Upstart Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy came to the pages of The American Conservative to articulate his foreign policy vision. In a Monday op-ed, Ramaswamy invoked George Washington, James Monroe, and Richard Nixon to define his strategy for America’s navigation of the next decade. “The longer the war in Ukraine goes on, it becomes ever clearer that there is only one winner: China,” he said, promising to “lead America from moralism to realism by executing the inverse of what Nixon did in 1972: I will go to Moscow in 2025.” The sooner peace can be established in Europe, the sooner focus can be turned to maintaining American sovereignty in the Western Hemisphere and defending against Chinese expansionism in the Pacific.

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo became the latest official from the Biden administration to go to China in recent months, following Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, among others. Staff writer Bradley Devlin took the occasion of the trade talks to consider the political significance of the economic slowdowns in both China and the United States. What does it mean for global rivals to be trade partners and do domestic economic ills help or hinder efforts to avoid a future conflict? Will the U.S. “decouple” from Chinese manufacturing, as many on the so-called New Right propose? As Julius Krein of American Affairs told Devlin “I think both the U.S. and China want to tone down tensions but the underlying issues and interests at stake are at some level irreconcilable.”

Alexander Zubatov used to believe in American public education. No longer. In a long essay Monday, citing Orestes Brownson and Christopher Lasch, Zubatov makes the case—“Teacher, Leave Them Kids Alone”—that the only way to repair American schooling is for parents to take as much responsibility for it as they can. That may not mean home schooling, necessarily. Returning curriculum standards and school administration to the local level would also go a long way to freeing us and our children from the indoctrination of the would-be secular priests of the professional education bureaucracy.

Best,
Micah Meadowcroft
Web Editor

―St. John Paul II

What We Can Learn From the Labor Left

David Hines