If that was Erdogan’s price for getting Sweden into NATO — he gets to pay us $20 billion — then it’s a terrific bargain. Because just look at NATO now.
When Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine last year, he may have thought the Western alliance would crack under the strain. But today, NATO is bigger and stronger than ever — and more united than at any point since the end of the Cold War. This achievement would not have been possible without Biden’s leadership.
As the world’s preeminent military power, the United States calls the shots in NATO, whatever a long line of French presidents might have liked to think. Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, had petulantly threatened to quit the alliance. Biden, by contrast, has coordinated NATO’s massive flow of arms, ammunition and intelligence to Ukraine — enough to stop Putin’s forces in their tracks.
The Russian invasion spurred Finland to abandon its long-standing neutrality and quickly join NATO. Now, with Sweden coming in, the Baltic Sea — Russia’s maritime portal to the world since the time of Peter the Great — effectively becomes a NATO lake, completely ringed by countries that belong to the alliance. That has to be the diametrical opposite of what Putin had hoped for.
This historic statecraft required skill, creativity and patience from all the NATO leaders. But as first among equals, Biden bore the heaviest burden — and deserves the biggest share of credit.
After the summit, Biden took a victory lap with a visit to Helsinki. In the same ornate room where Trump, five years earlier, had shockingly said he took Putin’s word over that of U.S. intelligence agencies, Biden celebrated Finland’s membership in the alliance and said “I absolutely guarantee” that the United States will remain committed to NATO. I’ll go out on a limb and absolutely guarantee that we’ll see footage of those contrasting presidential visits to Helsinki in a Biden campaign ad.
While Biden was overseas, developments at home were arguably even more encouraging, politically speaking. It is axiomatic that foreign policy rarely decides presidential elections and that, in James Carville’s immortal formulation, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Last week, the economic news was stunningly good.
On Wednesday, officials announced that inflation in June compared to June of last year was just 3 percent — the smallest year-over-year increase in two years. That is still higher than the Federal Reserve’s target of 2 percent, but not by much. The cooling inflation meant that for the fourth month in a row, wages rose faster than prices. Unemployment in June was at 3.6 percent — and has remained below 4 percent since February of 2022.
Back when inflation was out of control, Republicans railed against the purported failure of “Bidenomics,” a sobriquet they coined as a pejorative. But recently, Biden has stolen the term and begun touting “Bidenomics” as an unqualified success: falling inflation, rising wages and jobs for all who want to work. And while what Americans feel about the economy often lags behind what the numbers say, last week there was a sign that perception is catching up with reality: The University of Michigan’s benchmark measure of consumer sentiment jumped to 72.6 percent in July from 64.4 percent in June — the biggest single-month jump since 2005.
Republicans in Congress, meanwhile, were engaged in performative antics designed to appeal to the MAGA base. House Republicans made a show of festooning the Defense Department’s budget bill with culture-war nonsense that will never make it through the Senate; and Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) is holding up military promotions, and damaging the readiness of our armed forces, to make a point about abortion.
To cap off the week, the reelection campaign of Biden and Vice President Harris announced Friday that it had raised $72 million in the second quarter — more than twice the amount raised by Trump, and more than three times the haul of Trump’s leading opponent for the GOP nomination, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
God gave Democrats hands so they could wring them in political anxiety. They should consider using them, for a change, to applaud.
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