David J. Phillip/AP Photo
Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, and Elizabeth Warren at the Democratic debate in Houston, September 12, 2019
Foreign policy, the area where a president has the strongest and most unchecked hand to implement an agenda, hasn’t yet come up in this Democratic presidential campaign in a substantive way. In Miami, Detroit, and Houston, the loaded questions, often lobbed toward the end of the congested debate nights, hardly offered enough time to unpack the candidates’ policies. Tonight’s affair in Columbus, Ohio, probably won’t break the trend.
Because President Donald Trump has put so many international alliances and accords in jeopardy, it is incumbent on the Democratic field to explain to the American people the importance of restoring partnerships and rebuilding relationships with allies. Under Trump, the foundations have been rattled, including the very idea that foreign policy is conducted in consultation with country experts and diplomats on the ground. With American power so deeply undermined, there is a temptation to simply advocate for a return to what Democratic foreign policy was before 2016. But given the emergencies facing the country and the planet, there is opportunity for something bolder.
Nevertheless, some foreign-policy stalwarts want to flatten any debate before it begins. “The narrative that the Democratic Party is split over foreign policy—I don’t see strong evidence for that proposition,” Jake Sullivan, Hillary Clinton’s chief foreign-policy adviser who before that served as national-security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, told me. “There is much more convergence rather than divergence in my view among the candidates, from Senators [Elizabeth] Warren and [Bernie] Sanders to the rest of the field, on the core elements.”
Yet Sanders and Warren have separated themselves from the rest of the field on many issues, among them climate change, global oligarchy and authoritarianism, and dealing with corporate malfeasance. They both say, in their own ways, that they want to go beyond what Obama did on the world stage, though at times their statements sound decidedly Obama-like. That said, there are significant differences between the two progressives on foreign-policy matters, starting with who advises them.
Sanders has led more strongly than any other candidate on ending endless wars and significantly reducing our enormous military expenditures. Writing in The Atlantic, the researcher Thomas Wright argues that this approach is “incompatible” with recalibrating relations with foreign countries along the lines of democracies and autocracies. “Sanders … will be forced to choose between waging the struggle against autocrats and cutting the defense budget and deemphasizing military power.”
Sanders adviser Matt Duss told me that he doesn’t see a contradiction. “The imperatives of the defense industry,” says Duss, “are so ingrained in how we conduct foreign policy. It’s important to step back and question that logic.” He told me that Sanders believes in a strong defense but questions why the U.S. spends more on our military than the next eight to ten countries. “We need to invest more in diplomacy, development and conflict prevention upstream,” he adds, “so you don’t need military intervention downstream.”
Sanders proposed a relatively undeveloped foreign policy in the 2016 campaign, which Democratic centrists largely cast as isolationist; this cycle, he has come out of the gate with a bold perspective, one that wants to shake up the conventional wisdom in Washington. Duss, a former Prospect writer, calls for a rupture with the inertia of conventional wisdom and groupthink. The Sanders campaign has assembled an informal team of top thinkers to re-imagine how the U.S. could conduct itself in the world after Trump, with many experts outside of the usual secureaucrat circles. Some standout names are Robert Malley of the International Crisis Group and Suzanne DiMaggio of the newly established Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
Sanders, in particular, has moved the ball forward with his discussion of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, noting that as president he may withhold parts of the $1 billion of aid Israel receives annually from the U.S. “The United States government gives a whole lot of money to Israel, and I think we can leverage that money to end some of the racism that we have recently seen in Israel,” Sanders said at a town hall event in August. And once a conversation has begun on conditioning and withdrawing aid to Israel, an important taboo in this debate has been broken.
Sanders has also been a leading advocate for ending Saudi Arabia’s brutal war in Yemen and using congressional authority to limit the Trump administration’s arming of the Saudi-led coalition.
The left has eagerly embraced Sanders on foreign policy, hyping his long track record as an independent senator and an archive of principled foreign-policy pronouncements from over the years. (For his part, Sanders has faced criticism for being too optimistic or unrealistic about the potential for change, and for using his progressive bully pulpit to simply offer an Obama rerun.) In the meantime, critics from the left have spotlighted Elizabeth Warren’s foreign policy as representing continuity with the Democratic establishment, clasping onto her ambiguity and at times reluctance to express broad critiques of the status quo.
Warren’s ambiguity, it might be said, is strategic, a recognition that foreign policy does not typically win over voters—and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s hard to commit to grand strategies and theories of International Relations on the campaign trail, the types of hypotheticals that can lend themselves to illogical red lines and bad policies down the line.
