These far-left candidates lack a foreign policy

Lamont Colucci, associate professor and chair of the politics and government department, recently published an opinion piece for U.S. News & World Report about his perspective as interest in the coming election rises.

“Each time the United States and the United Kingdom have a general election, the far-left candidates delineate themselves by their domestic socialist, oftentimes Marxist rhetoric,” Colucci writes. “These tend to be attacks against global capitalism, free trade, local education and Christian values. What is amazingly missed by many, even in the media, is a focus on these candidates’ foreign policy, or lack thereof.”

He questions the foreign policy of up-and-coming Democrat candidate Bernie Sanders. “If the Obama Doctrine is a combination of a declinist mentality meeting the absence of strategy, the Sanders Doctrine would be the same thing on steroids,” he writes.

He points out that Sander’s own campaign website barely mentions international issues. Sanders also has pushed for a withdrawal from the World Trade Organization and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and calls for the end of America’s production of nuclear weapons.

“It’s difficult to decide what is more startling: that a far-left radical national security policy is taken seriously, or how close it is to the current occupant of the White House.” Colucci writes. “They both share the most damning policy in their view of international relations and national security: the lack of any real strategy at all.”

About “anti-American” British Labour Party candidate Jeremy Corbyn, he condemns Corbyn’s comparison of the Islamic State Group’s actions and those of American soldiers in the Middle East, and Corbyn’s push for a compromise between Britain and the Islamic State Group.

“One has to wonder if Corbyn thinks he would get such a compromise from the Islamic State group should it ever have his personal fate in its hands,” Colucci says. “Then again, modern international leftists never have to face such threats, and have always shielded themselves behind human rights rhetoric with no action.”

He says both candidates are highly similar, and “are both children playing the veritable fiddle while Rome burns, able to throw tantrums disguised as intellectualisms while the adults attempt to put the fires out.”

The full opinion piece can be read here.

Posted September 4, 2015 in Faculty.

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