The Pitfalls of a Primary Challenge Against Biden

Beinart makes a strong case that Biden is ignoring Democratic voters on most major foreign policy issues, but a primary challenge wouldn't remedy this.

Peter Beinart suggests that a primary challenge against Biden might force him to improve his foreign policy:

By challenging him from the left, Mr. Sanders didn’t only change Mr. Biden’s candidacy. He also made him a better president. But only on domestic policy. There was no joint working group specifically devoted to foreign affairs — and it shows. With rare exceptions, Mr. Biden hasn’t challenged the hawkish conventional wisdom that permeates Washington; he’s embodied it. He’s largely ignored progressives, who, polls suggest, want a fundamentally different approach to the world. And he’ll keep ignoring them until a challenger turns progressive discontent into votes.

Beinart makes a strong case that Biden is ignoring Democratic voters on most major foreign policy issues and that this has led to bankrupt and overly militarized policies, but a primary challenge wouldn’t remedy any of this. After all, Biden’s foreign policy is as bad as it is (and I agree with Beinart that it’s quite bad) because he has been ignoring what most Democratic voters say they want for years. Why would that change if he faced serious competition from a challenger in 2024? He managed to blow off progressives on foreign policy in 2020 easily enough. It is possible he might pay lip service to this or that issue if he faced a primary challenger, but then you could count on him reverting back to form once he was renominated. Biden the 2020 candidate claimed he would treat Saudi Arabia as a pariah and reenter the nuclear deal, and we all know what happened with those issues.

One problem with Beinart’s idea is that he assumes Biden can be pressured to break with the D.C. hawkish conventional wisdom, and that underestimates the extent to which he genuinely embraces the hawkish groupthink in Washington.