How the World Is Reacting to the U.S. Presidential Debate

Former President Bill Clinton once said that Americans prefer “strong and wrong” over “weak and right.” If he’s correct, then an overwhelming majority of his fellow citizens will have settled for former President Donald Trump over President Joe Biden in Thursday night’s presidential debate on CNN. 

Biden’s voice was not only hoarse, but also feeble, meek, and sometimes unintelligible. The next morning, on the campaign trail in North Carolina, he seemed a different person, shouting out attack lines with vigor and passion. But the damage was done. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, commentator Peggy Noonan said that letting Biden continue as the Democratic party nominee felt like “elder abuse.” Even in the New York Times, a chorus of liberal commentators—and Biden supporters—such as Thomas Friedman, Paul Krugman, and Frank Bruni called on the president to allow a younger Democrat to run against Trump this year. 

Trump, of course, acquitted himself as he often does. A post-debate fact-check on CNN found that the former president made more than 30 false assertions on a variety of topics, from Russia to tariffs and abortion rights. But Biden’s performance was so starkly worrying that the question of his ability to serve for four more years has dominated headlines. 

How is the rest of the world processing a disappointing debate for Biden? I spoke with two London-based commentators on FP Live: Leslie Vinjamuri, the director of the U.S. and Americas program at Chatham House, and Gideon Rachman, the Financial Times’ chief foreign affairs commentator. Subscribers can watch the full discussion on the video box atop this page or listen to the FP Live podcast. What follows is a lightly edited and condensed transcript. 

Ravi Agrawal: Gideon, you’ve watched a lot of these debates in the United States and all over the world. What’s your reaction?

Gideon Rachman: Horror. I don’t want Trump to be president. Within five minutes, I was cringing. I wasn’t alone in that reaction. Biden kept losing his thread and misspeaking. He sounded hoarse. He looked vacant when the camera wasn’t on him. Of course, he made some good points, but for the president of the United States, the bar has to be much higher than that. Trump, for all his flaws, sounded confident and commanding. And Biden, as I described, [seemed to be] weak and losing his touch.

RA: Leslie, you wrote a piece for Chatham House this morning. You said that “given Biden’s faltering performance, this may also turn out to be the only debate.” A lot of Democratic operatives are now in panic mode. How do you expect this to play out?

Leslie Vinjamuri: Well, it is very difficult, not least because of the deep fear that so many people have of a second Trump presidency and everything that it would mean not only for America’s democracy, but for those of us sitting in the rest of the world. There is a real concern for what it would mean for Europe, for multilateralism, and for climate change. We’re all very unsettled. 

People are focused on Biden because he did seem to be faltering, and to lose his momentum, to lose his memory at different points in time. But the story of Trump also can’t be forgotten, including the constant digging at Biden. I know we’re getting used to the bar being lowered, but I think it still stood out. 

Biden has a very impressive and deep bench of domestic and foreign-policy people supporting him. Nobody has confidence that that would be the case in a Trump administration. But still, you’ve got to be able to speak to the people, especially right now.

RA: Yes, leadership is about communication. Gideon, do you think the Democratic Party can still nominate someone else at its convention in Chicago? How does that play out?

GR: I must say I’ve been struck by the fatalism of American friends, particularly on the Democratic side, who as long ago as November were saying that it’s too late to replace Biden. That was six months ago. I can’t believe that in the world’s greatest democracy, you can’t course-correct. 

There must be a way of getting him to stand aside. But obviously, it’s technically, politically, and even personally very difficult. My own fantasy is that his cabinet goes to him and says that it’s time to stand aside with honor, and that Biden accepts that and endorses [Vice President Kamala] Harris personally but frees his delegates. 

I don’t think the Democrats can afford another succession where people are too polite to challenge the heir presumptive. Harris deserves a crack at it, but she can’t just be given it. I know all my friends who follow it much more closely are saying that can’t happen. But it has to happen.

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RA: Leslie, you have elections next week in London. And those elections were called just a month ago. Things can move pretty quickly in other countries, especially in parliamentary systems. Talk to us about how the U.S. system seems to the rest of the world today.

LV: The U.S. election cycle has always looked very long and phenomenally expensive to people who are sitting outside of the United States. This one looks even longer because it looks like a rerun, even though the circumstances are very different. And so that sense of America being stuck in a never-ending cycle of elections is profound. 

