Vivek Ramaswamy, who entered the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination last month, is calling on the United States to adopt a “Declaration of Independence” that would end its economic entanglement with China.
Comparing China with the Soviet Union, Ramaswamy said on Sunday that the key difference between the two communist regimes is that the latter had never so deeply embedded itself in the U.S. market.
“The key difference today is, unlike the USSR in the last century, we never depended on the Soviet Union for the shoes on our feet or phones in our pocket. That is the case today,” Ramaswamy said on CNN’s “State of the Union” program.
“And I think it’s the number one threat we face,” he continued. “And so I’m actually delivering a vision of national identity that hopefully allows us to make the short-run sacrifices we’ll need to on the global stage to actually win as a country over the long run.”
CPAC Speech
A millionaire investor and author, Ramaswamy spoke about the idea of declaring “independence” from China on several occasions, including in his address to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) last week.
“If Thomas Jefferson were alive today, that is the Declaration of Independence he would sign,” he told his audience at the national conservative event. “That is the Declaration of Independence I will sign if I’m elected as your next president.”
“We’re in a codependent relationship with our enemy,” he added, noting that “codependent relationships do not end well.”
“They send the fentanyl across our southern border, they send the digital fentanyl through TikTok, financial fentanyl in the form of the national debt that’s created this addictive relationship to China. We declare independence. We’re done with financial fentanyl, digital fentanyl, actual fentanyl.”
To actually implement such a declaration, according to Ramaswamy, the United States must go as far as to “ban most U.S. businesses from doing business in China” until the Chinese Communist Party collapses or “radically reforms” itself. “There is no easy way out but to take that bandage and rip it right away,” he argued.
By Bill Pan
