Bernie Sanders, foreign policy realist - The Washington Post - 0 views
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when it comes to foreign policy, there is little question that Sanders is closer to Obama’s sensibility than is Clinton.
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The campaign rhetoric exposes a significant divergence in perspective. Both Sanders and Obama opposed President George W. Bush’s catastrophic war of choice in Iraq. Clinton voted for it and defended her vote for years. That was, as Sanders repeats, not just a calamitous case of bad judgment; it also reflects differing worldviews.
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Clinton, as Vice President Biden noted, is by temperament an “interventionist.” She believes the United States is an “indispensable nation,” that, in Biden’s phrasing, “we just have to do something when bad people do bad things,” whether our vital interests are involved or not. Leading neoconservatives such as Robert Kagan (a Post contributor) who touted the Iraq War declare themselves “comfortable” with Clinton’s views. “If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue,” Kagan said in June 2014, “it’s something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else.”
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