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

ASHA LEWIS/ Daily
ALLISON ENGKVIST/ Daily

