Bernie Sanders' evasive maneuvers on national defense

Why won't Bernie Sanders clearly articulate his foreign policy?

Bernie Sanders is sending mixed messages on his thoughts on foreign policy.
(Image credit: AP Photo/Jim Cole)

It shouldn't have come as a surprise that in the first Democratic debates after the terrorist attacks in Paris, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) was asked to comment. Yet the senator seemed almost thrown off by having to shift from his well-worn domestic issues stump speech. He pivoted to climate change. He pivoted to criticism of Hillary Clinton's leadership record. Anything to avoid presenting a comprehensive vision of how America should defend itself and its allies. It was an interesting evasion for someone running for commander in chief, and even more so for a self-described socialist. Socialism, after all, is an ideology that comes with a prepackaged foreign policy vision. The talking points are already written. Does Sanders' flub of the terrorism question, and his reluctance to fully embrace a socialist foreign policy, imply that maybe he's not quite the dove he makes himself out to be?

Bernie Sanders isn't the first socialist to run for president. His hero, Eugene Debs, ran for the office five times. Debs was also arrested and imprisoned for his opposition to the First World War. The speech that got him arrested, delivered in Canton, Ohio, in 1918, claimed that all wars waged throughout history had been for "conquest and plunder." Without equivocation, Debs claimed that wars — all wars, mind you — were waged without the full consent and in opposition to the interests of the classes that would actually be spilling blood: "The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose — especially their lives."

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Scott Beauchamp

Scott Beauchamp is a writer based in Portland, Maine. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Guardian, and The Paris Review, among other places.