Republican lawmakers and national-security pros warn that America’s adversaries will take advantage of a rudderless executive branch.
Washington, D.C. — With the NATO summit wrapping up in Washington, D.C., America’s allies and adversaries alike are watching intently as President Biden seeks to prove he’s firmly in control of his faculties and the executive branch of the most powerful government on earth.
The fact that Biden has to prove his mental acuity on the world stage has foreign-policy-minded lawmakers and veteran national-security hands on edge, to say the least.
Several Republican lawmakers on committees related to foreign policy and national security, as well as longtime practitioners in those fields, tell National Review that Biden’s noticeable decline presents real dangers for the United States.
As Russia wages an increasingly brutal war in Ukraine, even blowing up a children’s hospital in Kyiv earlier this week, Iran approaches nuclear breakout, and a bellicose China eyes Taiwan, the sight of an enfeebled commander in chief might be just enough to convince America’s enemies that now is the time to act.
“When you see reports coming out of the White House about Biden’s abilities between the hours of ten to four, him declaring he needs to be in bed by 8 p.m., it’s disconcerting,” Representative Mike Lawler (R., N.Y.) — who sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee — told NR, “especially given our enemies and how they might try to use that information.”
Even if a swift, competent decision is made in response to some provocation in the dead of night, the lack of clarity around who exactly is making that decision represents a grave risk, warned Elliott Abrams, former U.S. special representative for Iran and Venezuela in the Trump administration and former deputy national security adviser to George W. Bush.
“Think what happens if we have a ‘Wizard of Oz’ presidency: Neither allies nor enemies will know what’s happening behind the curtain, who’s making decisions, and what to expect next,” Abrams told NR. “Deterrence of enemies and reassurance of allies gets much harder. The legitimacy of even good decisions would be undermined because their legitimacy depends on their being made by the only elected official in the whole executive branch, the president, himself.”
Then there is the question of how the American people perceive their leader.
Senator Todd Young (R., Ind.), who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told NR that Biden’s performance in the debate has left his constituents worried about their president’s capacity to respond to crises. The feeling is evident in polling conducted since the debate: Seventy-two percent of respondents to a CBS News/YouGov survey said Biden does not have the “mental and cognitive health necessary to serve as president.”
“This is the most important job in the world, and millions of Americans are deeply concerned about what they saw in the recent debate, especially when it relates to our national security,” Young said. “The citizens of our country deserve transparency about the president’s health situation. His physical and mental health clearly warrant scrutiny.”
For Abrams, Biden’s apparent inability to articulate his positions in the debate presents a challenge; in times of crisis, it is the president’s job to act as a unifier.
“The power to persuade is critical for any president; the bully pulpit is still essential for the exercise of statutory powers,” Abrams told NR. “Think of Bush pulling the country together after 9/11. A diminished president may be unable to rally the country to do the difficult and sometimes risky things he may believe must be done, or bring us together after tragic events.”
And tragic events have occurred throughout Biden’s presidency, from the calamitous withdrawal from Afghanistan to the Russian invasion of Ukraine to the multi-front war Israel finds itself fighting after Hamas’s October 7 attack.
Representative Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee in addition to leader of the House Republican Conference, told NR that the president’s mental state contributes to a weakening of America’s position in global affairs that has occurred over the course of Biden’s time in the White House.
“Joe Biden is mentally unfit to serve as president and has weakened our national security,” Stefanik said. “Since stepping into the Oval Office, not only has Joe Biden’s failed foreign policy of appeasement undermined America’s standing on the world stage, abandoned our allies, and emboldened our adversaries, but also our adversaries see that he is unfit to serve as commander in chief.”
Senator Joni Ernst (R., Iowa), who serves on the upper chamber’s Armed Services Committee, had similar thoughts about Biden’s fitness for the job.
“The world is on fire because we have a weak-kneed and feeble-willed man in the White House,” Ernst said. “By abandoning our allies and emboldening our adversaries, President Biden has created chaos. Now, the globe is laughing at the leader of the free world when they should be trembling in fear. We must bring back peace through strength and restore American leadership around the globe.”
Outside the particulars of an administration’s overarching foreign-policy strategy, there are times in which the president must ultimately make a decision — in Bush’s famous words, the president is “the decider.” The concerns surrounding Biden’s mental and physical fitness could make that process all the more difficult. It doesn’t help that Biden’s inner circle has reportedly shrunk, leaving him to rely increasingly on his son, convicted felon and drug addict Hunter Biden, as a top adviser.
“Crises happen under every president and every president gets conflicting advice; State, CIA, DoD, and the NSC staff may disagree,” Abrams told NR. “The president has to decide. If he is foggy, sleepy, unfocused, how will he decide? And how readily will agencies and cabinet members accept his decision if they think he is being manipulated by the White House staff? Here’s an example: George W. Bush overruled the generals when he ordered the surge in Iraq. Could a weakened president do that? Or think of Truman overruling advice from Secretary of State [George] Marshall and recognizing the new state of Israel in 1948, or firing Douglas MacArthur in 1951. Our system doesn’t really work without what Alexander Hamilton called ‘energy in the executive.'”
Abrams said the confusion over who exactly orders are coming from also hampers the ability of each component of America’s national-security apparatus to work with the others and protect the United States’ interests.
“It’s hard enough in the best of times to coordinate the activities of all the national-security agencies so that American foreign policy is coherent,” he told NR. “Each one of them, from DoD to State to CIA and all the others, has its own interests. Only the White House can do that — if the NSC staff is getting clear directions from the president and is getting tough backing from him when there are interagency fights. If the president is weak and out of it, there goes coherence. The ‘interagency process’ will just get to be a zoo. It’s one thing to defy the president, but quite another to say you won’t be shut down by some White House staffer and don’t even know if the president knows what’s going on.”