GOP no-shot candidate Vivek Ramaswamy channels his inner Neville Chamberlain

An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile — hoping it will eat him last" — Winston Churchill (paraphrased)

Vivek Ramaswamy is a candidate to be the 2024 Republican presidential nominee. Before he entered the race, most people did not know who he was. They still don’t. But TV news shows have dead time to fill, and interviewing long-shot candidates is low-hanging fruit.

With no political track record, a candidacy just over three months old, and little interest from the MAGA voter, let alone the general public, Ramaswamy is an unknown quantity. Yet, if some thought this 37-year-old would breathe new life, new ideas, and a new vision into the GOP, they would be disappointed.

He may be young by political standards, but his philosophy is the same old moribund, diversity-denying Republican orthodoxy clinging to the shibboleths of the heterosexual, white supremacist patrimony. He is another anti-woke warrior in a field cluttered with bigots.

His campaign announcement starts with a typical “all is lost, the US is going to hell in a handbasket” negativity of the windmill-tilting, cultural warrior.

“We are in the middle of a national identity crisis. Faith, patriotism, and hard work have disappeared — only to be replaced by new secular religions, like covidism, climatism, and gender ideology.”  

Here is the whole thing, if you are interested (spoiler alert, you will not learn anything new).

Ramaswamy might come by his philosophy from core beliefs. However, it is far more likely that he, like most politicians, merely embraces the rhetoric he thinks is most likely to get him elected. Not that he has to worry about the possibility, as he has no chance.

Today he offered one MAGA policy proposal — let Russia walk all over Ukraine. As he told Martha Raddatz on ABC’s This Week,

“I don’t think it’s preferable for Russia to invade a sovereign country that is its neighbor. But I think the job of the U.S. president is to look after American interests. And what I think the number one threat to the U.S. Military right now, our top military threat is the Sino-Russian alliance.

I think that by fighting further in Russia, by further arming Ukraine, we are driving Russia into China’s hands, and that Sino-Russian alliance is the top threat we face.”

Ramaswamy thinks he has made a solid point. He has not. For the sake of argument, let us accept that the US military’s greatest threat is a Sino-Russian alliance. The US would benefit if that alliance had fewer weapons. There is not much America can do about the Chinese. On the other hand, for 15 months, Russia has been hemorrhaging personnel and weapons in Ukraine.

Americans are watching one of its top two military foes bleed out, while not a single uniformed American has lost their life. To a cost accountant, the current arrangement by which we let other soldiers use American weapons to weaken Russia is the best possible disposition.

If nothing else, the US has not had to build the medical/support structure that accompanies Americans into battle. And there will be no legacy medical costs associated with wounded troops.

The biggest immediate military threat to the US is that Russia’s regular forces become so depleted that Putin will use tactical or even strategic nuclear weapons. A cornered dictator is a dangerous animal, especially one unchained. Here is the good news.

If Russia does become more tightly aligned with the Chinese — which they were predisposed to do, even without their disastrous Special Military Operation in Ukraine — the Chinese will act to keep Russia from rolling the nuclear dice. China operates with the knowledge that the US is its largest export market. And no business prospers if it kills its best customers — or lets others do so.

The biggest flaw in Ramaswamy’s argument is the belief that strategic appeasement prevents conflict. He is an educated man. He must know history’s worst prediction — Neville Chamberlain’s promise of “peace for our time.” A piece of magical thinking that hit the rocks 11 months later when Germany invaded Poland.      

To get his short-lived peace, Chamberlain acquiesced to the Nazi occupation of the Sudentenland — the German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia. If Ramaswamy, and his fellow travelers, do not see the similarities with the Russian occupation of the Russian-speaking region of the “sovereign country” (his words) Ukraine, they are either morons or cynics.

No man is an island. And no country is unmoored from the rest of the planet. In addition to the bitter lesson of appeasement, Ramaswamy should study the dead-end thinking of isolationists. German sympathizers in 1930s America lobbied for a laissez-faire policy towards the Nazis and the “European War”.

It did not end well. America ended up in a World War after Asia’s then-leading power bombed Pearl Harbor. Making nice with one enemy does nothing to stop it from taking what it can grasp. Nor does it prevent the adventurism of another enemy.

America has fought a lot of wars. Some were necessary. Some were profitable. And many were pointless. Now America can prosecute a necessary war — at a bargain price — so long as the country does not fall prey to the new religion of ‘appeasementism' (a word that the neologism-loving Ramaswamy could have invented — but did not.)