Over at LobeLog I’ve got a new piece that looks at what I could find of Bernie Sanders’s statements and record with respect to several core Middle East issues–Israel-Palestine, ISIS, Iran, etc. Sanders doesn’t have much of a foreign policy record, so apart from Israel-Palestine I was going mostly on things he’s said so far in this campaign. I actually find his unfamiliarity with foreign policy to be one of the more problematic things about his candidacy:
For Sanders, the issue is more straightforward. Foreign policy simply isn’t an area in which he’s particularly comfortable. Nor has he paid much attention to the matter until his candidacy really began to gain at the polls. When he comments on foreign policy at all, Sanders often steers the discussion to topics like inequality, which he frequently discusses in a domestic context, or to questions of judgment rather than specific policies. He has, for example, cited Clinton’s 2002 Senate vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq (Sanders, then in the House, voted against the authorization) as an example of her poor judgment (the same issue that played such a large role in Clinton’s 2008 primary loss to Barack Obama). He has even gone so far as to compare her to former Vice President Dick Cheney. Clinton’s usual response to this attack—that then-President-elect Obama obviously trusted her judgment enough to ask her to become his secretary of state—is somewhat blunted by an examination of her record in that office, which includes a disastrous intervention in Libya, a failed surge in Afghanistan, the now-defunct “reset” with Russia, and a muddled (at best) response to the Arab Spring.
The issue of judgment is entirely fair and may even be the key foreign policy factor for voters to weigh, given that a president will inevitably be expected to react to events that were unforeseen during his or her campaign. But it is troubling that so little attention has been paid to the issue of foreign policy, and that so little is known about what both of these candidates plan to do should they become president. This is particularly so for Sanders, whose limited foreign policy record doesn’t even give us much from which to extrapolate. Foreign policy is important, obviously, but it’s also one of the few areas where a Democratic president will be able to actually accomplish anything, in the face of a Congress that will likely be at least partly controlled by a resistant Republican Party.
My overall conclusion, I think, is that Sanders’s inclinations on Israel-Palestine and Iran probably make him the least bad candidate on both issues, but there are still problems there (particularly on I-P, where he’s only slightly more sympathetic to the Palestinians than most high-profile politicians). On ISIS and Syria, he really departs very little from the Democratic mainstream (he’s actually, in my view, closer to that mainstream than Clinton, who is easily more hawkish than the average Democrat). But, again, his unfamiliarity with the terrain is troubling to me.
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The Foreign Exchanges Companion 