As I noted yesterday, beyond all the high-button issues about Rudy Giuliani’s record as Mayor, colorful personality and open-minded approach to marriage, what doesn’t get discussed very often is that a Giuliani presidency would be a foreign policy catastrophe from which the nation might simply not recover. As Eric Kleefeld explains in this post, Giuliani’s new ghost-written article in Foreign Affairs shows that a Giuliani foreign policy would best be described as Bush-plus and premised on the idea that President Bush has not pursued his terrible ideas aggressively enough.
What seems apparent about Giuliani is that he’s not kidding when he says that being Mayor of New York City is a lot like being president and running American foreign policy. And reading through not just his emphasis on the War on Terror but the particular way he describes it shows that he believes that being on the receiving end of a mass casualty terrorist attack — even though his record of preparing for it is at best mixed — gives him a unique understanding of how to combat the threat. And into this general ignorance is poured a group of extremist advisors who would likely have us blowing up various other countries in no time.
In other words, he’s the Bush pattern all over again — only this time starting not from a period of relatively high American standing in the world but into the mess Bush has already gotten us.
As with Bush, the agenda Giuliani sets forth is covered with a patina of enlightened foreign policy internationalism, with emphases on nation-building, investing money in helping destabilized countries build rule-of-law based societies. But just as with Bush even a cursory look at the people slated to implement the policies shows a cadre rooted in militarism and ideological escapism.
Republicans looking for a non-insane candidate and Democrats interested in preventing the Rudy disaster should really look into this stuff.
