Hello, and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, your daily politics dispatch from the nation’s capital. It’s foreign policy Tuesday and I’m Julia Ioffe.

NATO opened its summit in Washington, D.C., today, celebrating 75 years of the alliance. Last night was NATO night at Nats Park, and the entirety of the D.C. blob sat and baked outside in their shift dresses and suits, despite the heat advisory. To celebrate the beginning of the summit, outgoing NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg threw out the first pitch. But not before, I’m told, the Norwegian asked local foreign policy wonks to explain the rules of baseball to him. (I’m so with you, SecGen…)

Also on Monday, the G.O.P. released its platform, summarized in 20, all-caps bullet points, which I’m sure we all want to mock but, honestly, it’s pretty shrewd and in line with the very effective messaging of Trump and the Republican Party: the repetition of simple, seductive points, whether they square with the truth or not. Contrast that with the Democratic Party, in 2016, when the Clinton/Kaine campaign released a literal book, and charged $16 for it. (As The New Republic’s Alex Shephard wrote at the time, “It is a very bad book and there is absolutely no reason for it to exist.”)

That said, the G.O.P. bullet points predictably contradict each other. Points 1 and 2 (“SEAL THE BORDER” and “CARRY OUT THE LARGEST DEPORTATION OPERATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY”), for example, don’t really work with point 3 (“END INFLATION AND MAKE AMERICA AFFORDABLE AGAIN”). Most economists agree that immigrant labor was a leading factor in both the post-Covid recovery and lowering inflation.

I read the platform just after I read my friend and Fletcher School professor Dan Drezner’s incredibly thoughtful (and depressing) piece about what a second Trump term would mean for America’s place in the world. “Trump’s economic and national security policies could lead to a more multipolar world,” Dan writes. “They are more likely to lead to a world in which nuclear proliferation accelerates, especially in Asia, the dollar ceases to be the world’s reserve currency, and the United States loses its ability to attract the best of the best from the rest of the world. Eventually, Americans could find themselves on the margins of Pax Europa.” The G.O.P. platform seems to confirm that this is precisely where Trump wants to take the country via the downstream effects of these free-candy-for-everyone policies. I can’t stop thinking about this piece and I highly recommend you read it.

🎧 Biden’s hell week: Before we get to the NATO summit, I’d like to turn your attention to the latest episode of my partner Tara Palmeri’s essential election podcast, Somebody’s Gotta Win, where she and CBS News senior White House correspondent Weijia Jiang outlined the next shoes to drop in Biden’s post-debate nightmare. First up, there’s Biden’s “big boy press conference” on Thursday, which Weijia rightfully characterized as “extremely critical” and which will hopefully address the question of whether “he can really handle thinking on his feet, on the fly, without a script in front of him.” Then there’s the August 7 virtual roll call of D.N.C. delegates, which Weijia observed will mark the end of any fantasy of replacing Biden on the ticket. “August 7 is officially the end,” she said. “If all the delegates say Biden, which they will because he earned that in the primary, it’s going to be a lock for him.” Check it out here or here.

And last, but certainly not least, here’s the amazing Abby Livingston on the Hill, where Congress is back in session and members and senators are finally reconvening after The Debate—and the panicking continues…

Needless to say, the dissonance within the party is palpable, even if lawmakers’ on-the-record statements of support for the president vastly outnumber publicly articulated concerns. Privately, Hill sources have described this dynamic to me as a tactical effort to avoid being perceived as counterproductive or destabilizing for the party. More accurately, perhaps, the hesitance to come out en masse against Biden’s nomination might be described as a cynical, self-conscious decision by Democrats to prioritize their own standing in the next election cycle or in a future leadership race.

A similar dynamic is at play in the Senate, where Kirsten Gillibrand and Mark Kelly both offered words of support for Biden over the last day, while Patty Murray—the Democratic senator and D.S.C.C. chairwoman who served the longest with Biden —issued a harshly critical statement that stopped short of calling for his withdrawal. This evening, CNN’s Dana Bash reported that Senators Michael Bennet, Sherrod Brown, and Jon Tester told colleagues at the Democratic caucus lunch that they don’t believe Biden can win… behind closed doors, but in a forum where they would have known their words would leak.

Whatever Biden says during the rare press conference he’s scheduled for Thursday, it will be Democrats’ behavior over the next days and weeks that will likely prove decisive. Among the signs to watch for: whether Democrats can generate anything resembling enthusiasm for next month’s convention in Chicago, whether donors shift their contributions to down-ballot campaign committees and candidates, whether vulnerable incumbents and challengers appear with Biden in their states and districts, and how far embattled Democrats in presidential swing states go to differentiate themselves from Biden on television.

