2020 Candidate FOREIGN policy Report

Foreign policy is the area over which the next president will have great power to deliver on their vision, and the decisions of the president will affect the lives of countless people around the world, as well as the population here in the United States. Data for Progress partnered with Common Defense, a progressive, grassroots organization of US military veterans, to assess the foreign policy plans and records of many of the top 2020 presidential candidates, and compare them to each other. For this analysis we walked through the public statements, campaign platforms, and key voting records for the candidates who qualified for the September debate, to determine how those vying to be our next commander-in-chief are thinking about foreign policy and national security. In doing so, we assessed their stances on a range of top global issues facing the next president, and advanced a strongly progressive vision for what our polling shows voters want to see.

A progressive foreign policy rejects Trump-esque “America First” posturing in which alliances are annoyances, international institutions are burdens, and foreign policy is inherently zero-sum, oppositional, and transactional. A progressive foreign policy also avoids “American exceptionalism” framing, which fails to recognize the harm that some of the United States’s policies have done in the world (including policies instituted before Trump), and it does not view either the US’s permanent, global military hegemony as a prerequisite for a peaceful world, or the peaceful rise of other countries as an inherent threat.

We want to see candidates take stock of and prioritize the security challenges facing the United States through a realistic lens that avoids fearmongering and/or inflating the level of actual threat. Candidates should prioritize by looking at physical, social, and economic threats holistically, and put people over power and profits. We want to see a recognition that many security challenges lack military solutions, and are often exacerbated by US militarism. We want to see an acknowledgement that there are limits to US power, and concrete investments in tools for cooperative diplomacy.

~ Alex McCoy, Political Director, Common Defense



Note: We excluded the critically-important issue of Israel-Palestine from this specific project because it has already been covered in a separate memo , authored by Data for Progress Senior Fellow Emma Saltzberg.