When looking through photos dating back to the final decades of the Cold War, the familiar smile of Joe Biden often turns up at remarkable moments. Whether meeting with then-Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito at a Belgrade state funeral in 1979, taking part as the “token liberal” at crucial dinner discussions with then-West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt in 1982 or traveling to Moscow to meet with then-Soviet Foreign Minister Andrey Gromyko in 1988, Biden’s career as a prominent U.S. senator put him at the heart of U.S. geopolitical influence in Europe.
Yet now that the 81-year-old Biden has withdrawn from the U.S. presidential election in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris, the culmination of his long political career may come to symbolize the last hurrah in its current form of a trans-Atlantic alliance that has linked Europe and North America since 1945.
The way NATO’s structures have entrenched the U.S. leadership role in Europe shaped Biden’s trajectory long before he became president in 2021. From his teenage years in 1950s Delaware marked by the U.S. rise to superpower status to his early adulthood during the 1960s marked by Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union, Biden’s formative years took place in a context in which Washington’s global ambitions were bolstered through alliances like NATO. His first two decades representing Delaware in the U.S. Senate during the 1970s and 1980s were directly affected by how this consolidation of the United States’ superpower status, driven by its rivalry with Moscow, drew every senior official and legislator in Washington into detailed involvement with European affairs.