The Ramaswamy Doctrine

Millions of voters met Vivek Ramaswamy for the first time in Wednesday night’s Republican debate, and they’re right to like the 38-year-old’s message about restoring America’s common purpose and identity. But the young entrepreneur’s foreign policy is a different story, and it’s worth taking its implications more seriously than Mr. Ramaswamy apparently has.

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Ukraine is “not a priority for the United States of America,” Mr. Ramaswamy said on Wednesday evening, with the hoary line that America should focus on its own border, not Russia’s with Ukraine. Nothing about shipping Stingers abroad precludes the U.S. government from fixing immigration chaos, and Mr. Ramaswamy knows this. He’s repackaging a Bernie Sanders applause line, with the border replacing social welfare.

Mr. Ramaswamy has called the Russia-China axis “the single greatest military threat” to the United States, which is true. But his conceit is that with a “modern Monroe doctrine,” as he said in a recent speech at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, the U.S. could evict all threats in the Western hemisphere and live unperturbed at home. This isn’t a new idea. It’s an updated version of the “spheres of influence” doctrine that would cede Asia to China and Europe to Russia.

Politically Mr. Ramaswamy is channeling Donald Trump and GOP frustration with President Biden, who hasn’t explained to the American public what the U.S. aims to accomplish in Ukraine. Americans are reading stories of slow and bloody fighting in large part because the Biden crowd has resisted delivering the weapons Kyiv needs to win.

Mr. Ramaswamy has said he’d cut a deal with Vladimir Putin to freeze the current lines of control and vow never to admit Kyiv to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In return, Mr. Ramaswamy says, Mr. Putin would exit his alliance with China.

This would be a free hand for Mr. Putin to regroup and strike Ukraine again. It would also shock Western Europe, which the U.S. is trying to persuade to give up export business to help against Chinese designs on advanced technology and the Pacific.

And why would Mr. Putin suddenly abandon a “no limits” partnership with Beijing? One irony is that a Ukrainian victory against Russia would accomplish more than Mr. Ramaswamy’s summitry ever could by making Mr. Putin look like a bad bet for Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Many on the right have been arguing that the war in Ukraine is a distraction from the larger threat from China. But Mr. Ramaswamy now reduces Taiwan’s fate to “nationalistic unfinished business,” which is a synonym for border dispute.

He says the U.S. should defend Taiwan only until 2028, when America will supposedly have more domestic semiconductor production. Mr. Ramaswamy talks about deploying more submarines to the Pacific, but he’s giving Mr. Xi a calendar date to invade.

Mr. Xi has signaled that he wants his military to be ready to retake Taiwan by 2027, so all he’d have to do under President Ramaswamy is wait another year. Thanks for the green light. Mr. Ramaswamy wants other nations to spend more to defend themselves, but Taiwan won’t if the U.S. has promised to abandon the island.

The naivete here is remarkable for a man who wants to be Commander in Chief. Taiwan is more than a floating semiconductor fab. It’s part of the first island chain in the Western Pacific stretching from Indonesia through Japan. Beijing wants to dominate the Indo-Pacific, and abandoning Taiwan would be tantamount to abandoning the Western Pacific and betraying Japan.

It’s a fantasy to believe that either China or Russia would then stay out of the Americas. Beijing isn’t spying from Cuba and helping left-wing dictators in South America in response to U.S. bases in the Pacific. It’s pursuing its economic interests and strategic advantage. With artificial intelligence weapons and missiles, China can threaten the U.S. from afar in any case.

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Former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley (see nearby) and former Vice President Mike Pence exposed Mr. Ramaswamy’s faulty worldview in the debate, and they’re right. Mr. Ramaswamy is a reminder that a GOP politician who can’t see the stakes in Ukraine won’t stand up to a larger test from Beijing.

Mr. Ramaswamy debuted in our editorial pages, and the presidential contest, as a bold challenger of progressive policies. His venture into foreign policy may be bold but it’s also glib and reckless. It will not help him get to the White House.