1. Something that is worth noting but that I haven't seen any commentary on. Some important experts in US economic coercion - most notably @RichardMNephew and @JarrettBlanc - have signed on as public supporters of the @ewarren campaign.
2. This may fittogether with a new analysis of foreign policy from the left of the Democratic Party, articulated to some extent in Warren's Foreign Affairs article - foreignaffairs.com/articles/2018-… but better and more crisply stated by @BernieSanders in 2018 theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
3. And it maybe tells us something about what a Warren or Sanders administration might look like. Both Sanders and Warren clearly believe that a crucial US foreign policy objective should be to defend democracy against a resurgence of authoritarianism.
4. Sanders describes how this resurgence is in part a product of "massive wealth and income inequality" and a global financial system that makes it easy to stash and hide wealth. While Warren doesn't state this as explicitly, it clearly fits well with her worldview too.
5. The missing connection that people have mostly failed to draw is that there is a direct relationship between addressing the problems of this system, and economic coercion. The US has a very extensive armory of secondary sanctions and other tools of external pressure.
6. These could be used to push an anti-corruption agenda that aimed to make the global financial system a less happy place for oligarchs and the super-rich. Moreover - it is entirely possible that this would be the _easiest_ path for a Sanders or Warren administration to follow.
7. The US political system is one where (a) there is intense domestic opposition to reform (and many, many veto points), but (b) where the presidency has a greater free hand with respect to foreign policy, and a specialized administrative apparatus of coercion.
8. We've seen before how this has been used against other states - Swiss banks are not what they used to be, thanks to the active use of IRS pressure, back when the IRS had greater resources and freer rein. What if secondary sanctions were aimed to support GND, or hit tax havens?
9. When faced with entrenched domestic opposition, these tools offer an alternative way of doing things - and also of attacking some of the factors worsening US domestic inequality through the back door. I can't imagine that either Warren or Sanders wouldn't make use.
10. Some people like to argue that Sanders or Warren would be Trump redux if they got into power - but from the left. This seems to me to be based on very weak analysis, and a nostalgia for a world of trade agreement boosterism that is never coming back.
11. The crucial way in which both differ radically from Trump is their opposition to the global wealth cronyism that Trump is looking to exacerbate (he doesn't like anti-corruption rules for obvious reasons), but that is also the barely hidden underbelly of the Davos model.
12. Given that they'd have a hard time getting their agenda through domestically (at best a narrow Senate majority), the attractions of globally focused executive action are obvious, and the migration of skilled practitioners towards the left may be very significant in long run.
