By Noah Rothman
Tuesday, January 28, 2025
Prior to his transition from mild Donald Trump
critic into Trump endorser, Vivek Ramaswamy committed the cardinal sin of
honesty in describing what he thought might reflect the populist right’s
outlook toward Taiwan and the threat to it posed by Communist China.
“My message to China is clear: Do not mess with Taiwan
before 2028,” he told Hugh Hewitt in August 2023. “After 2028, we have
semiconductor independence. We have very different commitments, lower
commitments, significantly lower commitments to a situation in which you’re
sorting out a nationalistic dispute dating back to 1949.”
Ramaswamy had reason to suspect that the Trump fans he
was courting at the time would respond favorably to the sort of nakedly
transactional interpretation of U.S. interests. He could even expect dividends
from his attempt to force the dispute across the Taiwan Strait to fit with the
contrivance the populist right invented to justify their apathy toward Russia’s
expansionist war in Europe. But it was a miscalculation. Conservatives and
populists alike, both of which have become increasingly invested in a national
project aimed at containing Chinese aggression, saw Ramaswamy’s remarks as
equal parts callous and blind to America’s interests in the Western Pacific.
Ramaswamy dropped that critique, but he may have had his
finger on the pulse of the self-described “realist” wing of the GOP more than
it appeared at the time. His error in judgment may have been limited to his
willingness to say in mixed company what they only whispered among themselves.
On that, Free Press’s Eli Lake’s recent analysis of the so-called “restrainers” who have
secured high-level positions in Donald Trump’s defense department is
instructive. Lake notes that Dan Caldwell, an Iraq War veteran and adviser at
the Koch-backed think tank Defense Priorities, has played a leading role in
personnel decisions at the Pentagon. It’s no coincidence that many of his picks
share Caldwell’s desire to avoid “more security commitments in the Pacific.” As
one GOP Senate aide told Lake, “Dan Caldwell wants America to come home from
the world. That’s his first and only priority.”
Indeed, the Pentagon is filling up fast with skeptics of
American hegemony. “America should abandon belligerent military initiatives
targeted at China,” argued Trump’s new deputy assistant secretary for defense
for Southeast Asia, John Byers. Deputy assistant secretary of defense for the
Middle East, Michael DiMino, yawned at the Houthis’s attacks on international shipping —
attacks that benefited Russia and China, whose ships somehow managed to
navigate the Gulf of Aden all but unmolested.
That, too, was Elbridge Colby’s view. Trump’s
undersecretary of defense for policy described the reluctant attention Biden
eventually devoted to the shipping crisis, an Iranian proxy instigated through
force of arms, as a “distraction.” So, too, in his view, is Russia’s war of
conquest in Ukraine. In fairness, Colby articulated the view that America’s
post–Cold War commitments prevent it from executing the long-delayed “pivot to
Asia.” It is, however, unclear if the U.S. can meet its obligations in the
Pacific if all its allies are dealing with an insurgent threat from the
revisionist rogue states in their respective backyards. Such a condition would
provide policymakers with a convenient excuse to abandon Taiwan. Our hands
were tied by the forces of history over which we had no control. What can you
do?
America’s frontline partners in the Pacific are paying
attention. The Japanese outlet Nikkei’s Washington correspondent Ken
Moriyasu’s reporting itemized the foremost priorities of the “restrainers” when
it comes to China, none of which can rightly be called confrontational. In
their view, Moriyasu wrote, the U.S. and China “are more geopolitical
rivals than adversaries.” Initiatives like China’s trillion-dollar “Belt and
Road” global infrastructure funding program, which former Trump secretary of
state Mike Pompeo deemed an effort to “harm” U.S. interests by saddling the developing world with
Chinese debt, does “not pose an existential threat” to the United States. And,
of course, “Taiwan, a non-ally, is not worth risking war with China over.”
A cynic could be forgiven for concluding that all that
talk about how conservatives had lost the plot by focusing so much attention on
Iran and Russia instead of China were just wielding the nearest weapon at hand
only to secure power. After that little democratic inconvenience was behind
them, they could go about implementing their preferred policy: U.S.
retrenchment everywhere. Who could have seen it coming?
It turns out that Ramaswamy had his finger on the
nationalist pulse. In prepared remarks that the president delivered on Monday, Trump
insisted that he would place tariffs on Tawain’s semiconductor industry
unless they build manufacturing facilities (which they’re doing now, but in the
absence of taxpayer-funded incentives) in the United States. The Taiwanese
already regard their near monopoly on advanced semiconductors — a 40-year
project — as a deterrent against Chinese aggression. But that industry is also
a check on their fair-weather friends.
“If China [attacks] Taiwan, immediately the factories of
the world will stop to function. Because every factory in the world needs
semiconductors,” Taiwan’s deputy foreign minister, Wu Chih-chung François, told me in October. “The world
needs Taiwan, and Taiwan needs the world.” Particularly given the troubling
noises emanating from Donald Trump’s Pentagon, why would Taipei sign its own
death warrant by ascending to Trump’s demands? Limited access to America’s
consumer market would hurt TSMC’s bottom line, sure. But the pain would be
endured equally and evenly by American consumers. And the upside of that
approach is that the West will continue to rely on Taiwanese semiconductors
and, however reluctantly, resolve to protect their investments.
The “restrainers’” talk doesn’t make any sense unless you
are possessed of a deep ideological commitment to the view that the U.S. should
have withdrawn behind fortress America long ago and left the rest of the grubby
world to its own devices. But “restraint” in the face of an imminent threat to
your own security is neither prudent nor thoughtful.
The “restrainer” crowd does like to attack those of us
who favor an extraverted American presence on the world stage because we get
into all these stupid wars in which we only ever lose — all while failing to
even pillage the local resources in the process. It’s a shallow and highly emotive critique. But even those who are
attracted to it must concede that at least this wing of the GOP has the courage
and confidence to put up a fight. The same may not be said of the
“restrainers.”
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