FOREIGN POLICY & DEFENSE

BRING MORALITY TO INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr: We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

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I believe our country will be stronger when we establish a just foreign policy. This means we must:

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• Use our foreign policy to create good will toward the U.S. through generosity and respect.

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• Place human rights at the center of all foreign and defense policy discussions.

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• Uphold our international obligations, including to the U.N. and N.A.T.O.

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• Stop wasting money on obsolete defense programs and systems.​ The military-industrial complex must be dismantled.

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• Increase support for veterans and their families, including making reparations for past failures.

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• Acknowledge the human toll of war by creating a federal Department of Peace charged with ensuring that war is always and only an absolute last resort (an old idea, but still a good one).

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• Work with the rest of the world to forever abolish nuclear weapons.

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• Restore the State Department to functionality because diplomacy is the cornerstone of a stable world.

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• Focus much more of our national attention on cyber security. We spend billions on nuclear weapons, but due to our reliance on networked computers, our country could find itself devastated without our enemies launching a single missile.

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• Stop propping up dictators and corrupt oligarchies around the world.

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• Never again allow genocide to be committed without challenge.

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• Re-invigorate the "sister cities" programs and other forms of people-to-people diplomacy, which helped turn Germany and Japan from profound evil into two of our closest allies.

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