In some ways, you can argue that it’s good that the debate happened in June, but it might be the case that we’ll wish that there wasn’t a debate. At some level, as Amy Walter said, people have priced into their assessment of Biden his age and his faltering behavior, and looked beyond it because they’re concerned about the broader picture and the question of alternatives. This is where I think we run into real trouble.

Two things change in the U.K. very quickly: One is the weather and two are the prime ministers. That is just not what you expect to see in the U.S. But at this point, it could certainly be the case. It’s just hard to see where it comes from because ultimately, it’s going to have to come from President Biden. An alternative candidate is a very high-risk strategy.

RA: And obviously, parliamentary systems have their own challenges. But Gideon, it strikes me that both Trump and Biden are essentially what marketers would call “brands.” This reliance on brands is something that we used to see more of in weaker democracies around the world. I’m thinking of the Bhuttos and the Sharifs in Pakistan, the Marcoses in the Philippines, or any number of entrenched family dynasties around the world. What did last night reveal about the U.S. political system?

GR: It’s not healthy. Particularly at a moment when democracy’s efficacy is under question, not just in the authoritarian world but even amongst democracies, if you look at the polling of young people. There is this loss of faith in democracy. If you started from scratch and looked at the two candidates that the system has produced, it is very hard to argue that this is a functioning system. 

America has been pretty dynastic for a long time. All the Bushes, the Clintons, the Kennedys, and now people desperately saying Michelle Obama should run. It is very difficult, evidently, to break in. That’s why what Obama did was so miraculous. He was a complete outsider, who through happenstance, charisma, and force of ability, made it. But he’s a rarity.

RA: He really is. We instinctively think of the U.S. president as the most powerful person in the world. And last night, the rest of the world saw a diminished image of that. From a foreign-policy perspective, from a national security perspective, how were London, Brussels, Moscow, and Beijing looking at this debate?

LV: I think people here are terrified. The conversation about the possibility of a second term for Trump has occupied and preoccupied European leaders, including the U.K., in a way that is much less the case in the United States. Europeans are absolutely terrified. They talk about trying to Trump-proof Europe—certainly in the context of a land war in Europe—but really have very few mechanisms to do that. So when they look at Trump saying that he would solve the war in Ukraine before he was inaugurated, that Europe is not doing enough, prevaricating on whether Palestinians should have a state, all of these things are just deeply worrying—especially at a time when Europeans are facing elections in the U.K. and France, and uncertainty about the ability to cooperate with each other. 

RA: Gideon, Trump said at one point that the whole world sees America as damaged. I think his exact words were, “they think we’re very stupid people.”

GR: He may have a point about that at the moment—partly because of him, of course. That’s something he didn’t add. I think you can separate out two fears now. There’s the fear of a Trump presidency, and that is very real. Ukraine is one aspect of it but also, less discussed, is protectionism. Trump is talking about 100 percent tariffs on [certain] Chinese goods and a 10 percent tariff on all other foreign goods. That is a kind of nuclear weapon that Trump is aiming at the world trading system.

After last night’s debate, there’s now a separate fear about the next six months. Suddenly, we look at America and we think the commander in chief is not in command. He’s the physical embodiment of the United States, and he looks weak, as Trump put it. Who’s really going to make the decisions with this election coming down the pike and with America distracted and turning in on itself? I’ve had messages from friends in the Middle East today saying we’re in real trouble because Israel’s not going to be restrained by this guy anymore, and whether Iran is really going to be that scared. 

In some respects, it’s already struggling. But if the kind of magic goes away and a sense that this place is falling apart sets in, then it’s not just in the Middle East. What might the Chinese in the South China Sea or Taiwan, or [Russian President Vladimir] Putin in Ukraine think? I think people are very concerned about the next six months, as well as the prospect of four years of Trump.

RA: Well, I was just about to bring up China. It barely came up last night!

LV: It came up through the tariffs and through the lens of inflation, with Biden saying [to Trump], your tariffs are going to drive consumer prices up, and that’s going to push inflation and hurt ordinary Americans. But that kind of argument and level of detail, by the time we were that far into the debate, was quite frankly lost. Trump also said that Biden had been bought by China. There were a few dings in there, but it really was absent. 

I think the concern is not only this immediate period, but also a renewed concern for what happens in that transition moment. It’s also Trump refusing to be very clear that he would recognize the results of the November election when pushed multiple times. That creates a vacuum of leadership on the part of the United States and leaves lots of question marks about the ways in which China will seek to fill that.

