In this COMMENTARY article, I looked at the radical foreign policy ideas being proposed by two of the Republican front-runners, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. But it’s also worth taking a look at Bernie Sanders, who is as far outside the mainstream of American foreign policy as they are — and is appears running just as strongly in Iowa and especially New Hampshire.
Foreign policy has not exactly been a Bernie Sanders signature issue. His campaign is essentially about bashing the “billionaire class” that he thinks has taken over this country and calling for socialist nostrums such as breaking up the banks and offering “Medicare for all” (i.e., a government takeover of health care). But he does have a foreign policy record of sorts, and he has been making pronouncements on the subject.
In a January 17 debate, Sanders called on the U.S. to “move as aggressively as we can to normalize relations with Iran… Can I tell you that we should open an embassy in Tehran tomorrow? No, I don’t think we should. But I think the goal has got to be, as we’ve done with Cuba, to move in warm relations with a very powerful and important country in this world.”
The Clinton campaign has criticized this statement and for good reason, even if Hillary, as a supporter of the Iran nuclear deal, hardly has the strongest standing to oppose any giveaways to Tehran. Normalizing relations with Iran, while it maintains its record as the number one state sponsor of terrorism and a backer of war crimes in Syria, would be to compound the mistake of the nuclear deal. It would be seen in the Middle East by allies such as Israel and Saudi Arabia as a final American capitulation to Iran as it seeks to exert its hegemony across the region. It would also be seen by other American partners around the world as a sign that the U.S. under Sanders would be prepared to sell them out too; South Korea should be particularly worried that Sanders would normalize relations with North Korea, too, which would legitimate this nuclear-armed Stalinist state.
Sanders’ proposal on Iran is of a piece with his career of foreign policy views. This is a candidate, after all, who honeymooned in the Soviet Union in 1988 in the naive hope of promoting better relations with the “evil empire,” and denounced President Reagan’s backing for the Contras against the Nicaraguan Sandinistas as “illegal and immoral” – a candidate, moreover, who opposed not only the 2003 war with Iraq but also the 1991 Gulf War that expelled Saddam Hussein from Kuwait.
Sanders has not opposed all use of force — he did support the 1999 Kosovo War and the 2001 war in Afghanistan. Today, he supports some action against ISIS but insists, along with the Obama administration, that America must not lead: “Countering violent extremism and destroying ISIS must be done primarily by Muslim nations–with the strong support of their global partners,” Sanders said. He admits that “Bashar al-Assad is a brutal dictator who has slaughtered many of his own people,” but refuses to support any action against him beyond the ineffectual talks overseen by Secretary of State Kerry. “I am pleased that we saw last weekend diplomats from all over world, known as the International Syria Support Group, set a timetable for a Syrian-led political transition with open and fair elections,” Sanders said, rather comically, in November. As if there is any actual “political transition” underway in Syria.
On most issues Sanders is predictably dovish. He opposed not only the Patriot Act, which expanded U.S. intelligence gathering capacity after 9/11 but also the Freedom Act, the measure backed by Ted Cruz and other libertarian-leaning lawmakers last year to water down the Patriot Act; Sanders thought that even the Freedom Act gave the government too much power. He has voted against the last four National Defense Authorization Acts because he wants to redirect the money to social welfare programs.
And Sanders is clearly appealing to those Democratic voters who think that Obama has not been apologetic enough about America’s sins, real and imagined. In a speech expounding his “democratic socialist” views last November, Sanders said that American must repent “of the failed policy decisions of the past — rushing to war, regime change in Iraq, or toppling Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, or Guatemalan President Árbenz in 1954, Brazilian President Goulart in 1964, Chilean President Allende in 1973. These are the sorts of policies do not work, do not make us safer, and must not be repeated.”
Of course, while denouncing American support during the Cold War for coups that toppled some leftist leaders, Sanders does not mention the U.S. support for democracy in countries from Germany to South Korea, from Poland to the Philippines, presumably because that would complicate his Howard Zinn/Noam Chomsky narrative of American sins.
In short, Sanders is a standard-issue peacenik from Burlington. Were he to win the Democratic nomination, he would be the most leftist nominee ever — to the left even of George McGovern. But oddly enough his strategy for American military disengagement from the world wouldn’t put him too much at odds with Trump or Cruz, who, while they are willing to bomb more readily than Sanders would and to keep Guantanamo open, are simpatico with his general desire to focus on domestic issues and give up the leadership position that the U.S. has played in the international system since 1942. All three candidates, of course, oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership, aligning themselves with protectionists.
That is an unfortunate degree of bipartisan agreement, and it underlines why it is so important that Hillary Clinton, a more mainstream Democrat, win that party’s nomination (she has cynically come out against TPP too, even if no one believes she means it), and that one of the more mainstream Republicans wins the GOP nod. America’s position in the world is too important — both for Americans and for the rest of the world — to have it be imperiled by an extremist in the White House; whether an extremist of the left or an extremist of the right or wherever it is that Donald Trump is coming from.