It’s worth remembering that when Democrats rallied behind Clinton during his 1998 impeachment, and when Republicans stuck with Trump in 2016, the parties outperformed expectations in the general election. There are now arguments being hashed out in real time over whether things are really that dire for down-ballot Dems. Incumbents seem to be holding (so far), and there is some evidence that Biden skepticism was already baked into his polling. And even if the president is in full political swoon, these candidates and incumbents are liberated to run as a check on Trump. Or so the party line goes. Despite all of that optimistic reasoning, it’s hard to find a Democrat who feels good about the fall.

America’s NATO allies—in fact, pretty much the entire European continent—breathed a massive, jubilant sigh of relief upon Biden’s election in 2020. Here was someone they could trust and who shared their worldview, someone who would take things back to normal and restore balance in the transatlantic universe. This week’s NATO summit was supposed to be the capstone of this restoration, the reunification of the alliance after Donald Trump scared the bejesus out of it. Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and the West’s response, only solidified this transcendent single-mindedness. Then came The Debate, and everything seemed to change.

There were also Viktor Orban’s provocative visits to Moscow and Beijing, made under the auspices of his six-month stint as president of the European Union, where he praised China’s “peace plan.” Xi Jinping, meanwhile, is clearly only too happy to continue fueling the war in Ukraine, thus keeping the West (and Russia) bogged down while he expands Chinese influence around the world, including in the E.U. and NATO aspirants Georgia and Ukraine.

But on the eve of the NATO summit, the arriving dignitaries had something else on their minds. “They want to talk about Biden,” one D.C. think tank head told me. Or, as one senior NATO official confessed, “We’re obsessed.”

That is not how European leaders feel today. There have been a lot of scene-setter pieces published in advance of this week’s summit about how NATO and the E.U. are “Trump-proofing” themselves, from setting up a Ukraine slush fund that a second Trump administration can’t touch, to ramping up individual members’ defense spending—and even choosing former Dutch P.M. Mark Rutte, who managed to get along well with Trump, to be the next NATO secretary general.

But what these pieces don’t capture is the calm resignation in the halls this week. After the debate, Europeans are starting to come to the conclusion that Biden is done for and that another Trump presidency is inevitable. One senior European defense official in town for the summit told me, “Two months ago, I thought Joe Biden would probably win. But now, I just don’t think he’s in good enough condition to do a real, full-time campaign.” This time, however, they’re not freaking out about it. “We can’t control who wins,” the official said, “but we’ll work with what we have.” Those Trump-proofing plans, in other words, seem to have served another function, too: calming jittery nerves in Brussels and making them feel prepared for when Trump inevitably pushes them off a cliff.

Some are so sure that Trump will win in November that they’re starting to bandy about names of people he’d place in foreign policy and national security roles in his cabinet. Our own Tara Palmeri reported on some of these names back in March—Ric Grenell, Trump’s former ambassador to Germany and acting D.N.I.; Gen. Keith Kellogg, Mike Pence’s former national security advisor; former N.S.A. Robert O’Brien—but I’ve heard some new ones in the past few days. For instance, Chris Miller, who was the acting secretary of defense for a hot minute at the tail end of Trump’s term, is rumored to be in consideration to lead the Pentagon. Steve Biegun, a deputy secretary of state from 2019 to 2021 who is now doing government relations at Boeing, would, the thinking goes, head up State. And so on and so forth.

One name, though, made my jaw drop. A source told me that Erik Prince, Blackwater founder and America’s Prigozhin, has resurfaced as a foreign policy advisor to the former president. (Whoa, as they say, if true, though I can’t help recalling what one informed Moscow source told me a few weeks ago: “Trump is impulsive and no one here knows who his foreign policy advisors are. Personally, I have a feeling that he doesn’t have them.”)

That said, it doesn’t seem that NATO’s Europeans have fully and definitively arrived at the fifth and final stage of grief: acceptance. There is still a fair bit of self-soothing talk, such as alliance officials rationalizing for themselves exactly why Trump would never pull out of NATO or abandon Ukraine. The former is just a bluff, they say, because all Trump wants is NATO members to boost their spending (which they are ready to do, along with some wink-winks I got from one NATO official about Trump confusing what’s going to Ukraine with what’s going to a NATO country’s defense budget). The latter, they say, would mean losing to Russia and that would be too much of a blow to a man who’s all ego.

Which is what it all comes down to. I’m hearing a lot of talk from Europeans and local wonks about Biden’s pride and how pushing him to withdraw will only backfire and cause him to dig in. But, as every woman in foreign policy will tell you, male ego is at the molten core of geopolitics, here, there, and everywhere. When I asked a French official what they thought Emmanuel Macron would do with the unruly coalition created by his strange, perhaps arrogant decision to call snap elections, they shrugged, “It’s all about presidential systems and men, men and presidential systems.”

Are you talking about us in the U.S., too? I asked.

The official looked at me and said, “I am specifically talking about you.” And they didn’t only mean Trump.

Julia