MCViewPoint

Stop buying into this bogus song and dance. Stop buying into this schtick where opportunistic faux populists play into widespread anti-war sentiment while slyly advancing the agendas of the war machine. People bought into it with Trump for four years, and they’re buying into it with Vivek Ramaswamy again.

https://substack.com/inbox/post/136750825

Caitlin Johnstone

I’m seeing Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy building up a lot of credibility in some antiwar circles, which is ridiculous because he’s clearly just another disgusting warmonger. He is not meaningfully different from all the other warmongers in the DC swamp.

I say this not because I’m some kind of purity police zealot who lets the perfect become the enemy of the good, nor because I don’t understand Ramaswamy’s appeal among those who oppose war and militarism. I totally get why it would look sparkly and interesting to see someone on the debate stage decrying neocons and wishing professional warmonger Nikki Haley the best of luck on the boards of Lockheed and Raytheon, and on the surface his support for a negotiated settlement in Ukraine looks admirable.

In reality, however, Ramaswamy is just one side of the dynamic we were discussing recently in which the populace is artificially manipulated into a power-serving debate over whether we should support warmongering against Russia or warmongering against China, thereby duping the public into arguing over how warmongering should occur rather than if it should. Ramaswamy is a virulent China hawk whose extreme militarism would greatly increase the risk of war with China if he became president, and the only reason he wants to end the war in Ukraine is to hamstring the PRC while rapidly increasing aggressions against Beijing.

Ramaswamy supports using Ukraine as a negotiating chip to pull Moscow away from Beijing, favorably comparing this approach to the way Richard Nixon exploited the Sino-Soviet split in negotiating to pull Beijing away from Moscow during the last cold war. Ramaswamy says he would negotiate to let the Russian Federation keep the Ukrainian territories it already controls and guarantee no future NATO membership for Ukraine in exchange for Moscow ending its military partnership with China. Ramaswamy doesn’t attempt to address the plot hole that there is no split between Moscow and Beijing to exploit today and that Putin would be an idiot to abandon his carefully cultivated relationship with Xi, but that’s an argument for another day.

The reason Ramaswamy is so eager to uncouple Moscow from Beijing is because he wants to focus the US empire’s firepower on aggressively confronting China (which he ominously refers to as “Communist China” as often as opportunity presents). He wants to rapidly increase the US empire’s encirclement of China, endorsing an “AUKUS-style deal” with India, calling for an increased military presence in the Pacific by France and the UK, and pushing allies surrounding China like Japan, Australia and the Philippines to increase their military budgets in preparation for war.

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