Vivek Ramaswamy, a 38-year-old biotech entrepreneur, has caused a flutter amongst the non-Trump aspirants for the Republican Party's presidential nomination. An Ivy League graduate, combining a Harvard degree with Yale law, he has annoyed and provoked every other candidate, except former president Donald Trump. He has also taken controversial positions on many social, political and diplomatic issues.
Consequently, he has few admirers amongst the East Coast elite to which his education entitles him. George Will concluded that "Vivek Ramaswamy runs on the optimism of the inexperienced". His fact-free policy enunciation was displayed when he was asked how he thought Social Security and Medicare could be continued indefinitely. He suggested making the US GDP grow at 5 percent, when the average growth during 1947-2023 was 3.1 percent.
He is co-founder of a fund called DRLL that supports oil and gas companies to "drill more and frack more". This, combined with his view that climate change is a "hoax" makes him as dangerous as Donald Trump, who withdrew the US from the Paris climate accord. He ignores that 2023 is likely to be one of the hottest years ever resulting in weather events globally like monster forest fires and flash floods.
He also adopts hawkish and even paradoxical foreign policy positions. On China, he dramatically declares: "Let me make it really simple for Xi Jinping's translator, ok? Do not mess with Taiwan before 2028." His logic was that by then the US semiconductor industry would be self-reliant. In fact, he conveys a weakness, thus inviting China to do exactly that by then.
On Ukraine, he bizarrely thinks that Russia should be allowed to retain portions of Ukraine it has occupied. A grateful President Vladimir Putin will, he believes, then dump his ally China and join the US. This is a neo-isolationist kowtowing of Putin without assessing rationally the Russian leader’s megalomaniac desire to resurrect the Soviet empire.
For a 'coloured man', his reading of racism is equally strange. He does not attribute it to White supremacy but to the misguided policies of the left. Politico has claimed that Ramaswamy did not cast his ballot during 2004-20. The Economist pithily describes him as an "over-caffeinated millennial act".
There is, however, a method to Ramaswamy's, at times, irrational views. It is revealed when he says that if elected he would pardon Donald Trump were the latter to be convicted. Thus he is largely aligning his public positions with those of Trump, with twin calculations. If Trump gets the Republican nomination, as appears certain looking at his lead, the door opens for Ramaswamy to become his running-mate for the vice presidency. Trump is known to remember those who offend as well as those who kowtow. At worst, if Trump wins, Ramaswamy will be an automatic pick for the cabinet. Alternatively, Vivek wants the Pied Piper's role to lead the Make America Great Again (MAGA) crowd, if Trump fails or is jailed.
In the first Republican debate on August 23, Ramaswamy managed to rile other participants with his sarcastic or novel comments. Nikki Haley, another Indian-origin aspirant, slammed him as having no understanding of foreign policy. On Ramaswamy's proposal to cut military assistance to Ukraine, she berated him for choosing a "murderer" over a pro-US democracy. Former governor Chris Christie chastised him as an out-of-depth novice.
Regardless of the brouhaha Ramaswamy caused, post-debate his favourability rating went up from 50 to 60 percent. But those unfavourable also rose from 13 to 32 percent. He is thus a polarising figure like his role-model. He can be dubbed as 'Trump Lite'. It remains to be seen whether his gamble, to become the opposite of what his Ivy League past dictated, works or not.
(The writer is Former Secretary, MEA and author of The Indian President: An Insider's Account of the Zail Singh Years. Tweets at @ambkcsingh)