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May 19, 2025, 8:52 a.m. ET
Joe Biden called me out of the blue last month. Something was on his mind. It was a few weeks before he went in for tests on the small nodule found on his prostate and received the tough diagnosis that was released publicly on Sunday. “Mr. President, what’s up?” I asked, as I stepped outside of a D.C. restaurant to hear better, leaving my family at the dinner table.
What was up? He wanted to talk about “the future of the NATO alliance.”
He told me he was planning to give a speech to remind people how incredibly valuable the Atlantic alliance has been over decades to preserve world peace and prosperity and how crazy it was to think that the Trump administration and its congressional allies would risk breaking it up. He wanted to bat around some ideas. He would call a few days later, he said, but we never had the follow up, because, I suspect, cancer got in the way.
I am not going to get into the argument today over whether Biden should have dropped out earlier from the 2024 presidential race. Immediately after his disastrous performance in the debate with Donald Trump, I urged him to do so then — but with a heavy heart.
The heavy heart was not just because we have known each other since we traveled together to Afghanistan after the fall of Kabul in 2001.
It is because Biden has an unbreakable gut connection to how important America is to the world, one that I deeply share.
