Bernie Sanders Is More Serious on Foreign Policy Than You Think

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Read more: http://www.politico.com/

Lawrence Korb, who has worked at several think tanks, served as an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration. The views expressed here are his own, and do not represent the views of any of his employers or the Sanders campaign.


In my dealings with him, and in analyzing his record in Congress over the past 25 years, I have found that Sanders has taken balanced, realistic positions on many of the most critical foreign policy issues facing the country. In the mold of realists like Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush, Sanders voted against the invasion of Iraq in 2002, while wisely supporting the war against in Afghanistan in 2001 and the intervention in the Balkans in 1990s. And Sanders certainly isn’t a foreign policy lightweight: In fact, given his long tenure in the House and Senate, he has more foreign policy experience than Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama did when they were running for office the first time.

What would a President Sanders’ foreign policy look like? Based on his record and my conversation with him, I believe it would be rooted in a number of key principles. First is restraint in using American force abroad. As he has stated, and as is demonstrated by his vote against the Iraq War and the first Gulf War, Sanders believes military action should be the last, not first, option and that, when taken, such action should be multilateral. I also believe, based on our conversation, that he would follow the Weinberger Doctrine (also known as the Powell Doctrine): When the United States uses military force abroad, our objectives should be clear, we should be prepared to use all the force necessary to achieve those objectives, and we should know when they have been achieved.

Sanders has demonstrated these principles in Congress. Before the 2016 campaign, I briefed him once, in 2006, when we discussed a foreign policy paper I had coauthored about how the United States could begin a strategic, phased withdrawal from Iraq. Unlike many of his Democratic colleagues, who characterized our plan as cut-and-run, Sanders supported it. He recognized that Iraq was not the most critical front in the war against terror; that America’s involvement there was creating more terrorists in the region and around the globe than we were capturing or killing; and that the Iraq War was diverting attention and resources from the necessary war in Afghanistan.

Sanders’ military restraint extends to spending, too. Since coming to Congress, he has argued forcefully and repeatedly for eliminating waste, fraud and abuse in the Pentagon so that we can reduce defense spending. There is no need for the United States to spend more than the next seven top-spending countries in the world combined, several of which are our allies, and more in real dollars than we spent annually on average during the Cold War. As President Obama has pointed out, while America has many challenges in the world, we are not in the midst of World War III.

Twenty-five years after the Cold War, there is also no need to spend a trillion dollars to modernize our nuclear arsenal, and Sanders has even pledged to cut $100 billion in nuclear spending over the next decade. Instead the United States should ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which Sanders told me he would push for, in order to ban all nuclear explosions in all environments, for both military or civilian purposes. In fact, Sanders has demonstrated a much more forward-thinking foreign policy. He would, like many of our military leaders, treat climate change as a national security threat and indicated to me that he would seek to have the Senate ratify the Law of the Sea Convention, which defines the rights and responsibilities of nations with respect to their use of the world’s oceans, establishing guidelines for business, the environment and the management of marine natural resources.

Finally, Sanders has demonstrated an admirable commitment to diplomacy. He is not naive in suggesting, as he has, that the United States should reach out to Iran to try to normalize diplomatic relations. Nor was Nixon naive when he went to China in 1972, at the height of the Cultural Revolution and at a time when Mao Zedong’s government was still providing arms to North Vietnam to kill American troops.

[californiabernin]

1. Kickin it. Nt

[tokenlib]

2. Damn right he is...and Hillary with her "single issue" shit...

The oligarchy and the corporate economic interests run through everything. It's long since time we follow the money through the military interventions and regime changes, and overall foreign policy.

[magical thyme]

3. Bernie's single issue:

InequalityJusticeJobsEconomyTBTFImmigrationClimateChangeEcologyEnergyMICWallStreetDefenseEducation...