Vivek Ramaswamy’s Foreign Policies Raise Eyebrows in Washington

End American dependence on Taiwan’s semiconductor factories. Declare economic independence from China. Give India an AUKUS-like submarine deal. And stage a dramatic visit to Moscow to broker a deal to end Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. 

These aren’t just my ideas, insists insurgent Republican presidential contender Vivek Ramaswamy. They’re drawn from the legacy of Richard Nixon, the U.S. president Ramaswamy says he admires most. 

One thing most everyone agrees on is that Ramaswamy, who burst into the spotlight this summer, is looking to bust foreign-policy norms. His most ambitious proposal? Bringing the Kremlin into the fold with the United States as a “strategic check” on China. Like Nixon, who based his diplomatic strategy on grand spectacles such as his 1972 Cold War-era overture to China, Ramaswamy wants to split the axis between Beijing and Moscow—only this time in the other direction: Turning Russian President Vladimir Putin against China to broker a peace deal to end Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. 

This idea, and a broader foreign-policy game plan, were outlined in detail by the political novice and onetime biotech entrepreneur in American Conservative magazine this week. His is a version of former U.S. President Donald Trump’s wheeling-and-dealing isolationism, advocating a turn away from moralizing liberal projects to “affirmatively” defending the U.S. homeland from Chinese expansionism. 

“In China, he saw the greatest butcher of the 20th century, Mao Zedong,” Ramaswamy wrote on Monday of Nixon. “Yet rather than counting Mao’s crimes or launching a moralistic push for his downfall, he understood that Mao was the driver of the Sino-Soviet split.” 

Taking a page from Nixon’s Cold War wedge diplomacy, Ramaswamy wants to use Russia as a counterweight to China. “I will respect and revive Nixon’s legacy by rejecting the bloodthirsty blather of the useful idiots who preach a no-win war in Ukraine that forces our two great power foes ever closer,” Ramaswamy wrote. “The longer the war in Ukraine goes on, it becomes ever clearer that there is only one winner: China.” 

Ramaswamy also hinted that he will use the offshore threat of American power instead of direct military intervention, patting Nixon on the back for not putting U.S. boots on the ground during the armed conflict between India and Pakistan in 1971 and instead keeping U.S. ships nearby. 

He’s not the only candidate espousing such out-of-the-box thinking. Anti-establishment fervor has gripped the top of the Republican field, especially when it comes to foreign policy. Ramaswamy is joined by Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in pushing back on further American aid to Ukraine. (Ramaswamy is also offering the prospect of sanctions relief to the Kremlin.) There may be popular backing for such a move. As U.S. President Joe Biden has floated a $24 billion humanitarian and military aid package for Ukraine to Congress, a July poll showed that 55 percent of Americans and 71 percent of Republicans opposed further U.S. assistance to Kyiv. 

“This is an anti-Washington cycle. It’s much more 2016 than it is 2012,” said Peter Rough, a senior fellow and director of the Center on Europe and Eurasia at the Hudson Institute. “The kind of frustrations and anger match something of a populist, tear-it-down message. Vivek represents that outsider status.” 

But just as Nixon’s plan to leverage the China opening for détente with the Soviet Union ran into congressional headwinds, Ramaswamy’s views conflict with the Republican establishment on Capitol Hill. Most Republicans in Congress still want Biden to send more weapons to Ukraine, despite public support for the massive military aid effort having ebbed. 

And some think Ramaswamy’s surge could also be an opening for some of the Republicans who jeered him on the debate stage. By castigating him for being too weak on Ukraine, they could distinguish themselves from the leaders in the GOP field and Biden. Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, for instance, has enjoyed a post-debate surge in the early primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire. “[Biden’s] tepid approach has only slowed Ukraine’s advance and dragged out the war as costs mount, making some Republicans susceptible to Vivek’s hucksterism,” Rough, who served in the Bush administration, said in a subsequent email. 

Ramaswamy’s takes have also invited criticism of a different kind—that he is cribbing from other people’s material. Last week, the rapper Eminem asked Ramaswamy, the first millennial GOP presidential candidate, to stop using the 2002 hit “Lose Yourself” on the campaign trail. And at the Fox News debate at Fiserv Forum last week, Christie accused the businessman of stealing from Obama’s script. “I’ve had enough already tonight of a guy who sounds like ChatGPT standing up here,” Christie said. “The last person in one of these debates … who stood in the middle of the stage and said ‘What’s a skinny guy with an odd last name doing here?’ was Barack Obama.”

The Nixon Foundation recently invited Ramaswamy – along with every Republican candidate – to speak earlier this month at the presidential library of the 37th U.S. commander in chief in Yorba Linda, California. But Ramaswamy’s pledge to move beyond the “bloody follies of neoconservatism and liberal internationalism” doesn’t hold up perfectly with Nixon’s track record. Even while Nixon administration officials touted using the soft-power opening to China as a substitute for hard-power tactics during the Cold War, the United States still spearheaded the invasion of Cambodia as U.S. troops began to leave Vietnam.

Ramaswamy’s lack of nuance, experts said, is part and parcel of a larger leadership crisis in the GOP.

“The Republicans are in the wilderness,” Rough said. “If one thinks back to the postwar era, all the way back to World War II, basically, every Republican president has been able to define what a Republican foreign policy looks like.”

With no incumbent, Rough said, the party has descended into internecine debates while missing the bigger picture. “We have massively overspent over the years. And Americans are looking around and thinking for what? What [have] these investments actually gotten us? And now you’re telling us we have to invest in Ukraine as well.”