Former Vice President and 2024 presidential hopeful Mike Pence accused entrepreneur-turned-candidate Vivek Ramaswamy of changing his stances regarding foreign policy matters.
Ramaswamy, 38, has appeared to take seemingly different stances on a couple of foreign policy issues including aid to Israel and whether to support Taiwan in the face of a move by China to reunify by force, though he has attributed such changes to inaccurate coverage by the media.
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Pence, comparatively, has long championed Israel since before his time in the White House, while he also supports Taiwan.
“There’s no North Star commitment to any one country other than the United States of America. So, what advances American interests … I actually do think our relationship with Israel has advanced American interests. I come out on the side of that,” Ramaswamy told actor Russell Brand on Aug. 11. “If we’re successful, the true mark of success for the U.S., and for Israel, will be to get to a 2028 where Israel is so strongly standing on its own two feet, integrated into the economic and security infrastructure of the rest of the Middle East, that it will not require and be dependent on that same level of historical aid or commitment from the U.S.”
Ramaswamy also recently said he didn’t want troops to die in another Middle East conflict and posed the question to his opponents in the GOP primary about “how many U.S. soldiers they’d like to see die in that conflict.”
“This week, when he said he would not use military force to defend Israel in an attack by Iran, that is deeply troubling,” Pence said on Fox News Sunday. “Israel is not an important ally, Israel is our most cherished ally, and we have to send a clear message to Tehran that any move against Israel will be met with the full force of the American military.”
In late June, Ramaswamy was open to cutting military aid to Israel as “part of a broader comprehensive vision for disengagement,” while in August, he said cutting aid to Israel “makes zero sense as a foreign policy priority any time in the foreseeable future.”
“This is a bit of a pattern for Vivek Ramaswamy. He kind of goes one direction than back another,” Pence noted. “I don’t know how we fully back and then say that there is a limit to what our military involvement would be defending Israel in an attack by Iran. One thing I bring to the race is that I’ve been the same, consistent, conservative throughout my career.”
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Vivek also initially said the U.S. should back Taiwan until 2028, which he later amended and said he would defend the island nation until the U.S. achieved semiconductor independence and then should reevaluate moving forward.
More recently, Ramaswamy posted a lengthy clarification explaining his ideology, including that the U.S. should no longer enforce decades of policy about not supporting Taiwanese independence but reconstitute the current policy of strategy ambiguity once the U.S. achieves semiconductor independence.
