In a screening hosted by the Political Science Club, Left Unity Club, and Associated Student Government, Bernie Sanders spoke at Westminster University about America’s foreign policy.

The screening took place at 5 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 27, in Administration Building Room 211. The speech itself was on Sept. 21, 2017.

“We need to begin a more vigorous debate on foreign policy [and] broaden our understanding of what foreign policy is,” Sanders said in the video.

He asserted that a country’s foreign policy is deeply linked to both its military policy and how it prioritizes its expenditures.

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger that are not fed and those who are cold that are not clothed,” he said, quoting former President Eisenhower.

We already spend more on defense than the next twelve countries combined.”

He went on to describe a program that he helped establish as mayor of Burlington, Vermont in the 1980’s, when the Soviet Union was commonly thought of as the enemy of the United States. The program allowed children from both the Soviet city of Yaroslavl and Burlington to personally get to know each other, and it still exists today.

“Hatred and wars are often based on fear and ignorance. The way to defeat this ignorance and diminish this fear is to meet with others and understand the way they see the world. Foreign policy means building people-to-people relations.”

Later, he described what he believes to be one of the worst aspects of America’s foreign policy – its use of military intervention.

“Far too often, American intervention has produced unintended consequences which have caused incalculable harm.”

Among other examples, he cited an intervention in 1953, during which he says the United States acted on behalf of oil interests to support the otherthrow of Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh. It also supported the reinstallation of the Shah of Iran who ran a corrupt, brutal, and unpopular government.

After the screening, The Channels spoke to Fernando Cornejo, a leader of the Left Unity Club, and Student Trustee David Panbehchi, who helped organize the event with the Associated Student Government.

Cornejo said that he and the other organizers wanted to use this event to spread the ideas that people need to hear and they agreed that Sanders’ speech would be a good way of doing that.

“Bernie’s bottom line is that we need to have a system based on love and compassion and building bridges between people,” Panbehchi said.

Panbehchi believes that there are many ways that this can be done on campus, and we should continue to work towards this goal.

The full speech can be watched here.