On Foreign Policy, Bernie Stands Alone
▻https://jacobinmag.com/2019/10/foreign-policy-bernie-sanders-elizabeth-warren-2020-presidential-campaig
Throughout her speeches and writings on foreign policy, #Warren makes it abundantly clear that she wants to “protect American interests first and foremost.” Similar to all post–Cold War US presidents, she is dedicated to preserving US “global leadership,” a euphemism for empire that became popular in the Vietnam War’s wake. Her “Foreign Policy for All” is, in essence, a foreign policy for all Americans that takes the nation-state as the natural subject of politics and history.
#Sanders, in contrast, adopts an explicitly global understanding of the United States’ world role. For him, the purpose of US foreign policy is not to reaffirm US “leadership,” but to create “a global community in which people have the decent jobs, food, clean water, education, health care and housing they need.” In a radical departure from the nationalist rhetoric of Warren — and American politics generally — Sanders emphasizes his desire “to reconceptualize a global order based on human solidarity, an order that recognizes that every person on this planet shares a common humanity.” Where Warren’s campaign says she will “stand up for the American economy, fight to protect American workers, and defend American values,” Sanders’s campaign states that “he will change the terms of the global economy to lift up workers everywhere, reversing the race to the bottom” that compels “American workers to compete with desperate workers in Vietnam who make less than a dollar an hour and migrant computer workers in Malaysia who are working as modern-day slaves.” As this suggests, Sanders, unlike Warren, is a globalist in the best sense of the term.