Bernie Sanders wears his idealism on his sleeve, but it stops at the water’s edge; there are times when his views on foreign policy mirror those of Trump and Cruz. How do we account for that?
I think his fixation with Henry Kissinger provides an answer to that question.
I was too young to be involved with the agitation over the Vietnam War. Both then and now, I viewed the war as a dreadful policy mistake that was driven by the misconceived idea that all Communist countries in Southeast Asia had consistent interests. The student opponents of the war, however, took that argument several steps further, and contended that the war was actually immoral, and part of a piece that included interventions to hobble or topple legitimate left-wing governments all over the world. This line of reasoning conveniently merged the war opponents’ self-interest with the inevitable American desire to moralize, and its logical conclusion was that idealism and the refusal to exercise power abroad were one and the same.
I never bought that part of the argument, but Bernie clearly did, and he never got over it, even though the world is a completely different place than it was in 1970. That is why he talks about Kissinger and the 1950’s coup in Iran rather than Bosnia or Rwanda or Darfur.