Bernie Sanders Goes Full Neo-Con On Ukraine.

The Once Independent Voice Sells Out To The Pro-War Democratic Establishment.

Pictured Above: Satirical Cartoon from the “Lincoln Project” portraying Bernie Sanders and Dick Cheney as “The Odd Couple”

Bernie Sanders Vs. Bernie Sanders

Wars have unintended consequences. They rarely turn out the way the experts tell us they will. Just ask the officials who provided rosy scenarios for the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, only to be proven horribly wrong. Just ask the mothers of the soldiers who were killed or wounded in action during those wars. Just ask the millions of civilians who became “collateral damage”.

That is why we must do everything possible to try and find a diplomatic solution to what could be an enormously destructive war in Ukraine.

These were Vermont Senator and two-time presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders’ words in the Guardian on February 8th of 2022.

What he is saying today, with the current Ukraine negotiations, is very different.

In his response video to Trump’s comments on Ukraine, Sanders said

Yesterday, Trump said that Ukraine started the war. That’s not true. Russia invaded Ukraine twice: first in 2014, then again in 2022.

True, Trump’s comments were incorrect, but Bernie did not mention the U.S. role in provoking this war, something I know for a fact he understands.

In the aforementioned Guardian article, he wrote:

When Ukraine became independent after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Russian leaders made clear their concerns about the prospect of former Soviet states becoming part of Nato and positioning hostile military forces along Russia’s border. US leaders recognized these concerns as legitimate at the time. They are still legitimate concerns. Invasion by Russia is not an answer; neither is intransigence by Nato. It is also important to recognize that Finland, one of the most developed and democratic countries in the world, borders Russia and has chosen not to be a member of Nato.

Sanders went from saying that Russia had “legitimate concerns” over NATO expansion to pretending the U.S. did not provoke this war. Bernie even pointed out the hypocrisy of the United States and how they would react had the situation been reversed writing:

Putin may be a liar and a demagogue, but it is hypocritical for the United States to insist that we do not accept the principle of “spheres of influence”. For the last 200 years our country has operated under the Monroe Doctrine, embracing the premise that as the dominant power in the western hemisphere, the United States has the right to intervene against any country that might threaten our alleged interests. Under this doctrine we have undermined and overthrown at least a dozen governments. In 1962 we came to the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union in response to the placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba, 90 miles from our shore, which the Kennedy administration saw as an unacceptable threat to our national

To put it simply, even if Russia was not ruled by a corrupt authoritarian leader like Vladimir Putin, Russia, like the United States, would still have an interest in the security policies of its neighbors. Does anyone really believe that the United States would not have something to say if, for example, Mexico was to form a military alliance with a US adversary?

Bernie completely understood the issue of NATO expansion back then, but today is pretending he does not.

Sanders went on to say:

Trump is cosying up to Vladimir Putin. So who is Putin? And what kind of world does he want to build? Putin is a dictator who crushed Russia’s movement toward democracy after the end of the Cold War. Russia holds sham elections every six years, where Putin wins 90% of the ‘vote’, and authorities don’t even try to hide their ballot-stuffing."

In the Guardian piece, he warned that:

I am extremely concerned when I hear the familiar drum beats in Washington, the bellicose rhetoric that gets amplified before every war, demanding that we must “show strength”, “get tough” and not engage in “appeasement”. A simplistic refusal to recognize the complex roots of the tensions in the region undermines the ability of negotiators to reach a peaceful resolution.

Now, Bernie is the one pushing “bellicose rhetoric” to “not engage in appeasement” in his beating of the pro-war “drumbeat of Washington” and opposing an end to the Ukraine proxy war.

Bernie The American Exceptionalist

For me, the part of his video that pissed me off the most has to be when Bernie Sanders said:

We know, and we are proud of the fact that the United States of America is the longest-standing democracy in the world. We know that many hundreds of thousands of brave Americans, over the years, have fought and died to defend democracy. We also know that our allies in the world are those countries that believe in democracy, not authoritarianism.

I know that Bernie Sanders knows full well that this is a giant heaping pile of bullshit.

One of the main attacks against Bernie Sanders in 2020 was over the fact that he correctly stood with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the 1980s while the United States was backing contras in an effort to overthrow the government which itself defeated the U.S.-backed Somoza dictatorship.

In 2019, Bernie Sanders opposed the U.S.-supported military coup against Bolivia's democratically elected president Evo Morales. In an interview with Univision’s Jorge Ramos. Sanders said:

we can argue about his going for a fourth term, whether that was a wise thing to do... But at the end of the day, it was the military who intervened in that process and asked him to leave. When the military intervenes, Jorge, in my view, that's called a coup

Bernie Sanders repeatedly led the charge to end the U.S. support of the Saudi Arabian dictatorship while they massacred civilians in Yemen. In 2022 Sanders said:

More than 85,000 children in Yemen have already starved and millions more are facing imminent famine and death. More than 70 percent of Yemen’s population currently rely on humanitarian food assistance and the UN has warned the death toll could climb to 1.3 million people by 2030. This war has created the world’s worst humanitarian crisis today and it is past time to end U.S. complicity in those horrors. Let us pass this resolution, so we can focus on diplomacy to end this war.

