In his first broadcast interview since leaving the White House, former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. condemned President Trump’s handling of the war in Ukraine and his dealings with global allies, and defended the timing of his withdrawal from the 2024 presidential campaign.
Mr. Biden did not mention his successor by name in the interview with the BBC. But in a departure from an unwritten rule of former presidents, he criticized some of Mr. Trump’s actions as president — including his combative meeting in the Oval Office with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in February.
“I found it sort of beneath America in the way that it took place,” Mr. Biden said of the meeting during the interview, which was recorded on Monday in Wilmington, Del., and broadcast on Wednesday. He also pointed to calls from Mr. Trump to rename the Gulf of Mexico, take back the Panama Canal and acquire Greenland.
“What the hell’s going on here? What president ever talks like that? That’s not who we are,” Mr. Biden said. “We’re about freedom, democracy, opportunity, not about confiscation.”
Mr. Biden called the Trump administration’s proposal that Ukraine cede Crimea to Russia as part of a peace plan “modern day appeasement.” Referring to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Mr. Biden said: “Anybody that thinks he’s going to stop is just foolish.”
Mr. Biden was asked whether he thought he should have dropped out of the 2024 presidential campaign earlier. Mr. Biden announced his exit from the race on July 21, about 100 days before the election. “I don’t think it would have mattered,” he told the interviewer, Nick Robinson.
“We left at a time when we had a good candidate, she was fully funded,” he added, referring to Kamala Harris, his vice president who became the Democratic nominee.
Mr. Biden, who had hinted at the possibility that he would only serve one term during his 2020 campaign, said in the interview that he had been prepared to hand over to the next generation instead of running again. “But things moved so quickly that it made it difficult to walk away,” he said, adding: “It was just a difficult decision.”
Mr. Biden said he was worried about the future of global democracy if allies no longer see the United States as a reliable leader. He noted that Sweden and Finland had both joined NATO during his presidency, bolstering the alliance. “And in four years we’ve got a guy who wants to walk away from it all,” Mr. Biden said.
“I’m worried that Europe is going to lose confidence in the certainty of America, and the leadership of America in the world,” he said.
The possibility that the NATO alliance might be dying was a “grave concern” he said.
“We’re the only nation in position to have the capacity to bring people together to lead the world,” he said “Otherwise you’re going to have China and the former Soviet Union, Russia, stepping up.”
If NATO did not exist, Mr. Biden asked at one point, “do you think Putin would have stopped at Ukraine?” He added: “I don’t understand how they fail to understand that there is strength in alliances,” apparently referring to Trump administration officials.
Mr. Trump has often singled out his predecessor for blame in his second term — a Times analysis found that he publicly mentioned Biden’s name more than six times a day on average in his first 50 days in office. Asked whether Mr. Trump was behaving more like a monarch than a president, Mr. Biden put it carefully: “He’s not behaving like a Republican president.”
