Does Pete Buttigieg Have A Foreign Policy?

Hunter DeRensis

Domestic Politics, United States

Buttigieg’s wunderkind charm has won him outsized attention, but where does he stand on foreign policy?

An impressive, intelligent “boy wonder” emerges from the Midwest. He checks out of his political post for a stint of military service and seeks to challenge an incumbent president with underwater approval ratings. Pete Buttigieg meet Harold Stassen. The thirty-seven-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has a lot in common with former Minnesota governor Harold Stassen, who at age forty-one in 1948 tried to unseat Harry Truman. But while Stassen was one of the postwar founders of U.S. internationalism, Mayor Pete’s foreign policy remains something of a blank canvas.

The most forthright foreign policy issue taken by Buttigieg, who formally announced his campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination on Sunday, is on Afghanistan. Commissioned as a naval intelligence officer in the Navy Reserve in 2009, in 2014 Buttigieg was deployed to Afghanistan for a seven-month tour. He often refers to Afghanistan as a “hauntingly beautiful country.” “In Afghanistan, I was assigned to a counterterrorism unit called the Afghanistan Threat Finance Cell. Working long hours, seven days a week, we went after the most dangerous terrorist groups by targeting the connection between narcotics and insurgent financing,” Buttigieg wrote in a 2014 op-ed when he returned. He and Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii are the only veterans in the almost twenty-person Democratic field.