While he was very late on the issue, he eventually opposed America’s support of Israel’s genocide in Gaza saying

(Israel) has not simply waged war against Hamas. It has waged an all-out war against the Palestinian people

Bernie Sanders knows full well that American foreign policy has nothing to do with democracy and has tried to overthrow democratically elected governments in South America to install puppet dictators while backing some of the most brutal regimes on earth like Israel and Saudi Arabia while they mass murder civilians.

After spending a lifetime calling out the undemocratic nature of American imperialism (on some issues) Bernie is now playing dumb and pretending that America actually cares about democracy when it wages war around the world.

Bernie Sanders Is a Sellout

Bernie Sanders has never been great on foreign policy.

The leftist political scientist Michael Parenti has noted that his friendship ended with Bernie Sanders because he was opposed to Bill Clinton’s bombing of Yugoslavia while Bernie was in favor of it. Parenti noted that the bombing included using “depleted Uranium, which has left Serbia with the highest cancer rate in all Europe”.

In 2014 Bernie Sanders supported Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza which killed 2,251 Palestinians, 1,462 of whom were civilians including 551 children and 299 women. The Israeli bombing also led to “11,231 Palestinians being injured” “10 percent of whom suffered permanent disability”.

While Sanders eventually came around to opposing the Gaza genocide, he was extremely late. As late as December 10th of 2023, Sanders was openly opposing a ceasefire in Gaza even after Israel had already massacred 18,000 Palestinians, 90 percent of whom were civilians.

These are some truly horrific stains on Bernie Sanders' record.

With that being said, there has also been some good in Bernie on foreign policy.

As mentioned above he took some good stances on Nicaragua, Bolivia, Yemen, and (eventually) Gaza (though it took him far too long to come to the conclusion that genocide is wrong).

In his 2016 debate against Hillary Clinton, Sanders correctly called her out for supporting the wars in Iraq, Libya, and Syria saying:

I worry too much that Secretary Clinton is too much into regime change and a little bit too aggressive without knowing what the unintended consequences might be, Yes, we could get rid of Saddam Hussein, but that destabilized the entire region. Yes, we could get rid of Gaddafi, a terrible dictator, but that created a vacuum for ISIS. Yes, we could get rid of Assad tomorrow, but that would create another political vacuum that would benefit ISIS.

Sanders also took a strong stance against war with Iran, saying “ I will do everything in my power to prevent a war with Iran” in 2019 and opposing the murderous U.S. sanctions on Iran in 2020.

Unfortunately, Bernie’s current position on Ukraine goes in the “horrific” category of his record.

While Trump’s Ukraine comments may be dumb and counterproductive, the alternative is far worse.

Polls show that 52 percent of Ukrainians “want talks with Russia to end the conflict as soon as possible” and 52% of those respondents even said they would “be open to territorial concessions” if it could end the war.

To deal with this problem the Ukrainian government created a military draft, which CNN said gave Ukrainian men a choice to “comply and face the possibility of being sent to the frontlines, or try to evade and risk penalties and condemnation.”

This has led many Ukrainians to leave the country, some of whom have drowned attempting to escape the draft.

These drafts have led to an endless slew of videos on social media of Ukrainians being forced into vans to be drafted. As the Daily Mail wrote there was “a torrent of videos emerging of civilians being brutally beaten and forced into vans by mobs of soldiers”.

In November of last year, the Biden administration began calling for Ukraine to lower the draft age from 25 to 18.

At the same time, the West knows that Ukraine cannot win this war, in an interview with TIME magazine Eric Green, an official from the Biden National Security Council admitted that they always knew Ukraine would not regain territory. The Magazine wrote:

We were deliberately not talking about the territorial parameters,” says Eric Green, who served on Biden’s National Security Council at the time, overseeing Russia policy. The U.S., in other words, made no promise to help Ukraine recover all of the land Russia had occupied, and certainly not the vast territories in eastern Ukraine and the Crimean Peninsula taken in its initial invasion in 2014. The reason was simple, Green says: in the White House’s view, doing so was beyond Ukraine’s ability, even with robust help from the West. “That was not going to be a success story ultimately.

The Ukraine policy that the Democrats and Bernie Sanders support is forcing Ukrainians to fight in a war the majority of the country wants to end, by dragging 18 years olds into vans and forcing them to fight in a war they know they cannot win only to weaken a U.S. adversary and fill the pockets of defense contractors.

There is no excuse for Bernie Sanders on this, his piece in the Guardian from 2022 proves he knows this war is bogus and is supporting it to appeal to the democratic establishment.

Of all the issues to sell out on, the issue of forcing an entire generation of young men to fight in an unwinnable proxy war is a pretty vile one.

I was a die-hard Bernie fan in 2016 and 2020.

It was a massive heartbreak for me when he was screwed over again by the DNC in 2020.

The bigger heartbreak, however, is finding out that the man I so passionately defended and supported turned out to be just another Washinton careerist warmonger.

---

Note to readers: The Dissident is a reader-supported outlet. If you liked this article consider becoming a paid subscriber.