Republican presidential candidate and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy told JNS late last month that he supports most of former President Donald Trump’s policies on Israel and that he wanted to go further than the former president with respect to the Abraham Accords.
In a recent interview with The Washington Free Beacon, Ramaswamy articulated a rather different aspect of his “Abraham Accords 2.0,” including ending military funding to Israel by 2028.
“If we’re successful, the true mark of success for the U.S. and for Israel will be to get to a 2028 where Israel is so strongly standing on its own two feet, integrated into the economic and security infrastructure of the rest of the Middle East—that it will not require and be dependent on that same level of historical aid or commitment from the U.S.,” he told the paper.
The candidate later told the Free Beacon by email that he would support continued Israeli aid should his Abraham Accords 2.0 plan not succeed.
Hussain Abdul-Hussain, a Foundation for Defense of Democracies fellow, told the paper that aid to Israel would still be necessary due to “a bunch of enemies with technology” in the region. Conservative radio host Mark Levin wrote to Ramaswamy, in part, saying “respectfully, you need to bone up a bit on this subject.”
“He has no understanding of the Middle East and likely shows he has little understanding of U.S. foreign policy,” added Ari Hoffman, another conservative radio host. “Now this makes him a hard ‘no’ for me.”
In a release, Nikki Haley, another Republican candidate for president, stated that Ramaswamy “is completely wrong to call for ending America’s special bond with Israel.”
“Support for Israel is both the morally right and strategically smart thing to do. Both countries are stronger and safer because of our iron-clad friendship,” stated the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and former South Carolina governor. “As president, I will never abandon Israel.”
Matt Brooks, CEO of the Republican Jewish Coalition, released a letter to Ramaswamy, in which he noted that Israel spends most of the U.S. aid it receives in the United States, that Israel and the United States have an important security partnership and that cutting military funding to Israel would signal a deterioration of the U.S.-Israel relationship to Israel’s enemies.
“The appearance of abandoning Israel would seriously harm Israel in military, diplomatic and economic terms,” Brooks wrote. “In this dangerous time, such a move would very decidedly not be in America’s best interest.”
Earlier this month, Ramaswamy was one of three bipartisan presidential candidates who talked to JNS about U.S. President Joe Biden snubbing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
