Candidates for the U.S. Congress usually have websites, and often those websites include some minimal platform (what they would do if elected). Sometimes there's none at all. Sometimes there's a great deal of substance on numerous topics. But the vast majority of congressional candidates have no foreign policy whatsoever. They want to be given a job to oversee a discretionary budget of which some 60 percent goes to militarism, yet they make zero mention of war, peace, diplomacy, weapons sales, bases, treaties, international law, budgetary priorities, or 96 percent of humanity. They clearly do not think that the military spending and wars they will be responsible for will help them get elected.
Would a platform that was serious about peace help them get elected? It might. To the limited extent that it has been tried, it has tended to be a boost or at least not a burden.
This is what I think a decent and humane foreign policy section of a congressional campaign website would look like:
From the moment I am elected I will work to organize the public and my colleagues, regardless of their party or the party of the president, to move resources from military spending to urgent human and environmental needs at home and abroad. I will pull together a caucus publicly committed to voting no on any military spending that is not at least 10 percent lower than the previous year -- and voting no on every related procedural vote and otherwise working to impede the current gargantuan levels of military spending or increases thereto.
I will also introduce and work to pass legislation to
- assist individuals, businesses, and localities in transitioning to peaceful industries,
- require compliance with the Treaty on Nuclear Nonproliferation,
- mandate both the elimination of U.S. nuclear weapons over the next 10 years and negotiations to effect the elimination of nuclear weapons by other nations,
- mandate the closure over the next 5 years of all U.S. military bases outside of the United States,
- end all military assistance to foreign governments,
- end all weapons shipments to foreign governments, with severe criminal penalties for violations of a practice already often done in violation of laws,
- establish a cabinet-level department of compliance with international law,
- introduce a privileged resolution to compel a vote on preventing any threatened or ending any current war,
- create a department of unarmed civilian defense to train the U.S. public in nonviolent noncooperation with foreign militaries,
- abolish draft registration, military advertising, ROTC, and JROTC,
- abolish joining the military as a path to citizenship,
- establish a global marshall plan to provide humanitarian aid,
- create, on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., a memorial to all the victims of all wars.
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