Peter Beinart: What the Yemen vote reveals about the Democratic party

But Sanders doesn’t just talk about foreign policy more. He talks about it in a more radical way. None of the senators running for president are hawks. Last January, Booker co-wrote an op-ed arguing that—absent new congressional authorization—it would be illegal to keep American troops in Syria once the fight against ISIS was over. In her Foreign Affairs essay, Warren called for “ending” the “endless war” that has “sapped” America’s “strength,” and for rethinking the “singular focus on counterterrorism” that “has dangerously distorted U.S. policies.” Warren and Gillibrand also led the fight to keep the Trump administration from pulling out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia.

What distinguishes Sanders is the same quality that distinguished him on domestic policy in 2016: his willingness to cross red lines that have long defined the boundaries of acceptable opinion. One clear example is Israel. Most of the Senate Democrats running for president have shifted left on the subject. Booker, after initially supporting legislation to criminalize boycotts of the Jewish state, voted against a similar bill last month. Warren, after defending Israeli military actions in the Gaza Strip earlier in her career, last year criticized Israel’s response to protests there. But Sanders has gone much further: He’s produced videos that call Gaza an “open-air prison,” he’s depicted Benjamin Netanyahu as part of the “growing worldwide movement toward authoritarianism,” and, most controversially of all, he’s suggested cutting U.S. military aid to Israel.

But Israel is only the beginning of Sanders’s sacrilege. He’s the only presidential candidate in recent memory who regularly describes the Cold War not as a heroic American victory, but as a cautionary tale. Sanders doesn’t just warn against U.S. military intervention in Venezuela, as Warren and Gillibrand have. He warns against it while invoking the United States’ “long history of inappropriately intervening in Latin American countries.” In his speech at Westminster College in 2017, he spent paragraph after paragraph detailing America’s disastrous 20th-century interventions: Iran, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Vietnam—a litany that resembled a Noam Chomsky lecture more than a typical presidential candidate’s foreign-policy speech.

Peter Beinart: America needs an entirely new foreign policy for the Trump age

Sanders’s darker view of Cold War foreign policy isn’t mere historical revisionism. It’s linked to his critique of American foreign policy today. Now, as then, he wants America to shun the quest for global supremacy that leads it to overthrow regimes it can’t control and to instead pursue a foreign policy based on “partnership, rather than dominance.” That’s why, in his Westminster speech, Sanders did something Democrats have rarely done in recent decades: He called for putting the United Nations—which he called “one of the most important organizations for promoting a vision of a different world”—near the heart of American foreign policy.