The Real Progressive-Centrist Divide on Foreign Policy

The Democratic Party is clearly split along progressive-centrist lines on domestic politics, but the story is more complicated on foreign policy. Throughout the course of the primary campaign, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have pitched a distinctive progressive foreign policy that cuts the defense budget, ends military interventions, reforms the global economy, and confronts authoritarianism and networks of corruption around the world. Advisers to both campaigns are trying to clarify the progressive worldview and hope to transform Democratic foreign policy, much like neoconservatives in the 1980s and ’90s did for the Republican Party, albeit in the opposite direction.

For those of us trying to figure out where the United States goes after Donald Trump leaves office, the unfolding Democratic primary poses several questions. Is the country on the cusp of a new foreign-policy revolution? Will a progressive president break with the post–Cold War consensus? And if the next president is a Democratic centrist, like Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, or Amy Klobuchar, will there be an intra-party struggle about the direction of American strategy?

One answer is becoming clear: Sanders, in particular, may dramatically