When asked why he’s the best choice to become America’s next commander-in-chief, Bernie Sanders tends to offer a simple refrain: Unlike most others, I got the 2002 Iraq War vote right. The intended message to voters: My judgment is superior; my presidency will be a safe bet.
A deeper assessment of Sanders’s foreign policy record returns a different verdict.
Whatever you think about Sanders’s Iraq War vote, applied to basic American values of freedom and justice, the 2020 Democratic Party presidential hopeful hasn’t always come down on the right side. On the contrary, Sanders has repeatedly shown an actively effected sympathy for authoritarian regimes. That speaks to something broader: Sanders’s foreign policy record isn’t the paradigm of cautious reliability he presents. It’s a jumbled mix.
But it is Sanders’s socialist sympathies that stand out. Because those impulses sometimes seep so deeply into Sanders’s psyche that he cannot help but see authoritarians in a positive light.
The most notable example here is Sanders’s long-standing support for the Nicaraguan Sandinista movement. During his 1980s tenure as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, Sanders even directly supported the Marxist Sandinistas. This included his 1986 delivery of 500 tons in aid to a Sandinista-controlled town. It is worth noting here that 1986 was at the height of Sandinista tyranny in Nicaragua, a time when they had shut down media publications and were actively using an emergency declaration to detain civilians without trial. Apparently unconcerned, Sanders had been the July 1985 guest of honor at Sandinista festivities to celebrate its sixth year in power.
By the end of the 1980s, Sanders wasn’t exactly disabused of his admiration for the Sandinistas, whom he saw as a socialist example to replicate and a lesson even to be transplanted into American schools.
Interviewed for a 1989 master’s thesis, he declared that “when you go into the schools, that is where you start. It’s important for young people to understand the history of Nicaragua and what’s going on there. But do you know what is even more important? For them to understand that they’re suppose to understand, that is what is important for them to understand. That is the first thing.”
This inadvertently Orwellian language speaks to the ideological devotion with which Sanders serves his socialist cause.
Sanders expanded on that education theme in the same interview, noting that “we’re in the process of organizing an observation in remembrance of the destruction of democracy in Chile and the death of Salvador Allende … obviously as part of that we’re going to be showing films, having a panel discussion, getting some stuff on television. That’s something I think a mayor, and a governor as well, should be doing.”
History shows that Sanders’s adoration for Latin American socialism runs particularly deep. In August 2011, Sanders’s website featured an opinion piece suggesting that “the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela, and Argentina, where incomes are actually more equal today [than in the U.S].”
The current state of Venezuela, Earth’s oil-richest nation and home to a shocking number of children starving to death, might be considered a rebuke to these words.
But when it comes to socialist failure, Sanders is rarely willing to find fault. In reality, when it comes to democracy, he is openly hypocritical. Take the senator’s signature of a January 2003 letter to George W. Bush, published in the Michigan Citizen, a left-wing publication which closed down in 2014. Opposing what he believed was a U.S.-sponsored coup against Hugo Chavez’s Venezuelan regime, Sanders asserted that “the U.S. government should demonstrate its ongoing and active support for democratically elected governments.” What was needed, he said, was “a strong statement of condemnation [against the coup plotters] from the White House explaining that the U.S. opposes violent and unconstitutional actions.”
Fine words, but Sanders’s affection for Venezuelan democracy has not endured.
Today, Sanders refuses to recognize Juan Guaidó as interim president. This, even though Guaidó is supported by the vast majority of democracies around the world. Nicolas Maduro’s manipulation of voter returns in the last election, and his creation of a separate crony-filled Constituent Assembly to supplant the legitimate National Assembly, convinced nearly everyone but Sanders and the most committed socialist ideologues to abandon him.
Aside from wanting to help brutal, incompetent, and totally undemocratic socialist regimes, Sanders does not have a very consistent foreign policy record.
The senator supported the 1999 Kosovo campaign and the 2002 invasion of Afghanistan, but he vehemently opposed the Gulf and Iraq wars. Sanders expressed support for Moammar Gaddafi’s removal, but he hedged on the use of military force to effect it. Sanders believes in trade protectionism, but he simultaneously argues that the United States must show deference to impoverished nations.
On Afghanistan, Sanders evinces a rare concern for the health of the Treasury. In a 2011 statement opposing President Barack Obama’s Afghanistan strategy, Sanders focused more heavily on the financial implications of war that he did the human costs: “This country has a $14.5 trillion national debt, in part owing to two wars that have not been paid for. We have been at war in Afghanistan for the last 10 years and paid a high price both in terms of casualties and national treasure. This year alone, we will spend about $100 billion on that war.”
On other foreign policy issues, however, Sanders is more willing to break from his far-left ranks.
Sanders is pro-Palestinian, for example, but not enough to placate the far-left of the Democratic Party.
What of Russia? Sanders now claims he’s a supporter of NATO, but his history paints a more complex picture. In 1997, Sanders argued that NATO’s very existence was wasteful: “After four decades of the Cold War and trillions of United States taxpayer dollars allocated to compete in the arms race, many of our constituents understand that it is not the time to continue wasting tens of billions of dollars helping to defend Europe, let alone assuming more than our share of any costs associated with expanding NATO eastward.”
China?
Again, it’s a hodgepodge. Sanders has condemned China’s trade practices and its human rights record, but used a 2019 interview to claim that China has “made more progress in addressing extreme poverty than any country in the history of civilization.” Here, we see the familiar vein of sympathy for socialist-communist regimes. But in this case, the sympathy is without economic foundation. After all, China’s dramatic reduction in poverty is specifically the result of its abandonment of socialism and its embrace of an export model dependent on foreign capitalist consumption.
Ultimately, then, we can draw at least one confident conclusion. While Sanders’s foreign policy is at times unpredictable, it is very rarely so when dealing with socialists.
