There’s no point sugarcoating it: the first presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump was a complete mess. Biden was listless, frail and confused. Trump was defiant, ranting and often incoherent. Kim Darroch, Britain’s former ambassador to the United States, summed it up well. ‘Every answer from Trump, if you listen to them carefully, is a mixture of wild exaggeration and total fantasy…his performance is pretty terrible too, but it was fluent and confident nonsense rather than stumbling, losing my train of thought nonsense.’ I suspect most Americans would agree with him.
Yet it’s important to resist the temptation to extrapolate from a single event. Domestic politics is one thing, international politics is another. In the days since this pathetic showdown, you would be forgiven for thinking that yesterday was, as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said after Imperial Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, ‘a date which will live in infamy.’
Commentators and observers in the US and around the world are running with this theory: the Biden-Trump reality show is a reflection of America’s decline and an indictment on waning US global power. As one European diplomat texted to a Politico reporter, ‘Internationally this isn’t a great look for America, at the risk of stating the obvious.’ Sergey Radchenko, a serious historian of the Cold War and a frequent writer in these pages, was even more blunt: ‘I am worried about the image projected to the outside world. It is not an image of leadership. It is an image of terminal decline.’ Allies around the world are purportedly aghast at what they witnessed, wondering whether the decades-long security arrangements they have with the United States are now in imminent jeopardy.
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