Foreign policy and the Democratic primary

After I wrote about Bernie Sanders and the Middle East for LobeLog, I decided to write about my irritation with the lack of substantive foreign policy discussion in the Democratic primary in general. I posted the result at Medium yesterday, and I hope you’ll give it a read:

Another conclusion that we can draw at this point is that, on the Democratic side at least, foreign policy is by and large not really a topic of interest. The simplest explanation for this is that, apart from terrorism, Democratic primary voters simply don’t care much about foreign policy. But the foreign policy void in this primary goes beyond a simple calculation of what the voters want and gets at problems that both of the leading Democrats have with respect to the topic and the voters. Clinton obviously has an extensive foreign policy record, having served four years as Barack Obama’s Secretary of State, and has clearly thought long and hard about the issue. But her approach to foreign affairs is considerably more hawkish than the Democratic Party mainstream. While Clinton is the front-runner in the race, she’s in no position to risk alienating any primary voters by emphasizing an area in which she has a significant disconnect with the party’s base.

For Sanders, the challenge runs much deeper. As Politico’s Michael Crowley reported on Saturday, Sanders, despite having outperformed expectations to the point where he is a real threat to upset Clinton, still has virtually no foreign policy apparatus connected to his campaign. Sanders hasn’t spoken extensively on foreign policy, his campaign can’t cite a single foreign policy adviser who’s worked closely with him, and many of the people it does cite as having advised the senator say they’ve barely had any contact with him. For a candidate with an acknowledged deficit of experience and familiarity with foreign policy to begin with, it is disconcerting (to say the least) to see how little attention his campaign has paid to the topic. It is possible to piece together some ideas about what a Sanders foreign policy might look like, and you might be able to make some general predictions based on where the Democratic Party as a whole is on the subject, but so far his campaign has done a poor job of articulating its own foreign policy vision.

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