Vivek Ramaswamy, speaking at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, unveiled a strong-armed strategy to quell foreign threats and bolster America’s global standing amid the ongoing war in Ukraine and the looming Communist Chinese threat to Taiwan. 

“Do not mess with the United States of America on our own home soil,” the presidential candidate declared in the Thursday speech, which was part of the Richard Nixon Foundation’s 2024 Presidential Policy Perspective candidate series. “Do not test us on our waters or in the Western Hemisphere — and if you do, you will have hell to pay for it.” 

Mr. Ramaswamy calls his approach to foreign policy the “modern Monroe Doctrine,” drawing from President Monroe’s position that foreign meddling into hemispheric and domestic political affairs represented a hostile act against the nation. 

Mr. Ramaswamy pledged to take American foreign policy from “an era of neo-conservatism and liberal hegemony to an era of realism and unapologetic American nationalism where we stand for our national interests on the global stage.”

As president, Mr. Ramaswamy said he would not allow China to fly spy balloons over America, build spy bases off the southeast coast, or put Chinese-manufactured fentanyl into the hands of drug cartels that are, he declared, waging “a modern opium war against the United States of America.” 

Mr. Ramaswamy said that his first priority would be to end the war in Ukraine on terms that require President Putin to cut off his military partnership with President Xi of China. 

“The Russia-China alliance represents the single greatest military threat we face in the U.S. today,” he said, promising to “advance American interests by pulling apart the alliances that threaten us.”

Mr. Ramaswamy envisions an agreement in which America reopens economic relations with Russia and makes a hard commitment that NATO will never admit Ukraine. In return, Russia would end its alliance with China, eliminate its nuclear weapons from the border it shares with Poland, and remove its military presence in the Western Hemisphere.

“That’s a big win for Putin, but a bigger win for us,” the Republican hopeful reckoned.

Mr. Ramaswamy takes inspiration from President Nixon’s diplomatic maneuvering in 1972, when he capitalized on Communist China’s disenchantment with the Soviet Union. This strategy of “triangular diplomacy,” as Secretary Kissinger called it, paved the way for President Reagan to negotiate an end to the Cold War.

While conventional wisdom predicts that pursuing this strategy today will embolden President Xi to seize Taiwan, Mr. Ramaswamy argues that the opposite is true: “Xi Jinping’s calculus is that the U.S. will not want to go into conflict with two different allied nuclear superpowers — Russia and China — at the same time,” he said. If this strategic partnership is broken, “then Xi Jinping will have to think twice before going after Taiwan.”

Yet if it came to a Chinese invasion, Mr. Ramaswamy said he would agree to defend Taiwan, given America’s reliance on the island nation for leading-edge semiconductors. Once America attains semiconductor independence — which Mr. Ramaswamy says he expects to achieve by 2028 — “our commitments to defend Taiwan will change,” he announced. 

When an audience member asked Mr. Ramaswamy how he would maintain multilateral economic commitments while pursuing American interests on the global stage, the presidential candidate affirmed the need to revive nationalism at home. 

“We may have good reasons to be skeptical of the purposes of any acronymized institution,” Mr. Ramaswamy said, citing the FBI, the WHO, NATO, and the UN, to name a few. He proclaimed that individual citizens, not business and government leaders promoting their agenda of “stakeholder capitalism,” should be responsible for achieving the common good — an ideal that set the country into motion in 1776. 

An assumption embedded in current foreign policy positions is that American power is in decline, Mr. Ramaswamy said. Yet he claims that the American Dream endures and cites it as the reason for the victories of the American Revolution, the Civil War, the two World Wars, and the Cold War. 

“I don’t believe we have to be a nation in decline,” he said. “We’re a nation that’s just a little young, going through our own version of adolescence, figuring out who we really want to be when we grow up.”