Former Vice President Joe Biden says that he decided to launch his 2020 presidential campaign, in part, because international heads of state called him to “beg” him to run for president and “save the world.”

The Democrat hopeful made the claim in a call to supporters after he launched his campaign this week, according to the Daily Mail.

“I get calls from people all over the world. World leaders are calling me, and they’re almost begging me to do this, to save the country, save the world,” Biden reportedly said.

President Donald Trump has been a thorn in the side of globalist politicians placing entrenched corporate interests above the needs of their own citizens. On issues such as illegal immigration, NATO contributions, global warming, and Chinese aggression, Trump has bucked international leaders rather than go along to get along. In particular, Germany’s open-borders prime minister Angela Merkel has been repeatedly humiliated in confrontations with Trump.

Biden has tried to frame himself as a populist candidate, bashing Wall Street and pledging to reject campaign cash from federal lobbyists to counteract the Obama administration’s infamously cozy relationship with big banks. However, this admission that globalists see him as their best hope to oust Trump has the potential to hurt his case with voters.

Further, the failure to disclose which nations want him to run brings up further questions about the Biden family’s relationship to the Chinese government, as first exposed in Breitbart News Senior Contributor-at-Large Peter Schweizer’s book Secret Empires. Schweizer suggests that the communist regime was “buying off Biden through his son” with a shady ten-figure deal:

In December of 2013, Hunter Biden flies on Air Force 2 to Beijing, China, with his father. His father meets with Chinese officials, he’s very soft on Beijing. The most important thing that happens happens 10 days after they return. And that’s when Hunter Biden’s small, private equity firm called Rosemont Seneca Partners gets a $1 billion private equity deal with the Chinese government, not with the Chinese corporation, with the government. And what people need to realize is Hunter Biden has no background in China, he has no background in private equit

Biden kicked off his campaign Thursday morning with a video where he repeated the hoax narrative that Trump called neo-Nazis “very fine people” in the aftermath of the 2017 riots in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The same day, a campaign spokeswoman asserted that Biden asked Barack Obama not to endorse his former Vice President because the candidate needs to win the primary “on his own merits.”

Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston.