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Eighty-six senators voted for that NDAA. Bernie Sanders was not one of them. Despite the Post’s revelations — and the Taliban’s impending triumph — almost no one in Congress has been willing to describe the war in Afghanistan as a mistake. The socialist senator is an exception.

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Readers are never provided with Sanders’s argument for seeing Morales’s ouster as an apparent coup, nor with information as to how ensuing events in Bolivia have validated or contradicted the senator’s assessment. We are only told that Morales presided over a tainted election and challenged term limits to remain in power. Among the things we are not told: (1) No one disputes that Morales won the most votes of any candidate in that “tainted” election, only whether his true margin was large enough to avoid a runoff, (2) in light of the audit’s concerns on the latter point, Morales agreed to convene new elections, (3) some well-reputed election analysts have disputed the audit’s premises, and (4) Morales’s ouster brought a far-right, anti-indigenous faction to power that had received no democratic mandate whatsoever, and nevertheless proceeded to overstep its bounds as a caretaker government. As the Guardian reported in December:

Interim president Jeanine Áñez vowed to unify the country when she took power — but packed the cabinet with members of the conservative elites and boasted that “God has allowed the Bible back into the palace” of a secular country. She exempted the military from criminal prosecution when maintaining public order; at least 17 indigenous protesters died after security forces opened fire. Police cut the indigenous Wiphala flag from their uniforms and anti-Morales demonstrators set fire to it. The interior minister has vowed to jail Mr Morales, in exile in Mexico, for 30 years for terrorism and sedition.

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Bernie Sanders is not immune to the gravitational force of these political realities. But he is more resistant to Congress’s collective madness than most of his peers. The senator has consistently opposed increasing the Pentagon’s gargantuan budget, called for rethinking the U.S. alliance with Saudi Arabia, and threatened to withhold U.S. military aid to Israel if it continues to expand settlements in the West Bank. To be sure, the man is no foreign-policy wonk. And his stated views on trade can be reductive and nationalistic. But on the whole, his outlook is both more evidence-based and more moderate — with its cautious approach to foreign intervention and allergy to unilateral assertions of American power — than the consensus he threatens to “upend.”

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/01/bernie-sanders-is-running-on-a-moderate-foreign-policy.html