I like Vivek Ramaswamy very much, because he is bright and talented and has good ideas — except for two bad ideas, both having to do with small but formidable long-time U.S. allies, which would be Israel and Taiwan.  Vivek wants to dump those two alliances, at a time when China is ready to pounce on Taiwan, and Iran is in a new alliance to provide massive numbers of suicide drones to Russia.  Both of those small countries are immensely talented and productive in defense technology, A.I., and cyber-warfare, and both resemble small Silicon Valleys.  Independent and productive, they are important allies for us.

Vivek argues that the U.S. should stop providing arms to Israel, as if this were just a one-way street.  Because of its frontline status among hostile enemies, Israel has been a kind of de facto test bed for U.S. defense technology — as in missile defense technology, which we are constantly co-developing in alliance with the Israeli Defense Force.  Israel is also our most reliable source of intelligence on the most dangerous part of the world: the Middle East and its new Chinese alliances.  As A.I.-driven weapons develop, Israel and Taiwan can only be U.S. assets.

What about Taiwan?  There, Vivek is proposing another suicidal idea — namely, that the U.S. should withdraw its support after he (Vivek) moves Taiwan's advanced chip production to other parts of the world.  Vivek is right that Taiwan's primacy in high-tech chip production is a risk for the world, because China constantly threatens to take over Taiwan.  By calling the long war between Nationalist China and CCP China a "domestic dispute," Vivek is trying to solve a major civil war with empty words.  Taiwan is not going to allow its advanced chip technology to be siphoned off to the rest of the world without a fight.  They would be fools to allow that, and they are not fools.

Similarly, the U.S. could decrease weapons support to Israel, but only by sacrificing some big advantages.  Many of the hot battles of the Cold War with the Soviet Empire were fought in the Middle East.  Great powers like the U.S. always prefer to fight proxy wars, not ones at home.  The United States has never had to fight a major war on its own soil, not since we emerged as a great power in World War I.  Our distant allies have helped to keep a defensive line far from home.

Neither Taiwan nor Israel is a throw-away ally.  I don't know if Vivek is quietly trying to curry favor with China or India, or with jihadist states like Iran and Saudi Arabia.  I do know that Vivek is an extremely smart and strategic candidate and that he has many good ideas.

So why those two duds?

Image: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr, unaltered.