President Biden delivered an address Tuesday for the 75th anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) during the organization’s summit in Washington.
NATO has several urgent items on its current agenda, although viewers at home and abroad will also evaluate Biden’s demeanor and apparent mental sharpness. The president received support from House Democrats earlier in the day, but the incumbent’s fitness to stand for reelection in the fall remains a pressing question both within his party and among the public as a whole.
The status of NATO, formed initially as a transatlantic counterweight to the Soviet Union, had been somewhat in doubt following the end of the Cold War.
But as several former Soviet satellites, Warsaw Pact nations, including Czechia (Czech Republic), Slovakia, and Hungary, and former Baltic republics of the U.S.S.R. itself signed onto the alliance, Russia came to see the alliance as a renewed threat.
The U.S.-backed war in Ukraine is the most critical flashpoint in the current tensions between Russia and the West. The bid by Ukraine itself to join NATO is still pending, although current member states are in agreement that the war-ravaged country will in time follow several of its neighbors in signing on.