Donald Trump vs. Bernie Sanders—2 Sharply Different Views of America’s Role in the World
Activism
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October 5, 2026
One is an imperial gangster; the other seeks to create a world “not based on greed but based on justice, on decency.”
America’s century is over. History has not ended. This has become the new conventional wisdom even among the keepers of convention.
The challenge is how America finds real security in this new era. This month, we witnessed two strikingly different answers: one from the self-proclaimed most powerful man in the world, Donald Trump, and one from the champion of the rising populist movement on the left, Senator Bernie Sanders.
Trump’s address to the 81st Session of the United Nations General Assembly was a characteristically grotesque performance, essentially a raised middle finger to the 190 country representatives gathered before him and the UN itself. Amid the routine farrago of lies, boasts, threats, and resentments, he presented a stark vision of America’s emerging role: essentially an imperial gangster—that, if pursued, constitutes a clear, present, and harrowing threat to this nation’s security.
To the Victor Go the Spoils
After a stump speech preening about America’s primacy—“Our economy is the envy of the world. Our military is the most powerful on Earth. Our technology is second to none, and we are leading in virtually everything. Our energy is fueling the planet”—Trump turned to America’s role in the world.
He boasted about the bombing of Iran, the “peace” in Gaza, the kidnapping of Venezuela’s president and control of its oil—“to the victor go the spoils”—the bombing of fishing boats in the Caribbean designated as “foreign terrorists,” the blockade of Cuba, “failing like never before and it will fail.”
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Each of these—from aggressive acts of war to aiding and abetting genocide to illegal blockade—represent a brazen and open violation of international law and the UN Charter. Trump is saying that America will continue to police the world, only not to enforce the law but to enforce its will and to take what it can get. In apparent acknowledgment of the lawlessness, he issued a scurrilous attack on the International Criminal Court, “an evil group of people,” calling on all members to resign from the “rogue institution.”
Ironically, this fool’s errand of brazen plunder isn’t Trump’s greatest disservice to US national security. As the UN secretary general warned in his opening remarks, the world is struggling with the growing costs of real and present dangers that can no longer be ignored and can only be addressed by greater international cooperation: catastrophic climate change, global pandemics, corrosive inequality that undermines democracy and savages the poor, an accelerating nuclear arms race accompanied by the collapse of arms control agreements, and the known unknown of AI, which requires international regulation.
Trump made clear that the United States, under his watch, will sabotage any international regulation. Climate change and efforts to regulate AI are dismissed as a “hoax.” He has pulled the US out of the World Health Organization that monitors emerging pandemic threats and crippled our own Centers for Disease Control. Having pocketed billions while in office, he is the tribune of oligarchs, torpedoing all efforts at imposing a minimal tax on multinationals or on carbon or efforts to shut down tax-free zones. “There is no global government,” he preached, and “while I’m president, there will be no global taxes.” And, boasting about hiking America’s bloated military budget by one-third—to $1.5 trillion—and promising to build a “Global Dome” over America, he only adds fuel to the nuclear arms race.
At the dawn of the conservative era, Britain’s Margaret Thatcher asserted that “there was no alternative” to the neoliberal catechism. But there is an alternative course for the United States as it struggles to address new realities. It won’t come from a return to the failed “unipolar” globalism of the past decades. Instead, if there is an alternative to Trump’s gangsterism, it will come from the rising populist movement of the left.
Speaking on the eve of the UN General Assembly at Riverside Church in New York, Bernie Sanders offered a clear outline. He began with a tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King’s historic address at Riverside at the height of the Vietnam War, and his warning that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
He argued that not only is the US spending more and more on military weapons while turning its back on working people and the poor, but that “it is happening all over the world.”
To turn that around begins with a change in US policy, including “an end” to Trump’s “disastrous war on Iran,” termination of military aid to Israel and condemnation of “the genocide” in Gaza, work with grassroots activists to end “Putin’s disastrous war in Ukraine,” and denunciation of the UAE for aiding the genocide in Sudan’s civil war.
The growing violence, he argued, makes the United Nations more, not less, important, arguing that instead of arguing that “might makes right,” “our job is to strengthen the United Nations…and bring disagreements to the negotiating table…”
That would enable us to address the real and present security threats that we now face. At the top of that list, Sanders warns, is that “we are moving rapidly toward an extremely dangerous global oligarchy.” In nation after nation, we witness unprecedented levels of wealth and income inequality, illustrated by the fact that just as “the top 1 percent of America now owns more wealth than the bottom 94 percent,” the ratio is similar across the world.
“Children die of preventable diseases. People suffer every day. People give up hope. And 3,400 of the richest people on Earth became $4 trillion richer last year alone.”
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The oligarchy, Sanders warned, “is ascending, working families are struggling to stay alive, and democracy is in retreat. The great challenge that we face in our country and all over the world is that that trend must be reversed.”
Sanders then turned to the other existential threats—focusing on the need to control the development of AI and to address catastrophic climate change.
The contrast is clear. For Trump, America strides the world. Our military will enforce our will. “The spoils” will go to the powerful, not to the people. Threats like AI and climate change are a “hoax.” International institutions are irrelevant if not evil.
For Sanders, militarism is a threat, not an answer. Basic security and democracy here and across the world are threatened primarily by an increasingly powerful and rapacious oligarchy. The emerging threats—climate change, AI (as well as pandemics and nuclear weapons, which he doesn’t mention)—require global cooperation. Changing our course depends not on building up the military but on building a progressive citizens movement here and across the world that can create a world “not based on greed but based on justice, on decency.”
Impossible? Perhaps, but Sanders reminds us of the “immortal words of Nelson Mandela: It always seems impossible until it is done.”
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