Democrats Are Fighting Over Biden's Foreign Policy Legacy. The Argument Is About China, Not Just Personnel.

The Purge Talk

In May 2026, Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii posted on social media that he thought it "fair to want a whole new crop of foreign policy staffers in the next democratic administration," adding that "it's not like the same 120 people are the only people who know anything." He said he did not favor "blacklisting" and then described something that sounds a lot like blacklisting.

Schatz was not speaking in a vacuum. His post landed in the middle of a sustained campaign, conducted partly through social media and partly through sympathetic press, to exclude Biden administration foreign-policy officials from future Democratic campaigns. The Atlantic published a piece by a former Biden National Security Council official pushing back on that effort.

The author, who held responsibility for strategic planning on Biden's NSC, is candid about his conflict of interest.

What Biden Actually Did

The popular shorthand on Biden's foreign policy—that he was a restorationist, trying to return to the pre-Trump liberal international order—is wrong, according to the Atlantic piece, and the evidence supports that reading.

For decades, Democratic administrations operated on a core assumption: that expanding globalization, integrating supply chains, and prioritizing free trade would strengthen both American prosperity and international stability. The theory depended on great-power cooperation. It assumed you could get anything you needed from anywhere in the world, just in time, and that this interdependence would make conflict too expensive for everyone.

Biden's team junked that framework. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan made the shift explicit in a 2023 speech at the Brookings Institution, arguing for an active industrial policy aimed at rebuilding domestic manufacturing capacity. The logic: global integration had left the U.S. dangerously exposed, and domestic industrial strength, not supply-chain efficiency, was the real foundation of national power.

This was not a return to the Clinton or Obama playbook. It was a significant departure from it.

The Real Divide

The fight over personnel is a proxy for a deeper argument about how to read the world. Two competing visions are in play inside the Democratic Party.

The first holds that the international order is eroding, that great-power competition with China is real and intensifying, and that the U.S. needs industrial strength, robust alliances, and strategic clarity to navigate it. This is broadly the Biden NSC's framework.

The second rejects that framing as self-fulfilling prophecy. Treating China as an adversary, in this view, forecloses cooperation on climate change, pandemic preparedness, and other shared global problems. The solution is restraint, not competition. This is the emerging progressive position.

This is a legitimate debate, and progressives have forced it into the open rather than letting it fester. The restraint position has serious intellectual backing. Scholars like John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have argued for years that threat inflation and overreach are America's primary strategic dangers, not Chinese ambition.

The Strongest Case for Restraint

Progressives arguing for a fundamentally different approach raise a concern worth considering: the competition framework, once adopted, tends to self-perpetuate. Defense budgets grow. Diplomatic options narrow. Every concession becomes appeasement. If the U.S. and China treat each other as adversaries across the board, cooperation on climate and biosecurity, areas where the cost of failure falls on everyone, becomes nearly impossible.

But the restraint camp has its own blind spots. China's military buildup in the South China Sea, its pressure campaign against Taiwan, and its systematic theft of American intellectual property are not American inventions. They are documented, ongoing facts. A foreign policy built primarily around Beijing's cooperation on shared problems has to grapple with what happens when Beijing decides competition is more useful than cooperation. On the evidence of the past decade, it frequently does.

What This Means Going Forward

The personnel argument Schatz and others are making is mostly a distraction. Excluding 120 people from future Democratic administrations does not resolve the strategic question. You can staff a restraint-oriented foreign policy with a completely fresh team and still get the framework wrong. You can also staff a competition-oriented policy with veterans and get the execution wrong.

The ideas matter more than the résumés.

What the Democratic Party has not yet done is hold a public, honest accounting of where Biden's framework worked and where it failed. The domestic industrial policy push had real results. The CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act reshaped semiconductor and clean-energy investment in ways that will outlast the administration. But Biden's handling of Gaza cost him politically and tested the alliance framework he had built. His administration's posture toward China was tougher than Obama's but produced no clear resolution to Taiwan's status or the broader competitive dynamic.

The unresolved question is whether the next Democratic administration, whenever it comes, will build on Biden's industrial-policy shift and sharpen it, or abandon the competition framework entirely in favor of a restraint doctrine that has never actually been tested against a peer adversary in the modern era.