in desperate need of antiwar and anti-imperialist voices willing to stand up to the bipartisan consensus. But Sanders, as antiwar activists in Vermont know well, is an unlikely spokesperson.

Sanders did once organize against the Vietnam War, and as a member of Congress, he voted against the two U.S. wars on Iraq in 1991 and 2003. But he supported Bill Clinton's war on Serbia in 1999, voted for Bush's war in Afghanistan in 2001, and has voted "yes" on many military budgets for those interventions, including those that funded the Iraq War.

In the speech's most radical moments, he exposed some of U.S. imperialism's many crimes, like its coups against democratically elected governments in Iran in 1953 and in Chile in 1973. Sanders went so far as to call intoquestion the "global war on terror" as the organizing principle of American foreign policy.

But the truth is that Sanders sees these crimes as an exception to a more benevolent history--and potential for the future.

Sanders, for example, celebrates the "international order which the United States helped establish over the past 70 years, one which put great emphasis on democracy and human rights, and promoted greater trade and economic development."

This order, he laments, "is under great strain. Many Europeans are questioning the value of the European Union. Many Americans are questioning the value of the United Nations, of the transatlantic alliance, and other multilateral organizations."

This puts a rosy spin--to say the least--on these institutions. American imperialism set up the United Nations, NATO, the European Economic Community (the predecessor of the