Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy unveiled his foreign policy platform Monday that would significantly reduce the United States’s international involvement, declaring, “We will be Uncle Sucker no more.”
Ramaswamy said in an article on the American Conservative that the United States “squandered our post-Cold War opportunity to preserve that position through a bipartisan embrace of “democratic capitalism” with Communist China, on the false premise that we could spread democracy through capitalism by creating mutual economic codependence with China.”
Ramaswamy said that “Our mistaken posture towards Communist China led us over the last three decades to a new uncomfortable equilibrium, where the United States tenuously remains the world’s great superpower but our two great power rivals—China and Russia—are now working together in a way that threatens us.”
“We must admit our mistakes” Ramaswamy continued, “recognize our time, and adopt a revised strategic vision for our day aligned with reality rather than wistfully wishing the immediate post-Cold War order back into existence.”
Ramaswamy noted that he would follow the Washington doctrine, which promotes alliances but only when they are in the best interest of the United States and that we should be able to freely abandon them when they are no longer in our best interest.
Ramaswamy also said that he admires Nixon’s foreign policy the most of any president, noting that the 37th president ended U.S. involvement in Vietnam and met with Chinese leader Mao Zedong instead of “counting Mao’s crimes or launching a moralistic push for his downfall.”
Ramswamy pledged that he “will lead America from moralism to realism by executing the inverse of what Nixon did in 1972: I will go to Moscow in 2025. I will deliver peace in Ukraine under the only terms that should matter to us—terms that put American interests first” adding that the Biden administration has “foolishly tried to get Xi to dump Putin. In reality, we should get Putin to dump Xi.”