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Notes -
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.
I think the whole “Vivek is smarter than Trump so he will succeed” totally misunderstands how government (or even very large) organizations run. In very large organizations, the CEO needs to rely on trusted lieutenants to help implement the CEO’s vision.
The government is an even more extreme version of this. The president being smart is a necessary condition but not sufficient to the president being successful. The main ingredient is predicated on the team he can build combined with knowing when and how to burn political capital.
Edit: Vivek has shown zero ability to delegate successfully in a large organization. Instead, his business success seems to have come from the ability to bamboozle investors instead of running a successful business venture.
Honestly, not feeling like he’s really demonstrating intelligence, either.
The intelligence required to come up with foreign policy is inversely proportional to one’s chance of enacting it. Protect Taiwan, abandon it, it’s all equally hypothetical to him. So he can come up with galaxy-brained plans optimized for sounding cool.
Which further feeds the impression that he's some sort of con-man/grifter.
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