Vivek Ramaswamy, Nikki Haley, And The National Question

It's natural for them to champion India, but it's not in America's interest.

Vivek Ramaswamy And The National Question

When he ran for President two years ago, Vivek Ramaswamy outlined his foreign policy in an American Conservative essay. In it, he argued for building up India, ostensibly as a counterweight to China:

Right now, India is the world’s largest arms importer, as well as a strong center for technology and engineering. The American defense industry needs time to grow and recover from decades of post-Cold War mismanagement. India can serve as a helpful partner in the meantime. We can use trade and tech transfer [i.e., "giveaways"] to unleash India’s tech and manufacturing might to not just arm India but other regional allies – to transform them from importer to exporter. In a similar way, I will pursue an AUKUS-style deal to share nuclear submarine technology and empower the Indian Navy.

As I wrote then, Vivek's (it's easier to type than Ramaswamy) foreign policy ignored the National Question:

Vivek has repeated tropes about how Americans are united by the ideals of the Founders (without every specifying which of those ideals Americans still agree on), but America's Founders saw themselves as bound by more than ideals. As John Jay said in Federalist No. 2 (emphasis mine):

With equal pleasure I have as often taken notice that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.

To current-year Americans (including Vivek Ramaswamy), that may sound like an anachronistic view of nationality, but it's not anachronistic to current-year Chinese and Indians. Chinese and Indians aren't bound by vague ideals; they are bound by ties of blood and history going back millennia, ties that have transcended different ideologies and forms of government. Just this month, two Chinese-American sailors in the U.S. Navy were arrested for spying for China.

In America, our reigning ideology is that everyone is the same, so when someone named "Wenheng Zhao" raises his right hand and swears allegiance to a document signed by bewigged WASPs in 18th Century America, our ideology implies he's no more likely to spy for China than a descendant of John Hancock. The Chinese government, of course, sees this differently. Presumably, the Indian government will too, if we become geopolitical rivals.

I added that there was no reason for the U.S. to be enemies with Russia or China (or India, for that matter),

We could just respect their backyards the way we expect them to respect ours (the Monroe Doctrine). Neither China nor Russia is trying to export a radical ideology, like the Soviets were during the Cold War.

But if we did, we wouldn't be able to do so colorblind:

I suspect Vivek is attempting to curry favor with the national security establishment with his newfound China hawkishness, but I don't see how his colorblind nation of ideas can survive war with an ethnonationalist power.

The National Question Returns

Two developments brought the national question back into focus this week. First, one of the Chinese immigrant sailors mentioned above, Jinchao Wei, was just convicted of the espionage he was charged with two years ago. And second, another Indian-American politician, Nikki Haley, has argued for building up India as a counterweight to China.

It's natural for Indian Americans to want to see their ancestral country continue to develop economically, but it's not in America's interests to industrialize India instead of reindustrializing America.

India Is Not Going To Join A Cold War Against China

Haley’s pitch treats India as “like us but cheaper.” That’s not how Delhi sees Delhi. India is a member of the BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization alongside China and Russia, which institutionalizes habits of coordination outside Western blocs. BRICS today is larger than its original five and explicitly framed by many members as an alternative pole; the SCO’s official site lists India as a full member with China and Russia. New Delhi also keeps deep energy and defense ties with Moscow, markedly expanding Russian oil purchases since 2022—because that’s what India’s interests dictate. None of this makes India an adversary; it makes India… India.

This is also consistent with India’s history. During the Cold War, India helped shape the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM)—not as a passive posture but as a doctrine of autonomy between rival blocs. Read the Indian foreign ministry’s own historical notes or the U.S. State Department’s account of Bandung 1955 and the NAM’s origins: the throughline is independence from great-power camps. Expecting India to enlist in a Western-led Cold War 2.0—this time against China—is deluded.

You Can't Reindustrialize America With Factories In India

America’s goal shouldn’t be to move assembly from China to India (or Mexico, Vietnam, etc.). It should be to build capacity back in the United States. The Trump Administration’s own rhetoric and policy architecture point in that direction: a universal baseline tariff and expanded Section 301 measures have been framed as tools to support American workers and domestic production—i.e., to bring manufacturing home, not just park it in a different foreign area code.

Economically, that matters. Manufacturing has powerful job multipliers: every advanced-industry job supports roughly 2.2 additional U.S. jobs across the economy, and broader manufacturing multipliers are high as well. If we want the community-level gains—middle-income employment, skills ladders, tax base, civic stability—they accrue here only when production happens here.

If Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy want to increase manufacturing in India, they can start a private equity fund to do so. It just doesn't have a place in self-interested American policy.