Stumbling Joe Biden is no longer just America’s problem

The 75th anniversary Nato summit was seen as the test of Joe Biden’s fitness for presidential office, after last month’s televised debate that went so badly wrong.

It was less the two-and-a-half-day gathering itself – which expert planning would ensure ran pretty much glitch-free – but the US president’s hour-long solo press conference that was scheduled to follow, which would be the first time since that fateful debate that he would have to face sustained questions and give spontaneous answers.

In the event, the growing number of those calling on Biden to abandon his bid for re-election had their scalp even before he had tried almost too hard to stride presidentially onto the platform for his duel with the world’s media. Just a couple of hours before, he had made what seemed the most extraordinary gaffe, when he addressed Ukraine’s President Zelensky, in his presence, as...  “President Putin”, before correcting himself after shocked prompts from reporters.

Now, forgetting names is not a cardinal sin, and – in the greater sum of things – nothing that, of itself, would exclude someone from the highest office. But to confuse the names of your chief protégé and your chief adversary, in the presence of the former and in front of the world’s cameras, is quite a gaffe; one that betrays perhaps not only a common effect of advancing age, but how large Putin looms in the mind of the US president at this stage of the war in Ukraine. No wonder Zelensky, never the most patient of individuals, cancelled his own planned press conference, although whether he was wise to do so is another matter.

The “President Putin” gaffe meant that almost however well Biden withstood his ordeal by press conference, there was a sense in which he had