Bernie Sanders is America's best hope for a sane foreign policy

Ryan Cooper

Excerpt:

Meanwhile, the 2020 presidential candidate with the most serious, realistic foreign policy agenda is the self-identified socialist, Bernie Sanders. Sanders promises the most stubborn confrontation with this lunatic militarism on offer, and the best possibility that America might become a responsible member of the international community.

In the 2020 campaign, Sanders has leaned into the anti-war message, distinguishing himself as the boldest critic of imperial overreach in the Democratic field. As Ryan Brooks writes at Buzzfeed News, Sanders was alone among the Democratic frontrunners in not implicitly justifying the assassination of Soleimani in his initial response. Even Elizabeth Warren couldn't manage this, though she did come out with a better response after her first one drew criticism from the left. (Joe Biden didn't even explain why the Obama administration didn't kill Soleimani, while Mike Bloomberg supported it outright.)

Make no mistake, any president attempting to even scale back the rate of atrocities committed by American military forces is going to face stiff resistance in Congress and especially from the complex of military contractors who have gotten hog-rich on ever-more bloated defense budgets — often by basically defrauding the government. But that is another mark in Sanders' favor. Only the most stubborn and committed anti-war president has a chance of putting U.S. foreign policy on an even slightly sane footing. At a minimum, Sanders is the candidate least likely to start a new war for no reason — no small thing!

Sanders could also possibly draw on deep wells of support for imperial rollback. Several studies and polls exploring the citizenry's opinion on foreign affairs have found a sort of bewildered irritation at the giant waste of resources all these wars have been. A recent poll asking what the U.S. should do regarding Iran found people against war by a 76-21 margin. A Center for American Progress focus group study described voters wanting "their political leaders to make more public investments in the American people in order to compete in the world and to strike the right balance abroad after more than a decade of what they see as military overextension." Veterans and ordinary people alike agree by huge margins that both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were a mistake.

https://theweek.com/articles/887731/bernie-sanders-americas-best-hope-sane-foreign-policy