The leading candidates in the Democratic nominating contest aren’t criticizing one another:

Despite tightening polls, the two leading candidates refuse to draw sharp contrasts, let alone criticize each other, leaving voters to discern the differences in their agendas and priorities largely on their own.

I am sometimes asked why I don’t have more to say about the Democratic candidates on foreign policy, and this is one of the reasons why. In theory, an insurgent leftist candidate ought to be dinging Clinton on foreign policy on a regular basis, and she should be responding in kind, but both Sanders and Clinton seem uninterested in talking about it. There should be a fairly steady stream of statements on major issues that would merit analysis and criticism, but there are hardly any. Not only are they not attacking one another on these issues, but they aren’t even addressing most of them. Sanders should be in a position to challenge Clinton on her interventionist record, but he isn’t doing it, and he isn’t volunteering much information about his own foreign policy views, either. For her part, Clinton says almost nothing about her record, since I suspect that she knows that this isn’t a priority for most Democratic voters and she doesn’t want to remind them of a record that would appall many of them.

Notably, Sanders’ campaign website still has no section on foreign policy, and it has been plain enough from the first few months of his campaign that these issues aren’t a priority for him. Insofar as Sanders’ foreign policy has been getting much attention lately, it has come from progressive critics that are not at all pleased with his statements from earlier in the year calling for an increased Saudi role in the war on ISIS. Like Clinton, Sanders has endorsed the nuclear deal, and it’s good that he has, but on most other recent and contemporary foreign policy issues Sanders has little or nothing to say. He will reportedly be giving a “major foreign policy speech” in the future, and when he does I assume I’ll have something to say about it. Until then, there isn’t much of a Democratic foreign policy debate going among the candidates.