This week Foreign Affairs published a 2,800-word essay by Bernie Sanders, the US senator from Vermont whose campaigns for president in 2016 and 2020, though unsuccessful, attracted wide interest and support. Sanders calls himself a democratic socialist and his essay, titled “A Revolution in American Foreign Policy,” faithfully reflects the far-left worldview he has always embraced.
That worldview is easily summarized: Most of what is bad in world affairs can be blamed on the United States, and especially on American corporations and billionaires. Sanders sees US foreign policy as fundamentally “disastrous,” a word he uses repeatedly in his essay. “For many decades, there has been a ‘bipartisan consensus’ on foreign affairs,” Sanders writes in his opening paragraph. “Tragically, that consensus has almost always been wrong.”
The great 19th-century French statesman Talleyrand reportedly said about the Bourbon royal dynasty that they learned nothing and forgot nothing. The same can be said of the 82-year-old Sanders. He regards America’s global record since World War II as an almost unrelieved litany of failure. “It’s easy to see that the rhetoric and decisions of leaders in both major parties are frequently guided not by respect for democracy or human rights but militarism, groupthink, and the greed and power of corporate interests,” he declares.
From Sanders’s perspective, America went wrong with the Cold War. What President John F. Kennedy described as “a long twilight struggle” to defend liberty from a Soviet empire bent on global repression, the Vermont senator sees as America’s “shameful track record” of propping up anticommunist dictators, fighting unwinnable wars, and backing military coups in countries like Iran and Guatemala. In Southeast Asia, “the United States lost a war that never should have been fought,” he fumes, making no connection between the eventual departure of US forces and the horrors imposed by the Communist regimes that subsequently took control. In Eastern Europe, America’s victory in the Cold War opened the door to freedom, democracy, prosperity, and grateful alliance with the West. To that victory, the greatest US foreign policy success in the second half of the 20th century, Sanders doesn’t even allude.
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He likewise pours out his scorn on the US policies that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Reasonable people certainly found much to debate about the global war on terror and the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. It would be interesting to know how Sanders thinks the United States should have responded to the murderous threat posed by radical jihadists of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. But he doesn’t say. Should Saddam Hussein, one of the world’s cruelest dictators, have been left in power? He doesn’t say. What does Sanders recommend regarding Iran, which is ruled by a regime implacable in its pursuit of nuclear weapons, its sponsorship of regional terror networks, and its hatred of the United States? He doesn’t say.
Throughout his essay, Sanders is voluble on the subject of what American foreign policy makers have gotten wrong, yet almost wholly silent when it comes to explaining how they could have gotten it right.
He is no more illuminating on today’s international crises. He devotes a single boilerplate sentence to Russia’s savage war against Ukraine: “Like a majority of Americans, I believe it is in the vital interest of the United States and the international community to fight off Russian President Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine.” But after that throat-clearing, he focuses on the real villain — the “many defense contractors” that see the war in Ukraine “primarily as a way to line their own pockets.” Sanders rails at length about how much Raytheon charges for its Stinger missiles and the “record-breaking profits” earned by weapons manufacturers. Those profits clearly infuriate him far more than Putin’s slaughter.
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He offers a similar bait-and-switch on China. “The United States can and should hold China accountable for its human rights violations,” Sanders writes. What follows, however, is not Sanders’s plan for promoting liberty in China but an extended denunciation of human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia. There is no question that the record of the Saudi regime is appalling. But Sanders’s lopsided outrage reflects a theme that runs throughout his essay: The governments he denounces most heatedly are those that ally themselves with the United States.
When all is said and done, the foreign policy “revolution” Sanders advocates is merely a tired recapitulation of leftist naysaying and eat-the-rich socialist clichés. He calls for unspecified “long-term efforts to build a world order based on international law,” for “ensur[ing] that all countries are held to the same standards on human rights,” and for “trade agreements that benefit workers ... not just multinational corporations.” Fine words, devoid of substance.
Over the years, Foreign Affairs has published articles of paradigm-shifting importance — George Kennan’s “X Article” in 1947, for example, or Samuel Huntington’s influential “The Clash of Civilizations.” What Sanders has written will shift nothing. It is mere preaching to the choir, convincing only to those who already believe.
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Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jeff.jacoby@globe.com. Follow him @jeff_jacoby. To subscribe to Arguable, his weekly newsletter, visit globe.com/arguable.
