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The Hunt for Warren’s Missing Foreign Policy

The fixation on Warren as the hoped-for progressive challenger to Clinton underscores how few prominent elected doves there are in the Democratic Party today.
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Danny Vinik tries to figure out what Elizabeth Warren’s foreign policy views are, but he has almost nothing to work with:

Even her one clear foreign policy position, on Israel, doesn’t shed much light on her broader worldview. Some liberals may be dismayed that her moderate stance, but as Paul Waldman points out at The American Prospect, her position is similar to that of almost every other politician on Capitol Hill. It’s boilerplate language from a senator who doesn’t spend much time thinking about foreign policy [bold mine-DL].

If Warren were running for president, this would be a major oversight on her part, but as a freshman senator focused on domestic policy reform it makes much more sense. She takes as few positions on foreign policy as she has to, and she tries not to make too many waves. Even her vote against arming and training Syrian rebels fits this pattern, since arming rebels in Syria is overwhelmingly unpopular across the country. Her lack of interest in foreign policy may seem like a glaring omission to many of her would-be supporters, but that is because they want to cast her for the role of the progressive anti-Clinton challenger. These would-be supporters need her to articulate foreign policy views that are significantly different from Clinton’s, but Warren evidently doesn’t want or need to do that. There are many progressives understandably unhappy with Clinton on foreign policy, and so they want to find some potential challenger to make a progressive foreign policy case against her. Warren would be useful because they already know and like her domestic policy views, and progressives aren’t going to rally behind someone like Jim Webb, but Warren has other ideas. Meanwhile, the fixation on Warren as the hoped-for progressive challenger to Clinton underscores just how few prominent elected doves there are in the Democratic Party today.

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