Bernie Sanders and Foreign Policy

Bernie’s statement on regime change never being a good idea, and mentioning Guatemala, Mossadegh, and Allende is heading toward the vision of what we actually need to do. End our imperial foreign policy, start closing our military bases overseas, focus on our domestic problems. Whether it’s a winning issue with a majority of the public is another matter. They have been quite literally scared out of their wits with a decade of BS propaganda about the “evildoers,” and on and on. Older voters got the Cold War BS. It’s hard to both educate and win in the same campaign. That’s why he’s focused on domestic economic issues, a broad consensus that working families are being screwed already exists.

When foreign policy comes up, IMO, he should frame talk about pulling back within the first 150 years of American foreign policy, not the more recent anti-imperialist strain of criticism that has been effectively marginalized by the corporate war mongers. Avoid foreign entanglements, spread democracy abroad by be a shining example here at home. In that vein, he needs to bring up his opposition to the USA PATRIOT Act and domestic spying more too. Clinton is very vulnerable there.

Saying that we need to have a discussion about why the American military is being used around the world to protect our supposed “commercial interests” when those commercial interests increasingly consider themselves global corporations, not American ones, might also prove useful. They ship our jobs overseas, they invest overseas, they offshore their profits, they avoid US taxes, but without the US military, the global casino economy and resource extraction racket they’ve created is vulnerable.