MANCHESTER, Iowa — Vivek Ramaswamy knows he doesn’t have the foreign policy chops of some of his opponents. He hasn’t been a president, an ambassador, a senator or even a governor. But still, he wants to talk about it.

At campaign stops in early states, Ramaswamy is urging voters to ask him about his foreign policy views.

“Anybody have any questions about my foreign policy?” the candidate eagerly asked a roomful of Iowans at a diner in the small town of Manchester on Monday. 

Luckily for Ramaswamy, a voter took him up on it. 

“I was going to say that’s one of the criticisms about you, is that you don’t have enough experience in foreign relations,” the voter said. Ramaswamy acknowledged that he could tell his lack of experience was “weighing on people’s minds.”  

“I think we should just talk about it in the open,” he said before diving into the two key pillars of his foreign policy plan. 

“My foreign policy is clear: stay out of World War III, declare economic independence from communist China,” Ramaswamy said.  

Ramaswamy’s reluctance to leave his foreign policy unaddressed on the campaign trail comes on the heels of fresh attacks on the debate stage from rival Nikki Haley, who was ambassador to the United Nations in the Trump administration and was governor of South Carolina.

“Putin and President Xi are salivating at the thought that someone like that could become president,” Haley said at the most recent debate in Miami, slamming Ramaswamy for wanting to stop funding Ukraine in its war with Russia.  

After the attack, Ramaswamy shifted his strategy on the campaign trail. Previously, the 38-year-old businessman took questions from voters after delivering a stump speech without the subject-matter suggestion. But now, he wants to make sure his foreign policy stone isn’t left unturned. 

Just three days after the third GOP debate, while on a swing through New Hampshire on Nov. 11, he again pressured voters to challenge him on the topic. 

“And if anybody else, while we’re on this topic of foreign policy, we can maybe hit a couple of foreign policy questions and then we’ll bring it back home,” he said while campaigning in Hillsboro. 

Haley’s swipe at Ramaswamy for his foreign policy views wasn’t the first time she’s taken aim at him. At the first GOP presidential debate in August, again while Ramaswamy was questioning American support for Ukraine, Haley went for the jugular.  

“You have no foreign policy experience, and it shows,” Haley said to applause from the crowd.  

But it wasn’t until Haley’s latest barrage of attacks that Ramaswamy took on this new tactic. 

Ramaswamy’s plan to avoid the next world war relies on his noninterventionist philosophy and includes freezing the current lines of control between Russia and Ukraine. He’s also promised to keep American boots off the ground in Israel or Palestinian territory. 

He has said he and former President Donald Trump are the only “non-neocon“ candidates in the primary, taking aim at what was the predominant foreign policy stance of the Republican Party, particularly during the presidency of George W. Bush.

“As your next president, my sole moral duty is to you the American citizens here in our homeland, not any other country,” he explained, questioning if billions of dollars in aid to fund foreign conflicts benefit the people of the United States. 

“I sense that there’s a lot of people who love aspects of my candidacy but have questions about my absence of abroad experience, foreign policy experience in particular,” Ramswamy explained to NBC News on Monday when asked why he’s urging voters to ask him about his foreign policy.  

“Questions about faith also come up,” he added. 

Ramaswamy, who is Hindu, has been dogged by questions about his religion since he began campaigning in the first-in-the-nation caucus state, but he wants to bring it “out in the open.”

After a man questioned him about his faith during a campaign stop in Marshalltown, Iowa, this week, Ramaswamy called out the topic: “I think it ends up being an elephant in the room at times.” 

“I think they’re two of the topics that I want to give people full comfort in and asking about,” he said, referring to his new strategy of inviting questions about his religion and his foreign policy views. 

“If you think about it like a due-diligence checklist,” he added, “I think that those are some items that we need to make sure … people fully know where I am on.”

Source : NBC News

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Tim Scott ripped into Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy on Tuesday for foreign policy positions he said project American weakness abroad, amid ongoing violence stemming from Hamas’ attack on Israel.

“Vivek Ramaswamy has said that the definition of success is reducing America’s support for Israel,” Scott, the South Carolina senator and longshot presidential contender, said at a Hudson Institute event. “And he’s proposed that we surrender Taiwan to the Chinese Communist Party as long as we’ve relocated some factories.”

“Governor [Ron] DeSantis once dismissed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as just some ‘territorial dispute,’” he added. “The last thing we need is a Joe Biden wing of the Republican Party on foreign policy.”

Scott’s remarks follow former Vice President Mike Pence’s scathing rebuke over the weekend of “voices of appeasement” in the GOP, serving to widen the rift in the Republican presidential primary between the party’s more isolationist and engagement-oriented wings.

“American courage and American values are not in decline,” Scott said, as he endorsed a whole-of-government response to supporting Israel.

Currently at issue in Scott’s day job at the Capitol is continued military assistance funding for Ukraine, which a considerable number of conservative Republicans in the House have firmly opposed.

Scott leveled several attacks at progressive Democrats and Biden over the violence in the Middle East, claiming that the president has “blood on his hands,” and that his weakness “invited the attack.”

