‘It was crushing’: Diplomats around the world left dismayed by presidential debate
By
Joel Gehrke
June 29, 2024 6:00 am
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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.”
more
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/foreign-policy/3064360/it-was-crushing-diplomats-around-world-left-dismayed-presidential-debate/
