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Vivek Ramaswamy has written an article on his foreign policy doctrine, focusing on China.
He is squarely taking aim at the "neocons and liberal internationalists", in other words the two main constituents of what Obama referred to as "the Blob" dominating foreign policy in D.C. He is predictably being called an isolationist and WaPo columnists are freaking out.
WaPo columnists themselves are not relevant but they are often mouthpieces for more powerful interests. Trump was hated for many things but one underappreciated aspect of why the Blob hated him was his instinct not to start new wars. In fact, he is one of the few presidents in recent memory who did not start a new war and he tried to get out of Syria - twice - but was undermined by his own bureaucracy.
Vivek is a much smarter guy than Trump, so I wonder if the Blob would be able to run circles around him the way they did around Trump. I doubt it and I suspect they doubt it too, which is why I think a campaign to destroy Vivek is likely to ramp up before too long. Trump couldn't be controlled outright but at least he could be misled.
You don’t have to be a professor of international relations to see why this idea is retarded. So you accept Russian control of Eastern Ukraine and lift all sanctions on Russia, and then Russia has to ‘exit’ (ambiguous) its ‘military alliance’ (something that only partially exists on paper anyway) with China….or else…what? Vivek restores sanctions on Russia for not sufficiently breaking ties with China (pointless, even a temporary break in sanctions will allow for large scale repatriation or transfer of Russian capital in anticipation of future sanctions)? Are you going to trust Putin? How will that be measured? Why wouldn’t cooperation continue in an underhanded way? Once you force a Ukrainian defeat and unilaterally lift sanctions you’re not in a position of strength toward Russia, you’re in one of total weakness. And Vivek can’t threaten Putin with Ukrainian NATO membership because, as Putin knows, there are other member states that would be amenable to vetoing it regardless of what the US says.
And most importantly, Russia can never be a ‘strategic check’ on China’s designs in East Asia. What does Vivek think he can do, get Putin to invade Manchuria in case Gyna threatens to bomb Taiwan? Send Russia’s three remaining seaworthy warships to the South China Sea? And Vivek is an isolationist who only cares about Taiwan until 2028 or whatever anyway (when he believes TSMC will no longer be critical) so why care about a long-term ‘check on China’ at all?
Still, Vivek is a high verbal IQ arch-grifter who has never created a substantial, profitable business, bilked investors out of $400m to buy a $5m failed drug from GSK (and burned through that entire capital in a doomed pivot) and then himself pivoted into politics when the cheap money dried up. He has never accomplished anything that is both impressive and good for society in his entire life. Even Trump is a better businessman, so perhaps this is what America deserves.
Excellent summary. I’d only add that I think a lot of these nonsensical foreign policies come from a “strategy-game understanding” of geopolitics. You can’t just offer Russia a big pot of gold to get +100 relations. Russia and China currently have deeply aligned interests. Both are non-status quo powers. Russia has already paid a significant cost in involuntary decoupling from the West and is now rebuilding those value chains with China. The Russian public is as anti-American as they’ve been for decades. Given the above, even if you could extract a promise from Putin to play nice, there’s no reason to expect it to hold.
The whole vulgar geopolitical mindset that believes that we just have to achieve "multipolarity" and then whatever desired outcome (generally something like the advancement of socialist economics or socially conservative culture) happens also often comes off like the person advocating it has this huge complex game board inside their head where this piece moves here and that piece moves here and good things happen and everything just seems to be based on so much wishful thinking.
I understand why Russians and other peripheral countries would advocate for multi polarity. What I haven’t really grokked is why an American would expect that to improve our situation.
Because maintaining the Empire is really expensive, to the point that the US government cares more about it than actually doing the job it is supposed to back home. I'm not sure if you've noticed, but huge swathes of the US are in absolutely terrible shape - drug addiction, economic malaise, continual border crises, unsustainable birthrates, infrastructure falling into malign neglect... the portion of the US population that directly benefits from the empire is shrinking day after day, and the portion for whom it is an unbearable burden is growing. One of the reasons for Trump's enduring popularity among his base is that he has directly advocated for pulling American funding out of a variety of overseas shitholes and focusing on America - that's a large part of what America First actually means.
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Everyone except them (the master strategist) is a robot NPC whose actions can be predicted by economics 101 game theory.
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Indeed. Not to mention that the last guy dumb enough to trust a deal with Putin famously just got murdered.
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