Bernie needs a coherent foreign policy -- and so does everyone else

No one -- with the possible exception of Bernie Sanders -- really thought that Bernie Sanders would get to this point. With the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses less than 24 hours away, the independent Vermont senator, now running for the White House as a Democrat, has come all the way from Nowheresville to within a couple of percentage points of long-assumed frontrunner Hillary Clinton in the Hawkeye State. And the polls show him on the verge of a landslide victory in next week's first primary, in New Hampshire.

The result, not surprisingly, is that Sanders is becoming 2016's Icarus, the mythological Greek dude who soared high with his wax-sealed wings -- until he got a little too close to the sun. The centrist, Wall Street-funded Democratic Party establishment -- which patronized Sanders last summer with the friendly equivalent of a pat on the head -- has suddenly turned vicious. No one more so than the wretched editorial board of the supposedly liberal Washington Post, which ran a hatchet job last week entitled "Bernie Sanders's fiction-filled campaign" (No, there shouldn't be a second "s" after the apostrophe, but who are we serfs* to correct the Washington Post's grammar?) -- probably to impress its billionaire libertarian owner, Jeff Bezos, who was visiting D.C. that morning and who might pay higher taxes under democratic socialism.

What's truly bizarre is that Sanders' Democratic critics like these editorial writers or the Clinton campaign are attacking the Vermont senator for backing things -- a single-payer healthcare system, or breaking up big banks -- that they themselves have backed in the past. But now that Sanders has a fighting chance to acquire real power to push for these things, the Establishment is in full panic mode. It almost makes you think the Left has been "played" by the Democratic hierarchy and the so-called liberal media all these years. (Spoiler alert: They have.)

However, there's one criticism getting tossed at Sanders this weekend (along with the kitchen sink) that has some validity: That he hasn't laid out a real vision for a foreign policy in a would-be Sanders administration. Most of the senator's positions on international affairs have come out under questioning at the debates; the only foreign policy point that Sanders usually makes with any enthusiasm is that he voted against the upcoming Iraq War in late 2002, while Clinton voted for it. That is, indeed, a credit toward smart, independent thinking...but it was also more than 13 years ago.

Indeed, Sanders promised at one point that he would deliver a major policy address in Iowa before tomorrow's caucus. It was a promise he didn't keep. That doesn't surprise me. I spent a good chunk of last fall learning Sanders' life story for my e-book, The Bern Identity, and one of the things I found out was that, over a half century, foreign policy has never been the top concern for the now-74-year-old Brooklyn native. The couple of international events that did fascinate Sanders -- the Cuban revolution of Fidel Castro and the arrival of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the 1980s -- were both cases of poor people rising up against rich oligarchs, the kind of thing he'd like to see happen, on some level, in the United States. Indeed, although he was a conscientious objector who avoided serving in Vietnam, there's no record that Sanders was significantly involved in the massive anti-Vietnam protests of the 1960s. His passion, instead, was economics, the plight of the working man, and developing a theory of "democratic socialism."

That's too bad, because frankly, at this point in America's tangled history, I'd love to see a real critique of our muddled foreign policy from someone who a) comes out of that Vietnam protest era and b) has some fresh new ideas about when and how American power -- military or otherwise -- should be used, or not used, overseas.

The truth is that not one of the 15 remaining presidential candidates in either major party is willing to even acknowledge, let alone discuss, what should be patently obvious: That America's militaristic policies, either created or acquiesced to by presidents and top elected officials in BOTH parties, have been an abject failure. And those policies have made large portions of the globe more dangerous -- and cost hundreds of thousands of lives in the process. An alternative universe -- where negotiation becomes more of a tool in our foreign policy than drone strikes, where we look realistically at where the United States can have a positive influence and where it can't, and where an otherwise liberal president doesn't brag about America spending as much on our military as the next eight nations combined -- remains for the most part painfully off the table.

There is little hope that anyone is listening to a smart critic of American foreign policy like retired Col. (now a professor) Andrew Bacevich, who in this 2015 interview correctly predicted that none of the presidential candidates would challenged the prevailing "wisdom." Said Bacevich: "The right wants to use military power to spread freedom. The left wants to use military power to protect the innocent, but both on the right and on the left, proponents of intervention lack a prudent understanding of what military power can do, what it can't do, and the likelihood of unintended secondary consequences that result from the use of military power."

Hell yeah, Bernie Sanders should offer a coherent plan for a new direction in American foreign policy -- one that would take the wisdom he displayed in opposing the 2003 Iraq War and expand on that, toward a more sensible policy in dealing with ISIS, the colossal disaster in Syria, and the never-ending mess in Afghanistan. But so should his chief primary rival Clinton: Her boasts about her time as secretary of state aren't the same as proposing a workable policy for 2017 and beyond, while her mistakes of the past (not just Iraq, but the poorly planned intervention in Libya) are largely unexplained, and her one idea for the future -- a no-fly zone over Syria -- is a reckless idea that could serve to widen that war.

But Sanders and Clinton are master diplomats when compared to the collective "wisdom" of the GOP candidates. The further-out-front-than-ever GOP frontrunner Donald Trump is a joke: His "foreign policy" is that he could make Mexico pay for a border wall and intimidate the Chinese on trade because...I don't know -- because he fixed a skating rink in Central Park once? The other candidates brag of their detailed plans to defeat ISIS -- the No. 1 issue among non-stop Fox News viewers -- but those plans are mostly 1) doing what Obama already is doing and 2) additionally dropping a lot more bombs. Sen. Ted Cruz has repeatedly talked of "carpet bombing" ISIS as we did in the first Gulf War in 1991 -- even though a) there was no "carpet bombing" in the Gulf War and b) the indiscriminate killing of civilians is a war crime that would only create more hatred toward America in the Middle East. Did I mention that Cruz is currently second in the GOP race?

I've already talked to a lot of rank-and-file voters in this election cycle, and what's most on their mind -- how to pay for a kid's college education or deal with a sick relative -- tend to be exactly the kind of things that Bernie Sanders is talking about on the campaign trail. Foreign policy isn't a front-burner issue, for Sanders or for most voters. But these topics are, in reality, interconnected.

The obscene amount of money that America now spends on weapons of death could instead rebuild our broken roads like the Pennsylvania Turnpike, or provide regular unleaded water to the people of Flint, or make public universities free to our young people. Bernie Sanders needs to find a better way to talk about how America can make this happen.

And so do the other 14 people who want to be our next president.

* Fixed from earlier version -- I've never claimed I can spell!