Vivek Ramaswamy Reveals Wisdom Beyond His Years on Foreign Policy – The American

Vivek Ramaswamy is 38 years old — quite young for a presidential candidate — but his proffered approach to U.S. foreign policy reveals wisdom beyond his years. In a recent essay in the American Conservative, Ramaswamy identifies George Washington, James Monroe, and Richard Nixon as his model foreign-policy presidents. And he states that “the president he most admire[s]” for foreign policy is Nixon. 

Nixon, Ramaswamy writes, conducted U.S. foreign policy with “a cold and sober realism.” He cites Nixon’s achievements in the Middle East, his shrewd restraint in the India-Pakistan War, the exit from the Vietnam quagmire, and, most of all, his triangular diplomacy with China and the Soviet Union which “changed the Cold War forever.” Ramaswamy pledges to “respect and revive Nixon’s legacy” if he becomes president, including improving relations with Russia to pry it away from its strategic partnership with China. He characterizes this approach as leading America “from moralism to realism.”

Controversially, Ramaswamy writes that he will “accept Russian control of the occupied territories” of Ukraine, prevent Ukraine’s membership in NATO, end economic sanctions against Moscow, and “elevate Russia as a strategic check on China’s designs in East Asia.” Ukraine’s supporters in the U.S. and the West will undoubtedly cry foul, but these positions are consistent with Nixonian realism. 

Ramaswamy also pledges to “declare economic independence from China” by ending technology transfers to Beijing, promoting the domestic production of semiconductors, and moving supply chains away from China. He will also “re-embrace the Monroe Doctrine” by refusing to tolerate Chinese encroachments in the Western Hemisphere. To that end, he promises to reinvigorate American naval power and to “grow hemispheric trade to historic levels.”

Again, controversially, Ramaswamy writes that he will shift U.S. policy toward Taiwan from strategic ambiguity to “strategic clarity.” China must be made to understand, he writes, that the U.S. “will defend American interests in Taiwan.” He will do this, he writes, by providing Taiwan with the weapons it needs to defend itself — a 21st-century version of the Nixon Doctrine. 

Ramaswamy also recognizes that India, Japan, the Philippines, and Australia can play crucial roles in our Indo-Pacific strategy vis-à-vis China, especially as strategic partners in the Indian Ocean, near naval chokepoints such as the Andaman Sea and the Malacca Strait, and in the East China and South China seas.

Under a Ramaswamy administration, NATO expansion would stop, and the NATO bureaucracy would be “pared to the bone.” NATO, he writes, must once again be a “defensive military alliance” that refrains from engaging in “liberal internationalist” crusades. And in the Middle East, Ramaswamy would keep a “minimal footprint,” cease efforts at “social engineering,” and maintain watch on an “uneasy equilibrium” that pits Israel and moderate Arab regimes against Iran. In other words, in both Europe and the Middle East, America should act as the “holder” of the balance of power. 

Ramaswamy concludes by paraphrasing George Washington. The United States, he writes, should seek “peace, commerce, and friendship with all nations,” prioritize our own sovereignty and interests above “internationalist delusions,” and focus on representing the “interests of Americans.” 

America’s younger presidents have been a mixed bag. Our youngest to date, Theodore Roosevelt (age 42), was a foreign-policy realist who understood America’s role in the global balance of power and who, except with the Philippines, eschewed an interventionist foreign policy. The next youngest, John F. Kennedy (age 43), promised to “pay any price” and “bear any burden” to assure the success of liberty and thereafter became involved in a series of crises — some of his own making — that signaled weakness and indecisiveness to our main adversary. Bill Clinton (age 46) was a foreign-policy amateur who intervened in the Balkans for humanitarian reasons and began the process of NATO expansion that helped revive the worst aspects of Russian nationalism and imperial traditions, despite public warnings from Russia experts like George F. Kennan and Jack F. Matlock Jr. Ulysses Grant (age 46), after saving the Union on the battlefield, conducted patient diplomacy and an overall anti-interventionist foreign policy. Like Washington, Grant pledged to “respect the rights of all nations” and to demand “equal respect” for the United States. Barack Obama (age 47) began his presidency by apologizing to other nations for America’s past conduct, then misread the so-called Arab Spring to America’s detriment, continued our involvement in the Afghan and Iraq quagmires, expanded NATO even further, and affirmed U.S. support for the admission of Georgia and Ukraine into the alliance. And in the face of a more assertive Chinese foreign policy under President Xi Jinping, Obama continued the policy of engagement even while publicly calling for a “pivot” to Asia. 

The other day, Ramaswamy caused a sensation when he said that he would roll back military aid to Israel as part of an extended “Abraham Accords” in the Middle East. He has since backtracked on that pledge. Youth and inexperience can lead to campaign and policy minefields like that. Currently at age 38, Ramaswamy is probably too young to be president (though the Constitution says you only need to be 35 years of age). But his general foreign-policy vision as expressed in the American Conservative piece shows that he is open to the wisdom of the ages.