Derek Robertson is a news assistant for POLITICO Magazine. Follow him on Twitter @afternoondelete.

Bernie Sanders is used to being outside the mainstream. His 2016 presidential campaign was predicated on that idea, and his foreign policy positions, to the extent that they were articulated, fell into a similar pattern—the independent senator from Vermont criticized what he saw as a failure in Democratic thinking that had led the party to fall in line behind costly adventures abroad. Hillary Clinton played herself up as the foreign policy candidate in the Democratic primary, but Sanders saw an opening: “I do question her judgment,” he said at one of their debates. “I question a judgment which voted for the war in Iraq—the worst foreign policy blunder in the history of this country.”

The Clinton campaign, backed by the entire Democratic foreign policy establishment, responded in kind. Listing Sanders’ foreign policy positions, Clinton adviser Jake Sullivan put it bluntly in January of 2016: “When you look at all these ideas, it’s pretty clear he just hasn’t thought it through.” A public letter signed by nearly 20 former government heavyweights railed against his “continued lack of interest in and knowledge of essential foreign policy and national security issues.” Given the bitterness of that primary contest and the extent to which Sanders’ line of critique on foreign policy was adopted by the Donald Trump campaign, one could be forgiven for assuming that bad blood persists to this day.


One would be wrong. Sanders, who hasn’t ruled out launching another bid for the presidency in 2020, has begun to roll out a much more robust foreign policy platform, including a speech at Johns Hopkins University on Oct. 9 in which he argued that progressivism on the home front is not only a moral imperative, but a crucial part of any effort to stem the international tide of authoritarianism.

“In order to effectively combat the forces of global oligarchy and authoritarianism, we need an international movement that mobilizes behind a vision of shared prosperity, security and dignity for all people, and that addresses the massive global inequality that exists, not only in wealth but in political power,” Sanders said last week as he steamed to his conclusion. “Our job is to reach out to those in every corner of the world who shares these values, and who are fighting for a better world.”

And over the past year and a half, according to a Sanders staffer, the senator has, on a semiregular basis, convened regular groups of foreign policy thinkers and academics to help him develop the argument beyond mere rhetoric. Sanders’ new focus on the global dimensions of crony capitalism, corruption and human rights has earned him some unlikely fans—one of whom is none other than Jake Sullivan.

“In 2016, I would say Senator Sanders’ main focus was on the past,” Sullivan said in an interview. “When you shift the frame from the past to the present and the future, in some ways almost necessarily that shift comes with an inclination to step up, and respond to threats, and to take on the challenges out there, and I think we’ve seen that in the way he’s been dealing with foreign policy over the last two years.”

Sullivan isn’t alone in his judgment. Van Jackson, a foreign policy expert and adviser to the Pentagon during the Obama administration, described Sanders’ global-minded makeover: “I’m a progressive but couldn’t bring myself to vote for Sanders in 2016 because I thought he wasn’t serious about national security. He was basically silent on it. … Not only does Sanders now seem to take national security seriously—he’s literally the only politician accurately diagnosing the threat landscape America faces,” he wrote in an email.

Strong words in favor of a politician Clinton described as having a “fundamental misunderstanding of what it takes to do … patient diplomacy.” But the authority and progressive credibility Sanders brings to his vision of a Democratic foreign policy have put him in a position to which he’s not accustomed, building a rare and tentative consensus between the progressive and the “establishment” spheres. If Democrats hope to challenge Trump’s particular brand of direct, transactional, easy-to-follow world politics in 2020, Sanders’ grand unified theory might prove their best tool with which to do it.



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When Sanders began his 2016 campaign, those in his orbit could name off the top of their heads the number of dedicated foreign policy aides on his staff: zero. Compare this to the “several hundred” pencil-pushers the Clinton campaign deployed to flesh out the former secretary of state’s foreign policy, drowning in an endless sea of memos the goals of which would never see fruition. The Sanders campaign chose instead to consult with a looser brain trust, much more modest in size, comprising mostly academics who were sympathetic to Sanders’ progressive worldview.

“Part of the Clinton inevitability strategy was to lock down the usual suspects in left-liberal foreign policy,” said Dan Nexon, a Georgetown professor who served as one of those informal Sanders advisers. Nexon described how he, along with others like Sean Kay (who had previously assisted the 2008 Obama campaign in a similar capacity), eventually persuaded the Sanders campaign to hire at least one full-time foreign policy staffer. That ended up being Bill French of the National Security Network, a now-defunct progressive foreign policy nonprofit. French’s mandate, according to a Foreign Policy report at the time, was to wrangle the ad hoc network of advisers and, on top of their knowledge, build out Sanders’ messaging. (French did not respond to a request for comment.)

French departed after the 2016 campaign, but was succeeded on Sanders’ senatorial staff by Matt Duss, the former president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace and a left-leaning foreign policy wonk who now serves as Sanders’ official foreign policy adviser. Nexon described the transition from the campaign, and Sanders’ evolution on foreign policy more broadly, as a slow awakening to the encroaching illiberalism represented by actors like Russia.

“With what we started to understand about Russia late in the campaign, you saw very quickly that while Sanders was someone who ran on a balanced foreign policy toward Russia, and who still isn’t interested in going to war, [that attitude] shifted after what we’d understood Russia had done. With the way in which those strands became highly salient and highly visible, we had more information by early 2017, and it came together quite naturally for someone concerned with domestic inequality, capital mobility and how they undermine liberal values,” Nexon said.

