Clinton has admitted her “mistake” in voting for the Iraq War, but she still spins her Libya debacle as a success and supports escalating our military involvement in Syria. Her most prized adviser is the venerable Henry Kissinger, the doyen of realpolitik but one who broke with most realists on key policy choices—Vietnam, NATO expansion, and the invasion of Iraq. And so the search for a genuinely realist candidate leads to the unlikeliest of conclusions: the wild-haired democratic socialist from Vermont is, paradoxically, the most clear-eyed foreign policy realist of them all.

With other candidates waving the banner of American exceptionalism, only Sanders is realist enough to sound the alarm that political corruption and deepening inequality have put the domestic foundations of that leadership in real jeopardy.

This returns us to the first and simplest of realism’s precepts—discarding illusion and self-congratulation to see the world as it is, to see ourselves as others see us, to face reality. This means admitting that the post–Cold War designs of both neoconservatives and liberal interventionists have done more harm than good. It means acknowledging the epic disaster of our Mideast policies—of Democratic and Republican presidents alike—and both the regional chaos they have caused as well as the myriad new threats that now radiate out toward Europe, Russia, Africa, and Asia. It also means asking how much stronger would our military be if not for over a decade of wars, thousands of US soldiers killed, and up to 1 million more wounded? And how much more influence might we yield today if the several trillion dollars these wars have consumed had been invested instead in infrastructure or global development?


The leading GOP contenders—Trump and Cruz—advocate highly aggressive policies that have learned nothing from the recent, much less distant, past. Clinton has admitted her “mistake” in voting for the Iraq War, but she still spins her Libya debacle as a success and supports escalating our military involvement in Syria. Her most prized adviser is the venerable Henry Kissinger, the doyen of realpolitik but one who broke with most realists on key policy choices—Vietnam, NATO expansion, and the invasion of Iraq. And so the search for a genuinely realist candidate leads to the unlikeliest of conclusions: the wild-haired democratic socialist from Vermont is, paradoxically, the most clear-eyed foreign policy realist of them all.

Coming out against wars that benefit the US and global 1 percent provides a whole new 21st-century way of understanding both President Eisenhower’s warning about the power of the military-industrial complex and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s warning about the deadly triplets of militarism, racism, and extreme materialism.

No Wars for the Billionaire Class means standing up to the overarching influence of the arms-producing companies, especially their overpaid CEOs (perhaps recalling an earlier era of US history, when war profiteering was actually deemed illegal as well as immoral). It requires saying no to dictators who want to buy more expensive weapons, no matter how close their alliance with the United States. It means facing down the oil industry and its demand for US military protection—often including military occupation of other countries—of its pipelines, oilfields, and other facilities abroad. It means challenging the too-frequent Pentagon role in building bases and deploying troops and bombers to protect the far-flung interests of US and global corporations and further enrich the already super-rich. It means reversing the diversion of more than 54 cents of every discretionary federal dollar away from jobs, education, and healthcare to fund the military.

It is already obvious that Clinton’s much-touted experience bears little relationship to those principles. While Obama bears full responsibility for the militarization of foreign policy and the failed wars on his watch, there is no question that Clinton served as cheerleader for the most hawkish positions that some in the White House, including the president himself, acceded to only reluctantly. Trying to pivot away from Sanders’s debate statement that she bore major responsibility for today’s violence and chaos in Libya, Clinton claimed, accurately, that he too, had voted for the US/NATO bombing campaign. But she went on to claim, not so accurately, that the UN resolution she had helped craft to justify the attack on Libya made it all somehow benign; she ignored the fact that the only reason key Security Council countries, including Russia, China, and South Africa, accepted the resolution was because it was specifically limited to protecting civilians—it did not authorize regime change. South Africa’s foreign ministry even apologized later for having made the mistake of supporting the resolution.

So what are the specific positions that would make up such a new democratic—small “d”—foreign policy? Here are just a few examples of what a Sanders Doctrine might look like: