I have found a candidate for worst and dumbest article published this year in the New York Review of Books. Who knows if the NYRB will top this one, especially if Bernie Sanders does as well as people are thinking in being a top tier presidential nomination contender. I know Michael Tomasky is out there, with his higher brow conventional wisdom, waiting in the wings. I remember Tomasky as a writer at The Village Voice and New York Magazine, when he wrote with true outside-the-Beltway wisdom about the Hillary Clinton health insurance fiasco, and the limits of Hillary Clinton's ideas. But after he left the Voice, he became more of a neo-liberal than anything else in particular, publishing largely fawning articles and books about Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren. But let's get to why this Jessica T. Matthews piece, entitled Do the Democrats Have a Foreign Policy? is so bad. First, the title is misleading. Three quarters of the piece is devoted to almost cliched attacks on Trump, as if NYRB readers are unaware of how Trump has twisted the entire foreign policy debate in America by mimicking different aspects of it while sowing chaos throughout the world.
Second, Matthews, for someone whose mother was the famed historian, Barbara Tuchman, who wrote about the folly of those in power, and tragedy for powerful people who saw reality on the ground, reveals a classic folly-driven and arrogant foreign policy establishment worldview. Here is how Matthews describes Bernie Sanders' foreign policy worldview:
Warren and Sanders agree on many things, but while she errs in saying too much, he barely touches on foreign policy. You have to scroll far down the Sanders website to find the little he has to say about it. He speaks cogently on the stump about the need to “privilege diplomacy,” to work more closely with allies, and to favor a posture of “partnership, rather than dominance,” but he has not gone beyond such generalities except in calling for changes in the US–Saudi relationship and ending US support that prolongs the killing in Yemen. His long-standing opposition to American interventions in Latin America and his approval of governments that profess concern for the poor have led him to express support for highly repressive leftist regimes in the likes of Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Bolivia. This could well prove to be heavy political baggage in a presidential election.
Let's unpack this paragraph. First, "highly repressive leftist regimes in the likes of Nicaragua, Venezuela, Bolivia." Says who? The Sandinistas were the least repressive regime in Central America in the 1980s (outside of Costa Rica, of course), particularly compared to the military dictatorships the US supported and lavished military training and hardware in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. In those US client states, it was a matter of policy for their regimes to torture and murder, under US training, nuns, priests, doctors, nurses, teachers, and labor organizers. Our nation's leaders supported a virtual bloodbath, and the Contras, fighting against the Nicaraguan Sandinista government, were adept at killing such classes of people in Nicaragua, while promoting the drug trade in the United States. Further, Sanders' support for Evo Morales in Bolivia is relatively well understood as marginal, but I don't recall anyone outside of very far right wingers calling Bolivia "highly repressive" during Morales' tenure. In fact, Bolivia was far more open, and hospitable to historically repressed people in Bolivia under Morales than ever before, and was a functioning open government for the most part. As for Venezuela, the US tried to overthrow Chavez in 2002--presumably with Matthews' approval--and was largely a free country in the political sense for most of his tenure. Yes, there were some issues that arose during Chavez's tenure, but nothing like a truly repressive dictatorship, say, in Saudi Arabia, and nothing as bad as Israel's continuing repression of Palestinians in the West Bank, to take two examples that make people such as Matthews squirm at a DC cocktail party.*
Second, I winced at how she plays into the nonsense that Warren has the specifics, and Bernie's only about vagaries. Matthews speaks about Warren's specifics in other paragraphs, and so we have to respond to each assertion. Matthews, ignoring Bernie's very clear attacks on the military-industrial complex, which no other candidate even mentions, says "Warren and, to a lesser degree, Klobuchar are the only candidates who have had the courage to address the country’s mushrooming defense budget ($738 billion for the coming year), which now consumes more than 60 percent of all federal discretionary spending." (footnote omitted) Warren only said she would cut part of the military budget to pay for her Medicare for All proposal. But Matthews wants readers to forget the fact Bernie has voted against every Trump era military budget, while Warren has supported them. And I am sure Matthews supports the new NAFTA 2.0, as did Warren, and which Bernie, acting on behalf of international human rights, labor, and environmental groups, opposed. Matthews wants readers to forget about Bernie's long, very specific record of opposing US military interventions, not just with Iraq, and for reasons that show far greater understanding of the motives and details of American foreign policy. He knows exactly what I am talking about in the previous paragraph about Central and Latin America. I doubt none of the others--except possibly Mayor Pete, from Mayor Pete's Marxist Gramscian loving Dad--even know about this horrific record. I doubt Matthews will run into a former DC cocktail party member, Peter Beinart, but maybe if she took the time to read this article from Beinart, she may not be as dismissive of Sanders' foreign policy proposals.
Matthews touts Warren, saying Warren's "website lists sixty-nine policy plans." (My emphasis) Well, I looked at Warren's campaign website, and I don't see that number of specific foreign policy plans at all. Here is the section of plans called "Foreign Policy for All," which is at least as vague as what Matthews accuses Bernie of being. One also sees nothing about sixty-nine plans in the section marked "Foreign Policy." One has to "jump" (the word on the website) to "all plans" to see a laundry list alright, and appears to add up to sixty-nine proposals. However, apart from helping vets and military housing, most are a rehash of her domestic policy concerns. Unlike Warren, Bernie is recognized as one of the leading advocates for military veterans, and has the highest campaign contributions from veterans and military personnel for primarily that reason. The only other two related categories in her "Foreign Policy for All" link are about rebuilding the State Department--as if Bernie wouldn't? as if Biden wouldn't?--and reducing corporate influence at the Pentagon. As if Bernie isn't talking about that? Really? If I worked for Politifact, Matthews' statements comparing Sanders and Warren foreign policy proposals would be deemed highly misleading and mostly false.
Matthews touts Warren, saying Warren's "website lists sixty-nine policy plans." (My emphasis) Well, I looked at Warren's campaign website, and I don't see that number of specific foreign policy plans at all. Here is the section of plans called "Foreign Policy for All," which is at least as vague as what Matthews accuses Bernie of being. One also sees nothing about sixty-nine plans in the section marked "Foreign Policy." One has to "jump" (the word on the website) to "all plans" to see a laundry list alright, and appears to add up to sixty-nine proposals. However, apart from helping vets and military housing, most are a rehash of her domestic policy concerns. Unlike Warren, Bernie is recognized as one of the leading advocates for military veterans, and has the highest campaign contributions from veterans and military personnel for primarily that reason. The only other two related categories in her "Foreign Policy for All" link are about rebuilding the State Department--as if Bernie wouldn't? as if Biden wouldn't?--and reducing corporate influence at the Pentagon. As if Bernie isn't talking about that? Really? If I worked for Politifact, Matthews' statements comparing Sanders and Warren foreign policy proposals would be deemed highly misleading and mostly false.
Last summer, Matthews wrote a very reliable and informative piece on what she called the "indefensible" US military budget, and an overview of the budget over the past decades, showing how it eats up 60% of the discretionary US budget nearly every year. I guess I should have known better about her for not even mentioning Bernie Sanders' opposition to the budget she rightly found indefensible. What I can't believe is the NYRB editors did not see through this current piece, and reject it.
Oh well. As I say, let's watch out for the NYRB falling into establishment oriented, but sly attacks on Bernie Sanders as this primary season finally arrives in full view. It is a holdover from the Slivers-Epstein days, I suppose, where, after they first casted out Chomsky, and then later, I.F. Stone, they more often showed fealty to American foreign policy establishment worldviews than not.
*I have homework to do this morning, so I leave the verification for doubters to themselves to research the statements made in the above paragraph. I admit trying in the past to find some of the sourcing for these statements, and finding a dearth on the Internet outside of far-left sources that may not be seen as credible to doubters. One must read books such as former NY Times reporter, Stephen Kinzer's books on Guatemala and Iran, and one of his latest, Overthrow, or the work of Raymond Bonner, another former NY Times reporter, for starters, and, for an overview of American foreign policy in the region, from former foreign policy insider, William LeoGrande. Another laser overview of this intentional policy of murder in Central America can be found in Penny Lernoux's Cry of the People, which predated the Reagan overdrive into murder in the 1980s. I can guarantee Sanders (and certainly me) would wipe out Matthews in any direct foreign policy debate. Sadly, she is no different from those who get into power curve establishment, which is why her blithe, glib phrase about "highly repressive left-wing regimes" statements is so classic, and irksome.
