If you believe the fundamental premise that the country and the world as a whole is better off with the United States at the top of the food chain, unparalleled by China, Russia, and our other dangerous adversaries, you have a vested interest in preventing a Bernie Sanders presidency.
As dangerous as the Vermont senator’s world view is, however, we cannot simply dismiss it and laugh off his pacifist-communist, “blame America first” foreign policy ideology.
The unbelievable foreign policy failures of past U.S. administrations have created a healthy opening for people to discuss, openly and critically, the best path forward for U.S. foreign policy. We now know that the ultra-ideological neoconservative and Wilsonian policies advanced by former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama have harmed our nation. President Trump, to his credit, is attempting to manage a reorientation of our foreign policy, one that is based in realism, restraint, and a hesitancy to continue to send soldiers into several viper’s dens in the Islamic world. However, Trump has faced several bureaucratic hurdles, pressure from inside and outside of the government to hold the course on our overseas debacles, and his efforts have stalled significantly.
With this reality, an opening has been created for people with dangerous ideologies, such as Sanders, to insert their claims into the debate.
The 21st century of foreign policy has been a bipartisan, blunder-filled, multitrillion-dollar disaster of epic proportions, which has resulted in thousands of U.S. casualties and an ongoing mental health crisis, which includes a PTSD and suicide epidemic in our veteran communities. It’s beyond tragic, and not enough attention is paid to the costs of war on our best and bravest citizens.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, we have very little to show for all of the blood and treasure spilled to advance the Beltway and Pentagon elite’s war and diplomatic strategies.
Sanders is absolutely within his rights to savage some of these foreign policy disasters, which, again, are widely condemned as disasters for a reason. But his solutions to our foreign policy problems would result in utter disaster for America’s place in the world.
First and foremost, Sanders, who does not exactly have a reputation as a cost-cutter, has called for slashing the U.S. military budget, largely so that he can bring in cash for his multitrillion-dollar social welfare programs. At a time when China is fully invested in challenging U.S. global hegemony, cutting the military budget (which, by the way, is much different than calling for a righteous audit of waste and abuse in military spending) gives Beijing a path to disrupt Pax Americana and undoubtedly threaten global stability.
Sanders suffers from a “blame America first” complex. When the people of Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran are suffering, he is quick to dismiss that a tyrannical political system such as socialism or Islamic totalitarianism is to blame. Instead, it’s always America’s policies vis-a-vis Caracas, Havana, and Tehran, and not the other way around. His public statements regularly reflect an understanding that if America would only get out of the way, everyone would be better off.
Sanders also fails to distinguish between our friends and foes, particularly when it comes to the Middle East.
In Sanders’s world, our long-held allies such as Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and others are somehow part of the problem, while the nuclear-aspiring, “Death to America” chanting Islamic Republic of Iran, which declared itself a sworn enemy to the U.S. during its 1979 Islamic Revolution, is his preferred candidate for normalization. Sanders believes it’s America’s fault that Iran is in its current state, so therefore, we must be made to suffer and appease the clerical regime to make things right.
His naive and historically bonkers worldview is complemented with the appeasement-based belief that if we ever get into a tussle with another adversary, the insanely corrupt United Nations will be able to step in and mediate all of our military and diplomatic disputes.
To counter Sanders’s dangerous worldview effectively, we have to account for the past while also providing a clear path forward. That path involves committing the U.S. to a second-to-none military that supports our allies and counters our foes. That path also involves taking a much more cautious approach to U.S. intervention overseas and promoting realism, restraint, and bolstering allies instead of ideological, dangerous campaigns, at great cost to the U.S. military and taxpayer.
In order to fill the healthy and open debate space created by the failed policies of the past, we must first acknowledge that Sanders and his cohorts are well within their rights to critique past foreign policy blunders. However, the radical solutions being offered by him and his advisers would result in an America that loses its vital military edge, which means the collapse of U.S. global hegemony.
Now is not the time to demolish a system that has brought unprecedented safety and prosperity to the American homeland. A U.S. foreign policy that does not invest in our military, while proceeding to prop up anti-American regimes, can result in the creation of a historically unparalleled power vacuum that will conclusively threaten world order and create global chaos.
Jordan Schachtel (@JordanSchachtel) is an investigative journalist and foreign policy analyst based in Washington, D.C.
