In the final Democratic debate of 2015, the discussion of foreign policy left much to be desired.
Bernie Sanders is a good man and he has some good ideas, but he failed to articulate a challenge to Hillary Clinton's concept of American imperialism. This concept of American imperialism has led to disaster after disaster in the 21st century. Hillary Clinton was one of the most enthusiastic supporters of George Bush's catastrophic invasion of Iraq, which killed one million Iraqi civilians, spread instability, chaos and disaster all over the Middle East, ruined the lives of millions of people and cost the US government about $3 trillion or more.
Mrs. Clinton has learned little from this disaster. When she became Secretary of State, she endorsed a campaign to attack the government of Libya on the grounds that she was supposedly saving people from a massacre, a story which later turned out to be a fraud. In the process of attacking and overthrowing the government of Col. Qaddafi, she aligned America with some of the most extreme and intolerant Islamic forces in the Middle East. This was a moral abomination as well as policy stupidity. Today Libya is in chaos. It's a total disaster. Mrs. Clinton was allowed to dodge this entire issue.
In 2012 Mrs. Clinton supported overthrowing the government of Bashar Al-Assad in Syria again in a coalition with some of the same bad actors, the extreme Islamic elements backed by Saudi Arabia and Qatar. This also turned into a total catastrophe leading to the rise of ISIS, and ISIS came out of the Western support for Islamic extremists trying to overthrow the government of Assad. There is a direct line between Mrs. Clinton and ISIS.
Mrs. Clinton also supported the policies in Yemen which have led to a disaster there. Now these are tremendous disasters that have killed hundreds of thousands of people. So it's not just Mrs. Clinton's support for imperialism in Iraq. She as Secretary of State has made it very clear that she wants to use American military power to basically rule the world and eliminate people that she doesn't like. This has been utterly disastrous.
We could also go on to the drone attacks, which have also been a disaster and a fraud in so far as the Obama administration's claim that they do not kill civilians.
So these policies of American imperialism and intervention have been a disaster. Yet Sanders failed to articulate an alternative to them.
Now one alternative is the issue of democracy. America could simply allow elections in these countries to see who they might choose, rather than having Mrs. Clinton arrogantly claim that she's going to pick out leaders herself. Mrs. Clinton has also been hog-wild about starting a New Cold War. She even made the crazy and outrageous accusation that Putin was similar to Hitler. These are crazy ideas and should be seen as such. But these arguments were not made in the debate.
Now America cannot continue to go on the road of imperialism. This is going to bankrupt us, as well as getting a larger and larger group of people overseas who will want to attack us.
Sanders cannot win unless he challenges the concept of imperialism, period. He can't just be a "Johnny one note" about the rule of the rich. His points are valid, but that's not enough.
So that's a key analysis of the Democratic debate.