Elizabeth Warren Tries to Invent a Foreign-Policy Message for Progressives and the Establishment

By Osita Nwanevu, The New Yorker

01 December 18

hen did contemporary American foreign policy first go wrong? In an address at American University’s Washington College of Law on Thursday, Senator Elizabeth Warren offered a surprisingly tidy answer. “In the nineteen-eighties, Washington’s focus shifted from policies that benefit everyone to policies that benefit a handful of wealthy élites both here at home and around the world,” she said. “Mistakes piled on mistakes—reckless, endless wars in the Middle East, trade deals rammed through with callous disregard for working people, extraordinary expansion of risk in the global financial system. And why? Mostly to serve the interests of big corporations, while ignoring the interests of American workers.”

This sounds like a thesis statement for a foreign policy inspired by the wave of progressive populism that will make both Warren and Bernie Sanders formidable Presidential contenders in 2020, should they run. But Warren’s foreign-policy agenda, as described in her speech, differs in subtle ways from the vision Sanders outlined in his own major foreign-policy speech in September. To begin with, for Sanders and most on the hard left, America’s modern history of moral and strategic foreign-policy failures begins well before the nineteen-eighties. In his address, Sanders mentioned not only the Vietnam War but the C.I.A.-supported coups against Iran’s Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, in 1953, and Salvador Allende, in Chile, in 1973. The most Warren said about this era was that America “wasn’t perfect.”

Warren and Sanders both have drawn connections between the problems we face abroad and the triumph of neoliberalism, an economic ideology that she never named in her speech, but nevertheless described succinctly. “Washington technocrats,” she said, “backed austerity, deregulation, and privatization all around the world.” For Sanders and others, the neoliberal turn exposed underlying economic dynamics that are indictments of capitalism itself. But for Warren neoliberalism has been a perversion of a system that could and once did work. “As one crisis after another hit, the economic security of working people around the globe was destroyed, reducing public faith in both capitalism and in democracy,” she said. “Policymakers promised that open markets would lead to open societies. Wow, did Washington get that one wrong.” All told, it was a speech aimed as much at the foreign-policy establishment as at the progressive left—a populist vision tempered for the Blob. Even if Warren doesn’t run in 2020, the balance she’s attempting to strike on this front may be the one the Democratic Party as a whole settles on.