Joe Biden spent an hour at the press conference last night bragging about how he has built ties within NATO and the West. By the end of it, his partners began looking for the exits. 

According to Politico EU, Biden's performance at the summit in Washington, both private and public, shocked Western diplomats. Now they want to start building ties with the man whom Biden painted as their opponent all evening long, a decision that has been months in coming:

For some of America’s allies, it’s time to bet on the other guy. 

European diplomats and officials have described their shock at President Joe Biden’s faltering, error-strewn public performances and revealed they have already started reaching out to Donald Trump. ...

The Trump outreach has accelerated, another diplomat said, and predates Biden’s latest gaffes. “It’s been going on for more than a year,” the person added. Key European officials have been addressing conservative think tanks in order to get the message on Ukraine across to the Trump-supporting audience, the person said. 

There are two shocking aspects to this development. First, foreign policy is supposedly Biden's wheelhouse, or so the American mainstream media claims, largely based on nothing more than Biden's own braggadocio. And to some extent, Biden may have had a warmer reception from EU and NATO diplomats after Donald Trump's more contentious approach over funding and troop commitments. 

However, Biden's clear incompetence on such matters has been evident for decades -- as former Defense Secretary Robert Gates famously wrote in his memoirs -- and became clear to Americans in the national disgrace Biden authored in Kabul. One suspects that the scales may have fallen from the eyes of these diplomats as early as August 2021, when Biden abandoned 14,000 Americans to the Taliban in his craven rush to get out. (The scales fell off at home, too; that was the inflection point for Biden's job approval and favorability collapse, from which he has never recovered.)

The second shocking aspect is the source of the reporting. David wrote about the European reaction earlier today, but that came from the conservative/Tory newspaper The Telegraph, which leans more sympathetic to Trump (or at least the American Right). That clearly isn't the case with Politico, in either its American or European editions. This report not only affirms the Telegraph's earlier reporting, it adds even spicier comments from those inside the EU circles about concerns over Biden's clearly advancing incapacity:

“It’s insane,” one British official said, giving a personal opinion. “All their messages at least to the election will be drowned out with coverage about his health and abilities. And it’s becoming a laughing stock around the world.”

“What will happen next?” the official asked. “Could he order an armed forces strike without meaning to and land himself in international court pleading some kind of mental disorder?”

And these comments are coming from diplomats. 

Why make these comments at all, though? This comes close to interfering in American elections, a sensitive issue all the way around in the West. That does seem to be what's intended, however, perhaps by both the diplomats involved and Politico EU. They conclude with on-the-record remarks from a Bundestag member working in foreign affairs that essentially begs Democrats to replace Biden before the election:

“It is now clear that Joe Biden sticking to his candidacy will only help Trump,” said Roderich Kiesewetter, a prominent Christian Democrat lawmaker on the Foreign Affairs Committee in Berlin. “It can only be hoped that the Democrats will find a way for Joe Biden to withdraw while saving face and that Kamala Harris, for example, will become the Democrats’ frontrunner.”

Has he met Kamala Harris?

At any rate, this repudiation of Biden's biggest claim to strength by the allies he assumed would back him up will certainly increase pressure on him to withdraw. One has to wonder how much more the European establishment is prepared to leak to get him out of the way, but they're preparing for Trump and more reliability in the meantime. And that really speaks volumes.