While Americans can take satisfaction in their still-functioning democracy and the free-wheeling airing of issues exemplified by last week’s Biden-Trump debate, the candidates themselves are not a source of either national pride or international respect.

That two elderly men who are clearly showing their age and their cognitive limitations should be put forward by the Democratic and Republican parties as the best America can offer for leadership of the free world is a source of embarrassment and even shame.

Joe Biden, at 83, the oldest man ever to serve as president, demonstrated at the debate his now-customary flubs, brain freezes and memory lapses. Donald Trump was not far behind, with his repetitive and often-juvenile attack lines, denials of reality and shallow understanding of international affairs. He seemed competent only by comparison to Biden.

Anxious Europeans join worried Americans in dreading the prospect that the nation could soon be governed in these extremely perilous times by one or another of two deeply flawed octogenarians.

While not all men of advanced age show signs of physical and/or mental decline, even the younger Biden and Trump manifested failed judgment on critical national security issues.

Biden’s decades-long record of foreign policy mistakes was famously recounted by former Defense Secretary Robert Gates. The updated list includes, among other errors, his shifting positions on the two Iraq wars; his calamitous abandonment of Afghanistan; his failure — first as foreign policy guru for President Obama, then........

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