have taken. (Putin also wants Ukraine to cede some territory that he has not succeeded in taking.)
“No, they’re not acceptable,” Trump said. “But look, this is a war that never should have started. … People being killed so needlessly, so stupidly, and I will get it settled and I’ll get it settled fast before I take office.”
That kind of promise causes its own uncertainty. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, among others, has dismissed such rhetoric on the grounds that any plan to bring the war to an abrupt end would necessarily mean “in other words, to make us give up our territories. … But we would not agree.” And NATO allies in Ukraine’s neighborhood perceive a dire threat in the prospect of Russia acquiring some or all of Ukrainian territory while enjoying the time to rearm.
“Can you imagine [if] Russia will get the whole Ukraine with all those also military capabilities and territories?” the second official said. “And then, after five years, they will challenge us.”
To avert that possibility, Merezhko allowed, Ukrainian officials will have to try to develop a rapport with Trump and his team, even at risk of ruffling feathers in the Biden administration.
“We don’t want to antagonize Biden, but at the same time, we don’t want to antagonize Trump, and it’s difficult, diplomatically,” he said. “At the same time, I think it’s worthwhile to start thinking about developing guys’ connections with Trump’s team, because, you know, if he is elected and there is no dialogue, and there is no engagement with his team, it might have [a] negative impact upon our position and upon aid to Ukraine. I’m afraid of this.”
Trump, while training most of his fire on Biden, claimed that “the European nations together have spent $100 billion, or maybe more than that, less than us” in support of Ukraine before boasting of his success in spurring NATO allies to spend more on defense during his presidency. Biden countered that “our NATO allies have produced as much funding for Ukraine as we have,” but other exchanges were more confused, or trivial, such as an exchange of taunts over which man is a better golfer.
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Still, Merezhko chooses to trust the process. “We believe in institutions in the United States; we believe that institutions and national interests are more important than people,” the Ukrainian lawmaker said. “So if worse comes to worse, and if Biden’s health deteriorates in a couple of years, we hope that institutions will be strong enough. And the same holds true for Trump, that despite his — some [of his] personal traits, personal views — we believe that institutions, democratic institutions, are more stable, and they make foreign policy more predictable in the United States.”
Other observers were less sanguine. “Very generally speaking, I don’t care who’s the president of the United States…as long as this person can steer the U.S. to remain a democratic and prosperous country that is tough on adversaries and attentive to the needs of allies,” the first European official wrote in a text message to the Washington Examiner. “If that’s the case then the allies are ready to always follow and be useful to the U.S., if necessary…But what I saw yesterday was not assuring and I hope that, one way or another, this will not be the image that will follow us for the next four years.”
