Ramaswamy's Jumbled, Hawkish Foreign Policy

He wraps up a lot of hawkish views in rhetoric about “realism” and putting American interests first, and the core of his worldview is that of an arrogant exceptionalism.

I listened to a recording of the foreign policy speech that Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy delivered yesterday at the Nixon Presidential Library, and the speech mostly left me cold. Ramaswamy delivered the speech very well, and he didn’t just deliver boilerplate hawkish talking points, but he lost me once he got into the details of what he wants to do. He wraps up a lot of hawkish views in rhetoric about “realism” and putting American interests first, and the core of his worldview is that of an arrogant exceptionalism that still presumes that the U.S. should dictate terms to other states and impose its will wherever it wants.