Bernie Sanders Imagines a Progressive New Approach to Foreign Policy

[Donkees]

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells 5:00 A.M.

Excerpts:

In 2017, Sanders hired his first Senate foreign-policy adviser, a progressive think-tank veteran named Matt Duss. Sanders gave major speeches—at Westminster College, in the United Kingdom, and at Johns Hopkins—warning that “what we are seeing is the rise of a new authoritarian axis” and urging liberals not just to defend the post-Cold War status quo but also to “reconceptualize a global order based on human solidarity.” In 2016, he had asked voters to imagine how the principles of democratic socialism could transform the Democratic Party. Now he was suggesting that they could also transform how America aligns itself in the world.

When Sanders’s aides sent me a list of a half-dozen foreign-policy experts, assembled by Duss, who talk regularly with the senator about foreign policy, I was surprised by how mainstream they seemed. Joe Cirincione, the antinuclear advocate, might have featured in a Sanders Presidential campaign ten or twenty years ago. But Sanders is also being advised by Robert Malley, who coördinated Middle East policy in Obama’s National Security Council and is now the president of the International Crisis Group; Suzanne DiMaggio, a specialist in negotiations with adversaries at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; and Vali Nasr, the dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced Studies at Johns Hopkins and a specialist in the Shia-Sunni divide.

Few of these advisers were part of Sanders’s notionally isolationist 2016 campaign. But, as emergencies in Libya, Syria, and Yemen have deepened, the reputation of Obama’s foreign policy, and of the foreign-policy establishment more broadly, has diminished. Malley told me, “Out of frustration with some aspects of Obama’s foreign policy and anger with most aspects of Trump’s, many leaders in the Party have concluded that the challenge was not to build bridges between centrist Democrats and centrist Republicans but, rather, between centrist and progressive Democrats. That means breaking away from the so-called Blob”—a term for the foreign-policy establishment, from the Obama adviser Ben Rhodes. DiMaggio said, “The case for restraint seems to be gaining ground, particularly in its rejection of preventive wars and efforts to change the regimes of countries that do not directly threaten the United States.” She and others now see in Sanders something that they didn’t in 2016: a clear progressive theory of what the U.S. is after in the world. “I think he’s bringing those views on the importance of tackling economic inequality into foreign policy,” DiMaggio said.

The part of Sanders’s vision that I still could not reconcile to reality was his optimism. He had a clear view of the enemy, but it was hard to see much evidence for the global popular movement against the right that he hoped to ignite. When I asked about where he thought his allies might come from, he said, “Maybe I’m wrong on this, or maybe I’m seeing something that other people don’t see, but I look at climate change as a very, very serious threat—to the entire planet, to every country on earth.” Putin, he acknowledged, was an obstacle; “China is a mixed bag.” But the effects of climate change, he said, were dawning on the planet at once, and their evidence would compel cooperation.“Australia now is suffering from terrible drought. China. Russia. Every country on earth is suffering. And it’s only going to get worse,” he said. “It also is an opportunity to say, ‘You know what? We gotta work together. We have some technology you may not have in China. You are producing this and that, that we’re not producing. We gotta work together.’ ”

That is the optimistic scenario: that climate change will bring about a new spirit of international cooperation. The darker view is that we are already seeing its effects in politics. Perceiving an existential vulnerability, people around the globe have sought the reassurance of authoritarians. Perhaps the pressures of climate change will liberate us from this moment; perhaps they also created it.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-political-scene/bernie-sanders-imagines-a-progressive-new-approach-to-foreign-policy

[InAbLuEsTaTe]

1. So do I... imagine a progressive approach that doesn't fall for fake evidence of WMD to justify war,

resulting in concocted Congressional pro-war support like the IWR, or imagine one that won't otherwise destabilize the Middle East. That shit is not going to happen on President Sander's watch!!


Bernie & Elizabeth 2020!!!
Welcome to the revolution!!!