By Thomas L. Friedman / The New York Times
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 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.
Biden understands something that — even if he cannot express it as well as he and we would always like — is embedded deep in his soul: That the world is the way the world has been since 1945 — which is to say one of the most relatively peaceful and prosperous eras in history for more people on the planet than ever — because America was the way America was.
That America is an America committed to the rule of law at home and a universal mission abroad to constantly work, within our means, to make the world a freer and more democratic and more decent and healthier place for more people.
So, what I told my family and friends when they asked me what Biden had said when he called was this: Joe Biden — even at his most inarticulate, and even with his voice weakened by age — has more gut commitment to and understanding of what America at its best means to the world, and who our real friends are and must always be, than every member of the Trump administration combined.
We will miss his gut when it’s gone. So, Mr. President, I am wishing you a speedy recovery. No matter how soft your voice or unstable your gait or weak your heart, you have the gut instincts of a healthy 20-year-old when it comes to articulating what America’s mission in the world must always be. We need to hear that — the world needs to hear that — now more than ever.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2025.
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