3B

Wednesday, March 11, 2020 // The Statement
3B

O

ne of the most dangerous ideas
in (Washington) is that Don-
ald Trump is a break from the

status quo, rather than a product of the
status quo,” said Matt Duss at the For-
eign Policy-Quincy Institute Forum a
few weeks ago. Duss, the current foreign
policy advisor to Democratic presiden-
tial candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.,
has become an increasingly well-known
figure in the United States foreign policy
establishment. His unconventional rise to
a top aide of a serious presidential hopeful
fully embodies the grassroots direction of
Sanders’s politics.

Moreover, Duss’s positioning of Sand-

ers as a maverick foreign policy candidate
sets him apart from previous Beltway out-
siders like former deputy national security
adviser Ben Rhodes, who rode his speech-
writer position with then-presidential
candidate Barack Obama to a senior role.
Rhodes served in an administration that,
to many progressives, perpetuated many
previous foreign policy excesses. Sand-
ers, on the other hand, has plainly called
for a reimagining of the traditionally real-
ist foundations of international relations.
At a rally five months ago, he challenged
the very idea of nationalism and sover-
eignty when he asked the crowd, “Are you
willing to fight for that person who you
don’t even know as much as you’re willing
to fight for yourself?”

But Duss is not just an interesting

character who distinguishes Sanders
from Obama or the apparent successor
of Obama’s legacy, Democratic front-run-
ner and former
Vice Presi-

dent Joe Biden. He helps visualize the
radically different way of governing Sand-
ers has in mind for America. But, through
Sanders’s and Biden’s fight for the chance
to beat President Donald Trump in the
upcoming presidential election, many are
making the mistake of viewing Sanders
as merely a further-left version of Biden.
Even more off-the-mark are those who
compare Biden and Sanders as recurring
characters in a political play, the Demo-
cratic versions of the Republican Party
establishment and Trump, respectively,
in 2016.

The reality contains much more con-

trast and nuance. Looking at Sanders’s
and Biden’s respective approaches to
foreign policy can help understand their
perspectives on the international role of
the U.S. for America and their respective
appeals to the electorate.
T

he establishment has tended
to view Trump’s approach to
the world as anomalous. Sand-

ers breaks with that by deriding cur-
rent U.S. foreign policy as more of the
same. Trump came into office talking a
big game about reducing America’s mili-
tary footprint, but time and time again
he has ramped up military involve-
ment and assistance. Likewise, progres-
sives have often critiqued Obama for
inspiring hope as a candidate, promis-
ing to disengage from Iraq and roll back
the post-9/11 security state, only to expand
America’s military footprint as president.
In this view, this status quo of inertial
military overreach stretches back further
to Presidents George W. Bush and Bill
Clinton. Sanders would approach his own
presidency as an overhaul, not a reform, of
this status quo. He wants to walk the walk
where others have failed.

Biden, meanwhile, is mostly com-

fortable going back to what is tried and
tested. And that pitch has its appeal.
Trump has gutted the State Department,
held longstanding alliances and secu-
rity arrangements at gunpoint, exit-
ed or threatened to exit crucial agreements
and otherwise damaged U.S. standing.
Biden aims to convince voters that going
back to the status quo — no matter how
flawed it was — would in most respects be
a welcome relief.

To be sure, Biden has explicitly dis-
avowed the neoliberal trade policies

proved politically toxic by the 2016
election. But his support for increas-
ing the military budget and maintain-
ing troop deployments in the Middle
East is, to many disillusioned progres-
sives, an Obama foreign policy redux.
To them, Biden simply recalls Rhodes,
who represented the anti-establish-
ment promises of Obama, only to jus-
tify drone strikes that killed innocent

civilians and push progressives to ques-
tion if he was really that different from
the establishment. Those progressives
find their faith in Sanders.

Talk to some of his strongest support-

ers, and you come away believing that
Sanders’s end goal is a U.S. foreign policy
completely remade in a humanitarian,
socialist mold. University of Michigan
sophomore Noah Streng, vice president of
Young Democratic Socialists of America
at the University and a campus organizer
for Sanders’s campaign, said he is drawn
to Sanders in part because of his vision for
a compassionate and diplomacy-centered
U.S. foreign policy. There is nothing radi-
cal about those premises at first glance:
George W. Bush paraded the idea of “com-
passionate conservatism” on his cam-
paign, and before Trump, diplomacy was
a near-bipartisan centerpiece of postwar
U.S. foreign policy.

But fully employing these premises,

or changing their definitions, would be
radical. Compassion, when called on
to help faraway peoples or topple bru-
tal regimes, has often led to political
disaster and so been disavowed when
convenient by presidents from Clin-
ton to Obama. And diplomacy, while sorely
lacking under the current administration,
has been traditionally employed to serve
national interests only. Sanders wants to
change all that.

Streng strongly believes this concept

is as much a pillar of Sanders’s domestic
promises, such as universal healthcare
and an increased minimum wage, as it is a
call to the workers of the world to unite. If
the Michigan auto worker and Iranian oil
worker realize they have more in com-
mon with each other than with their

respective billionaire compatri-

ots, the thinking goes,

then they have

realized

their
“com-
mon
humanity.” From
that, a more peaceful, pros-
perous future is possible.
If Sanders had reached the
presidency and was able to
see that promise through, it
would be nothing less than a
full transition to a socialist
foreign policy.

Discerning the two can-

didates’
foreign
policies

helps
dispel
misconcep-

tions
about
their

promises for America

more broadly. On the world stage, Sand-
ers wants to approach what has long been
a nationalist global order through a mate-
rialist lens. Common interests of working
people, not interstate competition, would
animate his foreign policy. At a rally in the
Diag on Sunday, he said, “Maybe instead
of spending $1.8 trillion a year on weap-
ons of destruction, killing each other, (we
should) fight our common enemy, which is
climate change.” For him, foreign policy
is less a separate venue for pursuing paro-
chial national interests, as it would be for
a staunch non-interventionist than it is a
way to generally promote human welfare
— and not just for Americans.

This is apparent not only in Sand-

ers’s past support for humanitarian mili-
tary intervention where American vital
interests were not at play, but also in the
words of his endorsers. State Rep. Yousef
Rabhi, D-Ann Arbor, who spoke before
Sanders at the rally on Sunday, endorsed
a decidedly socialist foreign policy when
he exclaimed “I want a president who will
stand up for people all over the world.”
That reflects Sanders’s larger desire to do
away with existing assumptions about the
world — not just tackle crises on an ad hoc
basis. That is either incredibly brave or
foolishly cocky, depending on where you
stand. Fellow progressive and Sanders
endorser Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,
D-N.Y., captured this systematic aspira-
tion when she said “Our priority is not
only defeating Donald Trump. It’s defeat-
ing the system of which he is a symptom.”

Bernie, Biden and America abroad

BY ETHAN KESSLER, STATEMENT CONTRIBUTOR

The topic no candidate wants to talk about

Read more at


MichiganDaily.com

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