Sanders 2.0 made his debut in a much-heralded speech last September at Missouri’s Westminster College in which he called for a foreign policy that would extend his progressive form of altruism across the globe to those under the yoke of more restrictive societies. He went as far as addressing Vladimir Putin directly:

“Today, I say to Mr. Putin: We will not allow you to undermine American democracy or democracies around the world. In fact, our goal is to not only strengthen American democracy, but to work in solidarity with supporters of democracy around the globe, including in Russia. In the struggle of democracy versus authoritarianism, we intend to win,” Sanders thundered.

He continued: “Inequality, corruption, oligarchy and authoritarianism are inseparable. They must be understood as part of the same system, and fought in the same way ... kleptocrats like Putin in Russia use divisiveness and abuse as a tool for enriching themselves and those loyal to them.”

In tackling Putin head-on Sanders risks the disapproval of some progressives who view Democrats as anti-Russia to a fault, a fact of which his camp is fully aware.

“He recognizes ultimately that the U.S. wants to seek areas of agreement and cooperation, and we want to use diplomacy as our primary tool, but we also have to be real when these governments pursue problematic policies, especially an intervention into our election,” said a Sanders staffer.

So far, Sanders’ approach has worked. In the aftermath of his speech at Johns Hopkins, in which he referred to “Trump’s cozy relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin” and even suggested the Russian state may have compromising material on the president, the senator still received rave reviews from the progressive left, including a glowing endorsement in Jacobin, a favorite magazine of the democratic socialist set.

Robert Malley, the president of International Crisis Group and a former Obama national security official with whom Sanders (and other Democrats) have consulted on foreign policy, described how Sanders has grown into a role where he assuages the worst fears of the center-left while maintaining his progressive bona fides.

“The gift the Trump’s presidency has inadvertently given to the progressive wing of the party is to … clarify that one could reject conventional foreign policy views which have led to the war in Iraq and 17 years of a failed war on terror without necessarily embracing an inward-looking, isolationist approach,” Malley said. “Trump’s very peculiar way of rejecting the policies of the past—by ignoring democracy and human rights; embracing autocrats; confusing business interests with national interests—has served as a foil for them.”

Distinguishing himself from traditional Democrats has been Bernie’s stock in trade since long before the 2016 primary campaign. Translating those distinguishing characteristics into actual policy, however, could be a separate challenge entirely.



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There is, for one thing, the simple matter that traditional Third Way-style centrist thinking has more or less a stranglehold on the foreign-policy think-tank landscape on the left, reducing the amount of talent available to a dyed-in-the-wool progressive like Sanders.

“This is one of the main disadvantages of populists and true-blue progressives who win office—they have to tap a talent pool that mostly doesn’t share its value set,” said Van Jackson. “That jump from stump to governance is hard.”

In the view of Malley, who has consulted with Sanders on Middle Eastern issues and appeared on a recent panel Sanders hosted in the wake of Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear agreement, that difficulty has informed the senator’s eclectic approach to developing a coherent progressive foreign policy.

“His process seems to me to be more ad hoc, exploratory,” Malley said. “It’s about listening to various people with various views in order to find a new voice.”

This, along with Sanders’ natural focus on domestic issues, of course, could explain why over the course of his long career he’s only sponsored a handful of bills regarding international affairs—most recently a failed joint resolution, originally co-sponsored with Senators Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Mike Lee of Utah, to end American military activity in Yemen, a subject about which Sanders has spoken repeatedly and passionately. Sanders plans to reintroduce that resolution, S.J. Res. 54, in the lame duck session of Congress after the midterm elections.

Sanders isn’t alone in the field of progressives hoping to expand their vision beyond America’s borders (and maybe those of their current political office). Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) earned herself a high-profile spot on the Senate Armed Services Committee after the 2016 election, and her first foreign trip as a senator in 2014 was to Israel, a politically crucial U.S. ally. She even swung by Kuwait and Iraq over the Fourth of July this year, bolstering her national profile with a markedly “presidential” visit to the troops. But Warren has yet to publicly lay out a sustained foreign policy vision of her own, as Sanders has now done.

Meanwhile, Sanders is making inroads even among centrists who might previously have been more intervention-minded, or at least more ambivalent about its costs. It’s a large part of the growing realization that the progressive left and the mainstream Democratic Party may have more in common on foreign policy than they think.

“When progressives start talking about the defense of democratic values, it’s something that [the centrist] wing always is supportive of, and [that wing has] also realized that the stomach for some of the emphasis on military instruments in the Democratic movement just isn’t there anymore,” said Nexon. “I think there’s a sense that’s the way the wind is blowing, and for good reason—it’s hard to look back on last 16 years and feel like the use of force has wound up producing good results.”

Even Sullivan agrees, with an eye on 2020, that the two wings are likely to have more in common than not regarding foreign policy after living with the hard-won lessons of the War on Terror and what’s followed.

“I predict in the primary that you’re not going to see huge divides on foreign policy. … The notion there’s going to be an isolationist wing and internationalist wing and they’re going to clash is, I think, not correct.”

If Sullivan is correct, after laying the groundwork for a new Democratic status quo on foreign policy, Bernie Sanders might find himself in a position with which he’s quite unfamiliar—dead in the center.