But Scott’s direct criticism of his GOP rivals represents a change of tactics for the senator, who has for months generally refrained from directly criticizing his opponents. It is also a shift for a senator who has spent his Senate tenure on committees with a mostly domestic focus.

In a statement to POLITICO, Ramaswamy’s campaign said he would defend Taiwan and criticized the status quo “One China” policy, in which the U.S. recognizes the People’s Republic of China as the sole legal government of China while retaining unofficial ties with Taiwan.

“We understand Tim Scott is attempting to gain some semblance of relevance in this race, but lying in the face of these barbaric atrocities isn’t an effective way to do so,” spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said. “Vivek has offered a clear, rational response that supports Israel while avoiding another U.S.-led disaster in the Middle East.”

The DeSantis campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Scott has largely failed to gain traction in a race dominated by former President Donald Trump.

Since Hamas attacked Israel over the weekend, Scott has repeatedly criticized Biden for being too weak and called for unstinting American support to Israel. He has joined calls for the president to refreeze a $6 billion funds package that his administration greenlit in a deal involving the release of Iranian prisoners. He met with Michael Herzog, Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., shortly before his remarks.

Notably missing from his jabs were Trump — who has repeatedly mentioned that he supports withholding Ukraine aid in many circumstances — and his home-state competitor, Nikki Haley, the former U.N. ambassador who has been ticking up in recent polls.

Scott, unlike Trump, DeSantis, Ramaswamy and Haley, has yet to qualify for the third primary debate, scheduled for the beginning of November, according to POLITICO analysis. Trump has already said he will skip the event, as he did for the first two.

Source : Politico

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Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is set to unveil his plan to “declare economic independence from China” in a preview of his policy speech obtained by Fox News Digital. 

In his address that will be given Thursday in his hometown of Columbus, Ohio, Ramaswamy says he will “delineate the heretofore-unexamined connection between the rise of ‘stakeholder capitalism’ in the West and China’s use of that trend to achieve economic parity with the U.S. by failing to adopt the constraints that multinational institutions apply to the U.S.”

“This includes the use of forced data and technology transfers and even pro-CCP U.S. lobbying as a condition for acquiring licenses to do business in China, including but not limited to applying constraints (e.g. emissions caps) in the U.S. while failing to apply such caps in China,” the preview of his speech read.

Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is set to unveil his plan to “declare economic independence from China” in a preview of his policy speech obtained by Fox News Digital. 

In his address that will be given Thursday in his hometown of Columbus, Ohio, Ramaswamy says he will “delineate the heretofore-unexamined connection between the rise of ‘stakeholder capitalism’ in the West and China’s use of that trend to achieve economic parity with the U.S. by failing to adopt the constraints that multinational institutions apply to the U.S.”

“This includes the use of forced data and technology transfers and even pro-CCP U.S. lobbying as a condition for acquiring licenses to do business in China, including but not limited to applying constraints (e.g. emissions caps) in the U.S. while failing to apply such caps in China,” the preview of his speech read.

Ramaswamy will boast what he calls a “pro-trade approach to sensibly decoupling from China” and knocked conservatives who reject a “trade-led agenda” as “unserious.”

“To declare independence from China abroad, we must first declare independence from the climate change agenda at home,” the preview read. “Electric vehicle agenda worsens dependence on China for rare earth minerals and mineral refining capacity: when U.S. taxpayers subsidize EVs, American taxpayers subsidize the CCP.”

Ramaswamy asserts the climate change agenda “has nothing to do with the climate and everything to do with letting China catch up to the U.S.,” adding that “this is something that the Republican Party has missed in entirety.”

The political outsider reiterated his call for semiconductor independence, calling the CHIPS Act that was passed and sign into law by the Biden administration a “boondoggle” and describing it as the “Green New Deal in chips-related clothing.”

“The right answer: more narrowly tailored pro-semiconductor policy in the U.S., but without the excesses and political trinkets of the CHIPS Act — not as a matter of economic protectionism, but as a matter of national security,” the preview read. “Key way to stop this from simply serving as corporate ‘pork’ — simultaneously open trade relationships with South Korea, Japan, and other nations that provide market access for their own semiconductors to the U.S. market to compete with domestically supported U.S. semiconductor manufacturers.

He will highlight the U.S. military’s reliance on China, pointing out how the CCP is a leading producer of “16” out of the 35 strategic materials identified as critical by the Department of Defense. 

“Limiting foreign engagement in other parts of the world (e.g. Ukraine and Middle East) will reopen substantial funds to reinvest in our domestic defense base without the need for expanding the overall U.S. military budget,” the preview read. “Vivek will modernize the Reagan Doctrine to the 21st century — from ‘peace through strength’ to ‘prosperity through peace.'”

Ramaswamy will also propose weakening America’s pharmaceutical reliance on China by bolstering trade partnerships with Israel and India and will do the same regarding rare earth minerals with countries like India and Brazil, adding that Chile is “the world’s third-greatest lithium reserves” yet “our third-largest lithium partner is China.”

“We don’t have to ban Chinese imports; we just need to buy from other countries that produce the same things. I call on all American companies to declare lithium independence from China and grow their imports from Chile,” Ramaswamy will declare according to the preview. 

Source : Fox News

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