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A REVOLUTION IN AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY  
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Bernie Sanders
March 18, 2024
Foreign Affairs
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_ Replacing Greed, Militarism, and Hypocrisy With Solidarity,
Diplomacy, and Human Rights _

The U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., January 2024, Leah Millis /
Reuters

 

A sad fact about the politics of Washington is that some of the most
important issues facing the United States and the world are rarely
debated in a serious manner. Nowhere is that more true than in the
area of foreign policy. For many decades, there has been a
“bipartisan consensus” on foreign affairs. Tragically, that
consensus has almost always been wrong. Whether it has been the wars
in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, the overthrow of democratic
governments throughout the world, or disastrous moves on trade, such
as entering the North American Free Trade Agreement and establishing
permanent normal trade relations with China, the results have often
damaged the United States’ standing in the world, undermined the
country’s professed values, and been disastrous for the American
working class.

This pattern continues today. After spending billions of dollars to
support the Israeli military, the United States
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alone in the world, is defending Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s
right-wing extremist government, which is waging a campaign of total
war and destruction against the Palestinian people, resulting in the
deaths of tens of thousands—including thousands of children—and
the starvation of hundreds of thousands more in the Gaza Strip.
Meanwhile, in fear-mongering around the threat posed by China and in
the continued growth of the military industrial complex, it’s easy
to see that the rhetoric and decisions of leaders in both major
parties are frequently guided not by respect for democracy or human
rights but militarism, groupthink, and the greed and power of
corporate interests. As a result, the United States is increasingly
isolated not just from poorer countries in the developing world but
from many of its long-standing allies in the industrialized world, as
well.

Given these failures, it is long past time to fundamentally reorient
American foreign policy. Doing so starts with acknowledging the
failures of the post–World War II bipartisan consensus and charting
a new vision that centers human rights, multilateralism, and global
solidarity.

A SHAMEFUL TRACK RECORD

Dating back to the Cold War
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major parties have used fear and outright lies to entangle the United
States in disastrous and unwinnable foreign military conflicts.
Presidents Johnson and Nixon sent nearly three million Americans to
Vietnam to prop up an anticommunist dictator in a Vietnamese civil war
under the so-called domino theory—the idea that if one country fell
to communism the surrounding countries would fall as well. The theory
was wrong, and the war was an abject failure. Up to three million
Vietnamese were killed, as were 58,000 American troops.

The destruction of Vietnam
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for Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. They expanded
the war into Cambodia with an immense bombing campaign that killed
hundreds of thousands more people and fueled the rise of the dictator
Pol Pot, whose subsequent genocide killed up to two million
Cambodians. In the end, despite suffering enormous casualties and
spending huge amounts of money, the United States lost a war that
never should have been fought. In the process, the country severely
damaged its credibility abroad and at home.

Washington’s record in the rest of the world was not much better
during this era. In the name of combating communism and the Soviet
Union, the U.S. government supported military coups in Iran,
Guatemala, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Dominican Republic,
Brazil, Chile, and other countries. These interventions were often in
support of authoritarian regimes that brutally repressed their own
people and exacerbated corruption, violence, and poverty. Washington
is still dealing with the fallout from such meddling today,
confronting deep suspicion and hostility in many of these countries,
which complicates U.S. foreign policy and undermines American
interests.
 
A generation later, after the 9/11
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Washington repeated many of these same mistakes. President George W.
Bush committed nearly two million U.S. troops and over $8 trillion to
a “global war on terror” and catastrophic wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq. The Iraq war, much like Vietnam, was built on an outright lie.
“We cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun that could
come in the form of a mushroom cloud,” Bush infamously warned. But
there was no mushroom cloud and there was no smoking gun, because the
Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein didn’t have any weapons of mass
destruction. The war was opposed by many U.S. allies, and the Bush
administration’s unilateral, go-it-alone approach in the run-up to
the war severely undermined American credibility and eroded trust in
Washington around the world. Despite this, supermajorities in both
chambers of Congress voted to authorize the 2003 invasion.
 
The Iraq war was not an aberration. In the name of the global war on
terror, the United States carried out torture, illegal detention, and
“extraordinary renditions,” snatching suspects around the world
and holding them for long periods at the Guantánamo Bay prison in
Cuba and CIA “black sites” around the world. The U.S. government
implemented the Patriot Act, which resulted in mass surveillance
domestically and internationally. The two decades of fighting in
Afghanistan left thousands of U.S. troops dead or wounded and caused
many hundreds of thousands of Afghan civilian casualties. Today,
despite all that suffering and expenditure, the Taliban is back in
power.
 
