Issue Position: American Leadership in the World

Issue Position

Rebuilding America's Leadership Role in the World

I believe that the United States can play a leadership role in the world, ensuring that Americans are safe and secure and that we are working to make the world more peaceful. I also believe that in 2021, we will have a very unique opportunity to rebuild our foreign policy and national security architecture after Donald Trump's complete decimation of it. That means re-entering the Paris Climate Accords and treating climate change with the urgency it deserves, rebuilding and funding our State Department and USAID, and re-focusing our Defense Department to the threats of the future, instead of fighting yesterday's wars.

It is well past time that Congress stops abdicating its role in our national security. I support repealing the 2002 AUMF which authorized the Iraq War, a clear mistake, and amending the 2001 AUMF to a new time-limited one that authorizes the use of military force in specific countries against specifically named groups while enhancing congressional oversight and public transparency.

We need to end the forever wars -- America's involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan, and fighting terrorism around the world -- and we need to do it responsibly. We've seen successful peacebuilding and conflict stabilization interventions in other places and we need to take the lessons that we learned from those experiences and make sure that we are funding a day after plan for leaving, just as we should have funded a day after plan for intervening in the first place.

I know that development and diplomacy are the most important foreign policy tools that we have. So, not only do we need to protect and maintain current funding levels for the State Department and USAID, we need to drastically re-balance our approach to foreign policy to give enough resources and emphasis to these agencies.

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