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Does foreign policy matter?
Ramaswamy’s emphasis on closer India relations in dealing with China is unlikely to resonate even with Indian American voters
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Even before the Republican Party is starting to make up its mind on a potential list of nominees to challenge the Democratic Biden-Harris ticket, sparks have started flying around between Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley on which of the two could better handle foreign policy especially when it comes to the “big ones” like Russia, China, Taiwan and Israel, to mention a few. Haley believes that she has seen it all by virtue of having been Donald Trump’s Ambassador to the United Nations; and Ramaswamy thinks he has it all figured out when it comes to handling China or having a naval fleet sail through Taiwan each week.
The big question is not getting into the imponderables at this point of time but in asking a very basic question: does foreign policy even matter to an American public when they start deciding. Memories start fading but one instance comes to mind: at the close of Gulf War One when Saddam Hussein and his forces were thrown out of Kuwait, the popularity of then President Herbert Walker Bush was in the 90s; and during the height of the 1992 Presidential campaign James Carville, one of Bill Clinton’s top strategists came up with a brilliant one liner… “The economy, stupid”. The sum and substance of this game changer was the famous saying of a former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Tip O’Neill who remarked “All politics is local”.
It is said that even in 1992 only about 8 per cent of Americans felt that foreign policy was important and perhaps a majority in this group voted for George H.W. Bush. Some academics will make the point that foreign policy started making serious headway in American Presidential politics since before the Cuban Missile crisis in 1962; and others still will say that the last time any appreciable impact of foreign policy was during the Vietnam War years of 1968 and 1972. These said, it is not easy to forget other foreign policy crises and their possible impact on Presidential election outcome.
The Iranian Revolution and overthrow of the Shah in 1979; the invasion of Afghanistan by the then Soviet Union in 1979, both of which were pinned on President Jimmy Carter as foreign policy failures; Gulf War 1, the terror attacks of 9/11, the Iraq War and the involvement in Afghanistan all had its implications on American Presidential elections but every one of them came with the necessary economic linkages. Even the present day heated discussions of Russia and China are not standalone discussion points.
Russia’s aggression in the Ukraine comes with its usual mixture of Kremlin meddling in elections; and China’s posturing in the Indo Pacific is not merely confined to flexing of its muscle in South China Seas over the Spratlys and aggressive patrolling in the Taiwan Straits comes with the usual toxic discussion of China’s runaway trade surplus of nearly US$ 400 billion and in an impression that Taiwan has to fork out more for its defence spending, the same empty “free loading” rhetoric levelled against Japan in the 1970s. The bottom line: in the debate on foreign policy, the necessity to bear in mind the domestic economic compulsions.
Nikki Haley calling out Vivek Ramaswamy’s “inexperience” in foreign policy will have as much impact as the former United Nations Ambassador’s “experience” in Trump’s revolving door foreign policy group. For that matter Ramaswamy’s emphasis on closer India relations in dealing with China is unlikely to resonate even with Indian American voters who may be interested more on visas and green cards than on finer aspects of a bilateral relationship which is already on the uptick.
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