The war in Afghanistan is 16 years old, yet America does not have an anti-war party. Foreign policy is in fact one of the few areas of common ground between Democrats and Republicans: Just last week, the Senate overwhelmingly passed a $700 billion defense policy bill, far more than what President Donald Trump had requested. The foreign policy establishment is remarkably monolithic, which helps explain why the anti-war candidate Barack Obama ended up on the side of that establishment so often during his presidency. The results have not been encouraging.

This is the backdrop for Senator Bernie Sanders’s foreign policy speech to students at Westminster College last week. In keeping with his progressive campaign for president, Sanders attacked the shibboleths of the foreign policy elite, while formulating an alternative way to look at national security that incorporated his egalitarian economic views. “Inequality, corruption, oligarchy, and authoritarianism are inseparable,” Sanders said. “They must be understood as part of the same system, and fought in the same way.” He added, “Foreign policy must take into account the outrageous income and wealth inequality that exists globally and in our own country.”

He proceeded to criticize historical hallmarks of American foreign policy, like the CIA-backed campaigns against foreign rulers like Salvador Allende in Chile and Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran. He defended diplomacy as a superior alternative to military intervention. And, in passages that bore some resemblance to Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s speech after the Manchester bombing in May, he condemned the war on terror as a self-defeating exercise. This was a detailed, coherent foreign policy speech from Sanders, and it was overdue: He largely failed to articulate a foreign policy vision during the 2016 Democratic primary, an omission that always felt like an unnecessary capitulation to Hillary Clinton’s touted expertise.

Sanders’s speech, therefore, is best seen as an attempt to break through the calcified ideologies of an elite that has discredited itself time and again in the post-9/11 era, but continues to wield inordinate influence and has barely changed its ways. He argued for a general reorientation of American foreign policy—a reconsideration of old alliances, with higher priority given to diplomatic solutions. And by doing so from the left, he challenged libertarian domination of the anti-interventionist label.

Nevertheless, Sanders didn’t convince everyone. At Vox, Jennifer Williams, a former researcher at Brookings, criticized the speech for failing to offer “concrete ideas” for how to achieve his vision for a more peaceful world. Sanders’s criticisms of military intervention are “all well and good,” she says, but adds: “How does he plan to address the threat—both to the U.S. directly and to the security, stability, and prosperity of people around the world—from groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda, if not by some combination of military intervention or drone and airstrikes?”