Bernie Sanders Sets His Sights On The Foreign Policy Establishment

09/20/2017 08:24 pm ET

Excerpts:

WASHINGTON ― Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will use a major foreign policy address Thursday to set out his view of how politicians on the left should discuss the U.S role in the world and why voters at home should pay close attention to America’s actions abroad.

The senator will focus on the value of international cooperation and less U.S. reliance on hard military power to pursue its goals around the world, rather than going into specific policy recommendations for hot spots like Syria, North Korea and elsewhere.

Sanders will deliver his speech at noon eastern time at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. The location is laden with symbolism. Westminster hosted Winston Churchill not long after the Allies won the Second World War. It’s there that, in 1946, the British-American icon delivered the epoch-defining “Iron Curtain Speech,” the origin of the concept of the Soviet Union trapping much of Europe behind an Iron Curtain and the idea of the “special relationship” between the U.S. and the United Kingdom.

Sanders has acknowledged the strengths of the post-war international order that Churchill and others developed. But he’s also spent years publicly warning that America’s leadership of that order has inspired excessive military adventurism in Washington ― and helped create the conditions, economic and otherwise, that turned Americans toward a man who sees little value in the current order, President Donald Trump. Sanders will focus on contemporary history to explain what he recommends in foreign policy, the aide said.

“There are two things he’s going to compare and contrast: the Iraq War, which most now agree was a disaster, and the Iran agreement, which is an example of how American leadership should work, where we used diplomacy and mobilized international consensus to address a shared challenge,” the aide continued.

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