Warren, who famously works the political system as an insider-outsider, will likely be a consensus-builder on foreign affairs. “It’s not just about pressing the reset button getting to where we were prior to Trump,” a Warren aide told me, “it’s about envisioning a new way forward in the 21st century.”
Serving on the Senate Armed Services Committee, she has focused on the potential for structural change within the Department of Defense, the nuts and bolts that the committee oversees. Though she has received criticism for voting for President Trump’s defense budgets, Warren’s team told me that she wants to shrink the size of the military’s footprint, decrease its bloated budget, and lead with diplomacy first. In February 2017, Warren hired Sasha Baker, a former deputy chief of staff to Obama’s fourth defense secretary, Ash Carter, and she has since taken on the foreign-policy portfolio for the campaign. Vanderbilt law professor Ganesh Sitaraman, a Prospect board member, also advises the campaign and has conveyed progressive economic policies. (The campaign declined to comment on who else is advising Warren.)
For Warren, two pieces of foreign-policy conventional wisdom need updating. First, the collapsing of the often arbitrary divisions between foreign and domestic policy, including issues like immigration, climate, and criminal justice within a national-security framework. Second, and along those lines, anti-corruption is a focus of Warren’s worldview, countering kleptocratic autocracies and rewarding democracies. Warren has advanced these ideas in a plan for trade that would prioritize human rights as well as economic opportunity for Americans. But what distinguishes her viewpoint is an emphasis on righting the rigged system of corporations conducting U.S. foreign policy. “A new approach should begin with a simple principle,” Warren wrote last November in Foreign Affairs, “U.S. foreign policy should not prioritize corporate profits over American families.”
You could argue that, even if climate and trade and immigration are global issues, this dodges tougher foreign-policy questions by wrapping them in more comfortable domestic policy concerns. Though she has said the right things on the Saudi crown prince’s killing of Jamal Khashoggi and human rights in China, she is still crafting her messages on a number of issues. Her language on Israel-Palestine—speaking of the “demographic realities” of Palestinian babies, an anti-Palestinian formulation—sounds like a political operative too eager to please pro-Israel voters, not a progressive. That’s a major wedge issue on the left right now, and given how Sanders has staked himself out as a strong advocate for human rights and international law in Israel-Palestine, it’s likely to be a sticking point on the debate stage sometime soon.
As for their contender Joe Biden, the onetime senatorial statesman endures as a front-runner who runs his mouth. But in the context of national security or foreign affairs, Biden has not set himself apart during this campaign. His inability to articulate a worldview beyond Obama’s has meant that instead his affinity for the CIA and liberal interventionism have been highlighted, not to mention his relative muteness on the Saudi-led war in Yemen, which the Obama administration greenlit in 2015. It’s easy to conjure up a litany of his blunders, from voting for Bush’s Iraq War to later advocating for a bizarre federalization of the country. Compared to Biden, Warren’s relative blank slate on foreign policy may prove to be a positive.
In addition to those serving on the Penn Biden Center’s faculty, Biden’s counselors include his former national-security adviser Tony Blinken and Harvard Kennedy School professor Nicholas Burns, the latter of whom also worked on the Hillary Clinton campaign. Though some of Biden’s working-level advisers were closely involved with the Obama administration’s diplomatic successes, like the Iran deal, Blinken and Burns are familiar faces of the Washington national-security establishment—standing in contrast to Duss.
It is worth recalling that foreign policy, and the calamitous conflict in Iraq, became a defining issue of the 2008 campaign. Barack Obama, too, ran on a progressive foreign-policy platform, emphasizing that Iraq was the bad, unlawful war, while Afghanistan was where the U.S. was on good moral footing. He employed his anti-war bona fides to establish a leftward flank to Hillary Clinton’s more militaristic foreign policy. Now, ending endless wars—from Iraq to Afghanistan to the other shadow interventions the U.S. engages in from its 800 bases worldwide (including Obama’s drone wars)—has started to enter the prime-time conversation.
Just as Bush turned the U.S. into an international pariah, so too has Trump manufactured his own foreign-policy emergencies, from Syria to the Persian Gulf to China. There is an argument to be made that Trump’s crises are useful in revealing the core tensions of America’s imperial posture in the world, its shadow deployments in unauthorized wars and its disregard for human rights concerns of so many at-risk groups. A Democratic foreign policy is waiting to be born—and if Trump can be beat, these varied emergencies may give Democrats a chance to rebuild foreign policy in a meaningful way.
It may turn out to be the first election in recent memory where, rather than espousing hawkish national-security talking points, a Democratic candidate will prove their credentials as commander in chief with a progressive vision.