RA: So I want to make a provocation here and play devil’s advocate. You’re both in London. And yes, Europe clearly has the most to lose in a world in which America is more transactional and cares less about alliances. But one could argue that there are several areas where the Biden foreign policy did not change that much from the Trump foreign policy, were you to look at trade hawkishness, for example, or being tougher on China. 

GR: I think there were continuities, but they didn’t, in the end, feel that similar. Trump, in a way, was a historic president in shifting the United States in certain important ways, above all on trade. And Biden continued that. He didn’t, as Trump pointed out last night, drop the Trump tariffs. Indeed, Biden has added industrial policy, which in a way upset the Europeans. 

Nonetheless, I think Europeans feel that the Biden administration is very traditional and is more committed to allies because of this consciousness that they need allies to push back against China. So America’s Asian and European allies feel quite consulted by the Biden people on those kinds of issues. Obviously in Europe, there have been disagreements about the pace of American aid to Ukraine, and some of the hawks in both the U.S. and Europe have felt that they’ve been too cautious. Overall, there is a sense that Biden and his team have been very staunch in their support of Ukraine and have absolutely no confidence that Trump would do anything like that.

Finally, there is the democratic question. The ultimate discontinuity would be if you have an American leader who is not committed to democracy—and we discovered on Jan. 6, 2021, that he isn’t. Therefore, Trump will play along with lots of forces in our own societies that are quite dangerous. In Britain, his favorite politician is Nigel Farage, the leader of the Reform party. In Europe, his favorite politician is [Hungarian President] Viktor Orban, who has been eroding Hungarian democracy. He will work with people like [Italian Prime Minister Giorgia] Meloni and perhaps with [Marine] Le Pen in France, who again raises questions about her commitment to democracy and to the European Union. 

With America’s thumb on the scales, in a Trump administration, all those illiberal forces in Europe would be empowered. So it’s not just the foreign-policy concerns, including the massive threat from Russia. But it’s also about the stability of our own societies and how Trump might play into that.

RA: What about how they contrasted on the Middle East?

LV: I think there was some very significant disagreement. We remember Trump saying on the question of a Palestinian state, “well, we’ll have to see.” America’s support for Israel has been robust and has not demonstrated the kind of restraint that many progressives in the Democratic Party and many young Americans would like to see. On China, there is the question of diplomacy. Yes, we’ve seen the small yard, high fence economic security agenda. But after that balloon incident, the very coordinated and concerted effort to reengage China through a diplomatic strategy is a really red line between these two men. When you acknowledge the fact that the greatest risk of war is probably, at this point, one that would come from the U.S. and China misreading each other’s intentions, getting that diplomacy back up and running is what separates and distinguishes the Biden administration. 

Then there is climate change. In some ways, Trump soft pedaled his antipathy toward the industries of the future. He did speak out against the Paris Accords. But he didn’t really double down beyond that, which was interesting to see. He did the same with certain parts of his reproductive rights agenda. He sort of backed off some of the harder edge parts of his agenda. 

Trump is always looking to see where he can get a reaction or move the needle. And when it comes to foreign policy, that is scary, because it means that allies and partners will not have that sense of predictability. That matters a lot when you talk about the diplomacy of the major power in international affairs.

RA: Gideon, if you are in any capital in the global south—I know you were just in South Africa and Indonesia—irrespective of who wins in November, do you think that the vision that this debate presents can be interpreted as one that accelerates a global move toward a more multipolar world?

GR: Yeah, I think so. Biden kept saying repeatedly last night, in a rather quavering voice, that America is the most powerful country in the world. I still think that’s just about true. But there’s definitely a sense that it’s moving. 

I was in Johannesburg and Jakarta not too long ago and saw both Presidents [Cyril] Ramaphosa and Jokowi [Widodo]. I got the sense that both of them see some opportunity in having alternatives. They don’t necessarily want an all-powerful America. In both cases, they also have to worry about their own domestic politics. But for Ramaphosa, for example, I think he felt that the chances of America really going after South Africa about taking Israel to the International Court of Justice are lessened by the fact that the Americans do not want to drive South Africa into the arms of Russia and China. It’s the same with the Indonesians. I got the impression that Jokowi saw China as an incredibly important source of investment and was skeptical about some of what America was asking him to do on Russia.

Therefore, they don’t particularly want an all-powerful America that can bang the table and say, “well, you know, get with the program.” They want options. On the other hand, I would suspect that for every country, a sense of a global system in flux—while it offers opportunities, there are also, clearly, risks. People don’t have certainties about how the world is going to work anymore, and that means there can be unpleasant surprises one way or another.