THE WAGES OF HYPOCRISY
I wish I could say that the foreign policy establishment in Washington
learned its lesson after the failures of the Cold War and the global
war on terror. But, with a few notable exceptions, it has not. Despite
his promise of an “America first” foreign policy, President Donald
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increased unrestricted drone warfare around the world, committed more
troops to the Middle East and Afghanistan, ramped up tensions with
China and North Korea, and nearly got into a disastrous war with Iran.
He showered some of the most dangerous tyrants in the world—from the
United Arab Emirates to Saudi Arabia—with weapons. Although
Trump’s brand of self-dealing and corruption was new, it had its
roots in decades of U.S. policy that prioritized short-term,
unilateral interests over long-term efforts to build a world order
based on international law.

And Trump’s militarism wasn’t new at all. In the past decade
alone, the United States has been involved in military operations in
Afghanistan, Cameroon, Egypt, Iraq, Kenya, Lebanon, Libya, Mali,
Mauritania, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria,
Tunisia, and Yemen. The U.S. military maintains around 750 military
bases in 80 countries and is increasing its presence abroad as
Washington ramps up tensions with Beijing. Meanwhile, the United
States is supplying Netanyahu’s Israel with billions of dollars in
military funding while he annihilates Gaza.

U.S. policy on China [[link removed]]is
another illustration of failed foreign policy groupthink, which frames
the U.S.-Chinese relationship as a zero-sum struggle. For many in
Washington, China is the new foreign policy bogeyman—an existential
threat that justifies higher and higher Pentagon budgets. There is
plenty to criticize in China’s record: its theft of technology, its
suppression of workers’ rights and the press, its enormous expansion
of coal power, its repression of Tibet and Hong Kong, its threatening
behavior toward Taiwan, and its atrocious policies toward the Uyghur
people. But there will be no solution to the existential threat of
climate change without cooperation between China and the United
States, the two largest carbon emitters in the world. There will also
be no hope for seriously addressing the next pandemic without
U.S.-Chinese cooperation. And instead of starting a trade war with
China, Washington could create mutually beneficial trade agreements
that benefit workers in both countries—not just multinational
corporations.

The United States can and should hold China accountable for its human
rights violations. But Washington’s concerns for human rights are
rather selective. Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy controlled by a
family worth over a trillion dollars. There is not even the pretense
of democracy there; citizens have no right to dissent or elect their
leaders. Women are treated as second-class citizens. Gay rights are
virtually nonexistent. The immigrant population in Saudi Arabia is
often forced into modern-day slavery, and recently there have been
reports of mass killings of hundreds of Ethiopian migrants by Saudi
forces. One of the country’s few prominent dissidents, Jamal
Khashoggi, left a Saudi embassy in pieces in a suitcase after he was
murdered by Saudi operatives in an attack that U.S. intelligence
agencies concluded was ordered by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman,
the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia. Yet despite all of that,
Washington continues to provide Saudi Arabia with weapons and support,
as it does with Egypt, India, Israel, Pakistan, and the UAE—all
countries that habitually trample on human rights.

It is not just U.S. military adventurism and hypocritical backing of
tyrants that have proved counterproductive. So, too, have the
international trade agreements that Washington has entered in recent
decades. After ordinary Americans were told, year after year, how
dangerous and terrible the communists of China and Vietnam were, and
how the United States had to defeat them no matter the cost, it turns
out that corporate America had a different perspective. Major
U.S.-based multinationals came to love the idea of “free trade”
with these authoritarian countries and embraced the opportunity to
hire impoverished workers abroad at a fraction of the wages they were
paying Americans. Hence, with bipartisan support and cheerleading from
the corporate world and mainstream media, Washington forged free trade
agreements with China and Vietnam.

The results have been disastrous. In the roughly two decades that
followed these agreements, more than 40,000 factories in the U.S. shut
down, around two million workers lost their jobs, and working-class
Americans experienced wage stagnation—even while corporations made
billions and investors were richly rewarded. Beyond the damage done at
home, these agreements also contained few standards to protect workers
or the environment, leading to disastrous impacts overseas. Resentment
of these trade policies among working-class Americans helped fuel
Trump’s initial rise and continues to benefit him today.

PEOPLE OVER PROFITS

Modern American foreign policy has not always been short-sighted and
destructive. In the wake of World War II, despite the bloodiest war in
history, Washington chose to learn the lessons of the punitive
post–World War I agreements. Instead of humiliating defeated wartime
enemies Germany and Japan, whose countries lay in ruin, the United
States led a massive multibillion-dollar economic recovery program and
helped convert totalitarian societies into prosperous democracies.
Washington spearheaded the founding of the United Nations and the
implementation of the Geneva Conventions to prevent the horrors of
World War II from ever happening again and to ensure that all
countries are held to the same standards on human rights. In the
1960s, President John F. Kennedy launched the Peace Corps to support
education, public health, and entrepreneurship around the world,
building human connections and advancing local development projects.
In this century, Bush launched the President’s Emergency Plan for
AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR, which has saved over 25 million lives,
primarily in sub-Saharan Africa, and the President’s Malaria
Initiative, which has prevented more than 1.5 billion cases of
malaria.

