President Biden will deliver a speech on Tuesday on the occasion of 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 are also assessing Biden’s behavior and apparent mental acuity. The president received support from House Democrats earlier in the day, but the incumbent’s fitness to run for re-election in the fall remains a pressing question both within his party and among the public as a whole.
The status of NATO, originally formed as a transatlantic counterweight to the Soviet Union, was somewhat in doubt after the end of the Cold War.
But as several former Soviet satellite countries of the Warsaw Pact, including Czechia (Czech Republic), Slovakia and Hungary, not to mention the former Baltic republics of the USSR itself, signed the alliance, Russia came to see the alliance as a renewed threat.
The US-backed war in Ukraine is, of course, the most critical flashpoint in current tensions between Russia and the West. Ukraine’s own application to join NATO is still pending, although current member states are in agreement that the war-torn country will, in time, follow the example of several of its neighbors in accession.
Biden is scheduled to speak at 5 p.m. EDT.
Watch the live video above.
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story