When it comes to foreign policy and national security, Rudy Giuliani is in an untenable position: he’s inexplicably decided to base his entire presidential campaign on subjects he knows nothing about. At some point over the last six years, Giuliani got it in his head that being the mayor of a city attacked by terrorists necessarily makes that person an expert on keeping Americans safe.
With surprising frequency, Giuliani struggles to hide his ignorance about his signature issue. He can’t answer policy questions coherently, he can’t debate the issues persuasively, and he can’t explain his beliefs rationally. Indeed, most of the time, Giuliani is an embarrassment to himself, though he’s a little too arrogant to realize it, and GOP primary voters are a little too gullible to question it.
As it turns out, however, Giuliani’s campaign has come to realize that if their candidate is going to be taken seriously, they’ll have to do what Giuliani can’t: describe a foreign policy platform that he would implement if elected. The result is this article in Foreign Affairs, the magazine of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Now, from the outset, let’s recognize that the Giuliani campaign considers this an important article. Its contents are not just off-the-cuff remarks made an unprepared and inexperienced candidate; this is an article ghost-written by a presidential candidate’s top foreign policy advisors (all of whom are neocons). It’s safe to assume that a large team of trusted aides went over the piece with a fine-tooth comb, making sure it reflects exactly what Giuliani would do as president.
And after having read the piece, I can safely say that Giuliani is as nutty as a fruitcake. His approach to foreign policy is spectacularly dangerous, irresponsible, and stupid. Imagine Dick Cheney with a loaded gun in one hand, and an empty bottle of antidepressants in the other, and you can start to get the idea.
I don’t want to reinvent the wheel here, so I’ll point to a couple of my favorites takes on the Giuliani piece from others. First up, Yglesias:
Giuliani thinks that “we must understand that our enemies are emboldened by signs of weakness” so any expressed desire to cut deals actually undermines our safety and invites attack. The result is a chilling vision of a world where peace can only be achieved through American military domination. […]
This has been the kind of thinking that’s animated the Bush administration at its very worst moments. You get the immediate problem that America’s military edge can be countered by nuclear weapons. So it becomes very important to prevent countries from getting nuclear weapons. This can’t be done through the UN-backed process of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and international law, or even through diplomacy more generally, because that would signal weakness. The only tools available are coercion — military and economic. Of course, signaling an American desire to invade lots of countries only makes other countries more eager to get nuclear bombs. What’s needed, then, is a credible threat to fight a whole series of wars.
James Joyner, meanwhile, (a conservative who used to support Giuliani’s candidacy) described the former mayor as “batshit insane.”
The more I hear and read, though, the more I think Giuliani is either a charlatan or a simpleton. Either he’s lying to us and we therefore have no idea what his foreign policy will be or, worse, this is what he really thinks. […]
Essentially, he wants to massively increase a defense budget that already spends more than the rest of the countries on the planet combined so as to buy more submarines and anti-missile systems to protect us against a land-based guerrilla movement. We’re then going to use that military to go in, apparently, to topple every regime we don’t like and to wipe out every instance of non-democratic badness and spend decades occupying those countries. All, of course, while winning friends and influencing people.
I’ve seen some analyses suggest that Giuliani would be a continuation of the Bush policy. That’s false. Giuliani seems to believe that Bush has been weak and compliant, and what we really need is to be far more forceful in opposing diplomacy, using force, beating allies into submission, and leading through fear.
It’s impossible to excerpt — the piece needs to be read to be appreciated, but like Jim Henley, I was struck by this one sentence from Giuliani’s article:
Aspiring dictators sometimes win elections, and elected leaders sometimes govern badly and threaten their neighbors.
Giuliani seems to have missed the irony.
