As Vivek Ramaswamy rises in the polls, fellow Republican presidential candidates are keying in on a number of policy pronouncements that veer far from the G.O.P. mainstream.
Republican presidential rivals, looking to blunt Vivek Ramaswamy’s rise in national primary polls ahead of the first primary debate on Wednesday, have seized on the political arena where the upstart entrepreneur has strayed far afield from his party’s thinkers: foreign policy.
Opponents have attacked Mr. Ramaswamy for his assertions that he would leave Taiwan to the Chinese once the United States has sufficiently expanded its domestic semiconductor industry and that he would allow Russia to keep parts of eastern Ukraine in order to entice President Vladimir V. Putin away from his military alliance with China. Most recently, he said he would curtail military aid to Israel after stabilizing the Middle East, perhaps the politically riskiest position yet.
“This is part of a concerning pattern with Vivek,” Nikki Haley, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations now running for the Republican presidential nomination, said Monday about Mr. Ramaswamy’s Israel comments. “Between abandoning Israel, abolishing the F.B.I., and giving Taiwan to China, his foreign policy proposals have a common theme: They make America less safe.”
Candidates have also looked askance at peculiar statements Mr. Ramaswamy made this month suggesting a government cover-up behind the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001; former Vice President Mike Pence said he was “deeply offended.”
Mr. Ramaswamy, who has never held elected office or worked in government, expresses supreme confidence in his foreign policy views. He has cited as his models George F. Kennan, the architect of America’s Cold War global reach, and James A. Baker III, the American diplomat most credited for transitioning the world beyond the Cold War. He has vowed as president to go to Moscow the way Richard M. Nixon went to China.
But in a political campaign, his positions may come off as naïve or bizarre — and easy to exploit. His tendency to answer any question posed to him has sent him down a rabbit hole of conspiratorial innuendo on Sept. 11. First, he told an interviewer, “I don’t believe the government has told us the truth” about the attacks. In a lengthy post on X, formerly known as Twitter, he subsequently explained that he was suggesting a deeper involvement in the attack by Saudi Arabia’s government.
Then in an interview posted Monday in The Atlantic, he plunged deeper, asking, “how many police, how many federal agents, were on the planes that hit the Twin Towers?”
His rivals’ criticisms in some cases have disregarded the broader context of Mr. Ramaswamy’s statements. His pledge to pull back military aid to Israel, made last week in an interview with the actor Russell Brand on the video platform Rumble that’s popular on the right, were part of a larger conversation on expanding Israel’s bilateral peace agreements with its neighbors that would make military aid less necessary.
But caveats and context are often sacrificed on the campaign trail, and Mr. Ramaswamy said on Monday that he expected further foreign policy attacks on the debate stage Wednesday night in Milwaukee.
“I personally think we should spend a lot of time on it,” he said in an interview, “instead of rehashing pre-canned lines on who is more anti-woke.”
Mr. Ramaswamy on Monday framed the blowback from his critics as hostility from “a broken foreign policy establishment that is sanctimoniously steeped in the disastrous mistakes of the last four decades.”
But his proposals are pushing the envelope, even for a Republican Party increasingly dominated by isolationism, and open to conspiracy theories.
Among those proposals are a quid-pro-quo offer to Mr. Putin: He would promise to block Ukraine from joining NATO and freeze the battle lines in Ukraine, with Russia controlling Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine, in exchange for a Putin break with China.
Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey and a fellow candidate for the Republican nomination, slammed that position from Ukraine in an interview with The Washington Post this month, calling it “a false choice” and “a ridiculous statement.”
Even as Mr. Ramaswamy promises to isolate China, he told the conservative broadcaster Hugh Hewitt that the United States would continue to defend Taiwan through 2028, when a Ramaswamy administration will have rebuilt the domestic semiconductor industry. After that, Mr. Ramaswamy said, the U.S. commitment to Taiwan would change.
“You are saying ‘I will go to war, including attacking the Chinese mainland, if you attack before semiconductor independence. And afterward, you can have Taiwan?’” Mr. Hewitt asked incredulously.
“Well, Hugh, I’m running to be the next president, and so I expect to be the president inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2025,” Mr. Ramaswamy answered. “So I’m wearing that hat when I’m choosing my words very carefully right now. And I’m being very clear: Xi Jinping should not mess with Taiwan until we have achieved semiconductor independence, until the end of my first term when I will lead us there,” he added, referring to the Chinese president.
But his comments on Israel, in the hands of his rivals, could threaten his rising star, considering the centrality of Israel to many conservative voters, especially evangelical Christians. After Jewish and Israeli publications played up his comments on pulling back military aid, the conservative radio host Mark Levin responded on the social media platform X, “Not good. Awful, actually,” adding, “He threw Taiwan under the bus too.”
In a lengthy response, released publicly as an open letter to the candidate, Matthew Brooks, the longtime chief executive of the Republican Jewish Coalition, said that “this is not the time for the U.S. to take an action that would be universally perceived by Israel’s enemies as a weakening of the U.S.-Israel relationship.”
On Monday, Mr. Ramaswamy said he was “not surprised at the foreign policy establishment’s anaphylactic response to anyone who challenges the orthodoxy.”
“Friends help friends stand on their own feet,” he said of his Israel policy.
But for Republican rivals looking for a target who isn’t the front-runner, Donald J. Trump, Mr. Ramaswamy could be an inviting one. Polling averages put him in third place, and gaining on Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who is in second. Other than Mr. Christie, Republican candidates have shied away from attacking Mr. Trump, convinced they will ultimately need the former president’s loyal followers.
Foreign policy would be a safer line of attack against Mr. Ramaswamy than his domestic proposals, which align closely with Mr. Trump’s.
“I’m not surprised they’re throwing the kitchen sink at me,” Mr. Ramaswamy said. “They’re threatened by my rise.”
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