If the goal of foreign policy is to help create a peaceful and
prosperous world, the foreign policy establishment needs to
fundamentally rethink its assumptions. Spending trillions of dollars
on endless wars and defense contracts is not going to address the
existential threat of climate change or the likelihood of future
pandemics. It is not going to feed hungry children, reduce hatred,
educate the illiterate, or cure diseases. It is not going to help
create a shared global community and diminish the likelihood of war.
In this pivotal moment in human history, the United States must lead a
new global movement based on human solidarity and the needs of
struggling people. This movement must have the courage to take on the
greed of the international oligarchy, in which a few thousand
billionaires exercise enormous economic and political power.

Economic policy is foreign policy. As long as wealthy corporations and
billionaires have a stranglehold on our economic and political
systems, foreign policy decisions will be guided by their material
interests, not those of the vast majority of the world’s population.
That is why the United States must address the moral and economic
outrage of unprecedented income and wealth inequality, in which the
richest one percent of the planet owns more wealth than the bottom 99
percent—an inequality that allows some people to own dozens of
homes, private airplanes, and even entire islands, while millions of
children go hungry or die of easily prevented diseases. Americans must
lead the international community in eliminating the tax havens that
enable billionaires and large corporations to hide trillions in wealth
and avoid paying their fair share of taxes. That includes sanctioning
countries that serve as tax shelters and using the United States’
significant economic leverage to cut off access to the U.S. financial
system. An estimated $21 trillion to $32 trillion in financial assets
are sitting offshore in tax havens today, according to the Tax Justice
Network. This wealth does nothing to benefit societies. It’s not
taxed and it’s not even spent—it simply ensures that the rich get
richer.

Washington should develop fair trade agreements that benefit workers
and the poor of all countries, not just Wall Street investors. This
includes creating strong, binding labor and environmental provisions
with clear enforcement mechanisms, as well as eliminating investor
protections that make it easy to outsource jobs. These agreements must
be negotiated with input from workers, the American people, and the
U.S. Congress—rather than just lobbyists from large multinational
corporations, who currently dominate the trade negotiation process.

The United States must also cut excess military spending and demand
that other countries do the same. In the midst of enormous
environmental, economic, and public health challenges, the major
countries of this world cannot allow huge defense contractors to make
record-breaking profits as they provide the world with weapons used to
destroy one another. Even without supplemental spending, the United
States plans to devote around $900 billion to the military this year,
almost half of which will go to a small number of defense contractors
that are already highly profitable.

Like a majority of Americans, I believe it is in the vital interest of
the United States and the international community to fight off Russian
President Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine. But many
defense contractors see the war primarily as a way to line their own
pockets. The RTX Corporation, formerly Raytheon, has increased prices
for its Stinger missiles sevenfold since 1991. Today, it costs the
United States $400,000 to replace each Stinger sent to Ukraine—an
outrageous price increase that cannot even remotely be explained by
inflation, increased costs, or advances in quality. Such greed
doesn’t just cost American taxpayers; it costs Ukrainian lives. When
contractors pad their profits, fewer weapons reach Ukrainians on the
frontlines. Congress must rein in this kind of war profiteering by
more closely examining contracts, taking back payments that turn out
to be excessive, and creating a tax on windfall profits.

Meanwhile, Washington should stop undermining international
institutions when their actions don’t align with its short-term
political interests. It is far better for the countries of the world
to debate and discuss their differences than to drop bombs or engage
in armed conflict. The United States must support the UN
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by paying its dues, engaging directly on UN reform, and supporting UN
bodies such as the Human Rights Council. The United States should also
finally join the International Criminal Court
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instead of attacking it when it delivers verdicts that Washington sees
as inconvenient. President Joe Biden made the right choice in
rejoining the World Health Organization. Now the United States must
invest in the WHO, strengthen its ability to respond quickly to
pandemics, and work with it to negotiate an international pandemic
treaty that prioritizes the lives of poor and working people around
the world—not Big Pharma’s profits.

SOLIDARITY NOW

The benefits of making this shift in foreign policy would far outweigh
the costs. More consistent U.S. support for human rights
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would make it more likely that bad actors face justice—and less
likely that they commit human rights abuses in the first place.
Increased investments in economic development and civil society would
lift millions out of poverty and strengthen democratic institutions.
U.S. support for fair international labor standards would raise wages
for millions of American workers and billions of people around the
world. Making the rich pay their taxes and cracking down on offshore
capital would unlock substantial financial resources that could be put
to work addressing global needs and helping restore people’s faith
that democracies can deliver.

Most of all, as the world’s oldest and most powerful democracy, the
United States must recognize that our greatest strength as a nation
comes not from our wealth or our military might but from our values of
freedom and democracy
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The biggest challenges of our times, from climate change
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to global pandemics, will require cooperation, solidarity, and
collective action, not militarism.

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BERNIE SANDERS is an independent U.S. Senator from Vermont.

* US Foreign Policy; International Cooperation; Bernie Sanders;
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