Seth Mandel writes for Commentary about international reaction to President Biden’s debate performance.
The feeling of crisis at this moment is so acute that all issues take a backseat—and that is a crisis all its own.
The crisis is international. Maybe even more so than it is domestic. And it’s worth talking about the repercussions and implications of that.
The homepage of the UK Telegraph this morning was filled to the brim with headlines like “Biden under pressure to quit after ‘painful’ debate performance”; “Biden is a danger to the world”; “The Free World must have a new leader”; etc. The Russians over at Sputnik were of course having their fun with President Biden’s “Debate Debacle.” Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald: “Democrats have other options after Biden disaster.” The South China Morning Post uses the follow quote as its headline: “Biden might have imploded.”
In the United Arab Emirates, The National tells its readers that “Biden faces calls to step aside after poor debate performance.” An opinion piece on the Toronto Star’s homepage puts it colorfully: “Joe Biden reportedly had a cold. After watching him perform, the whole world is feeling sick.”
Again, as of late morning Friday these were all on their respective newspapers’ home pages, and they were all headlines—not simply lines in a story. It is not great.
The pro-Hamas riot movement and Joe Biden’s poor cognitive performance are reminders of something else: Donald Trump’s presidency was also marked by domestic unrest, but the international arena was noticeably and undeniably quieter than it has been under Biden—which is, I believe, a large part of the global anxiety over last night.
That is not to say that there were no crises during Trump’s presidency. But there is a land war in Europe and the Middle East is aflame worse than it’s been arguably since the 1970s, and those two fronts were simmering but subdued during the four years before Biden took over.
