Given that Rudy Giuliani has no experience or background in foreign policy, national security, or diplomacy, it stands to reason that he’ll occasionally offer incoherent remarks about the global stage.
But his comments yesterday go beyond simple ignorance and point to a candidate who simply doesn’t understand current events.
Republican Rudy Giuliani said Monday the reputation of the United States has suffered globally not so much because of arrogant actions but for lack of salesmanship about benefits of democracy.
If he is elected president, he said, he would seek ambassadors who would work hard to sell U.S. strengths to foreigners….
“These are beautiful things, almost like gifts given to us by God, the wonderful resources of our country, the great system that our framers created that was ingenious,” Giuliani said
He added: “We’ve got to have a State Department that gets that, that understands that, that we’ve got a reputation that needs to be defended and protected. We are a country of good motives, of good people, of great accomplishments. We don’t want to force ’em on anybody in the world; we’d like to share it with them. That’s what diplomacy is about. It’s about sharing who we are with others and getting them to understand us better and understand our motives, because we don’t have bad motives.”
To hear Giuliani tell it, America’s global standing in the world has deteriorated over the last several years because of an ineffective sales pitch. We’ve lost the respect of most of our allies, and our moral standing has waned, but all we have to do is “share” lessons of our greatness with the world, and our reputation will improve.
It’s hard to overstate how absurd this is. This attitude isn’t just wrong, it’s dangerous.
Giuliani’s foreign policy vision is, in effect, a cop-out. Under his school of thinking, U.S. conduct is irrelevant. Americans’ actions on the global stage aren’t responsible for fueling international animosity; our public-relations campaigns are. We shouldn’t blame the war in Iraq for enraging the Middle East; we should blame our diplomatic spin.
By this logic, we shouldn’t change government policy; we should hire better advertisers.
What utter nonsense. As James Traub noted the other day, in a context unrelated to Giuliani, U.S. actions speak louder than words.
When Vice President Dick Cheney and other senior officials split hairs over torture, that shapes our ability to conduct the war on terror more powerfully than do the interrogation techniques themselves. What we say about ourselves no longer has much effect; but what we are seen doing — on occasion, what we are caught doing — matters immensely. (emphasis added)
Giuliani suggested yesterday that what the United States does matters far less than what we say. On its face, that’s ridiculous. But if Giuliani is still confused, perhaps he can ask Karen Hughes whether America’s standing abroad can be improved simply by some pro-U.S. schlock in the Middle East. (Here’s a hint: it can’t.)
Yesterday, the former NYC mayor added:
[Giuliani] conceded problems in the Middle East and the war in Iraq may be partially to blame on the United States, saying, “We didn’t know enough about that culture in advance. We assumed things that might come out of our knowledge of Western culture or even other Asian cultures or Asian cultures that we’d become familiar with, like Japan and China.”
Does Giuliani really think the Bush administration confused Iraqi culture with that of Far East countries like Japan and China? What does that even mean?
In the bigger picture, I’ve noticed that a lot of presidential candidates seem to be getting better on the stump. It’s a natural consequence of frequent town-hall forums and media interviews. And yet, Giuliani seems to be getting dumber as the campaign drags on.