Giuliani's Unrealistic Foreign Policy

It is really bad when conservative blogger James Joyner calls Rudy Giuliani's foreign policy vision "dangerously stupid."


The first thing that bothered me is how horribly written Giuliani's op-ed is. The Slate's Fred Kaplan remarked, "Had it been written for a freshman course on international relations, it would deserve at best a C-minus with a concerned note to come see the professor as soon as possible." A perfect example is Giuliani's confusing sentence structuring.

"Achieving a realistic peace means balancing realism and idealism in our foreign policy," Giuliani writes. "America is a nation that loves peace and hates war."

Giuliani's poison pen doesn't get better. I seriously wonder the America's Mayor paid a high school sophomore to write this shit. Another example is "The first step toward a realistic peace is to be realistic about our enemies." Was Giuliani under the impression that the American people have been living in a dream-like state the past six years since 9-11?

Giuliani engages in revisionist history.

"America must remember one of the lessons of the Vietnam War. Then, as now, we fought a war with the wrong strategy for several years. And then, as now, we corrected course and began to show real progress. Many historians today believe that by about 1972 we and our South Vietnamese partners had succeeded in defeating the Vietcong insurgency and in setting South Vietnam on a path to political self-sufficiency. But America then withdrew its support, allowing the communist North to conquer the South."

Vietnam was not going to become a democracy, no matter how long the United States remained militarily engaged. To suggest otherwise is revisionist history at best and utter batshit insanity at it's worse. Giuliani contends if Iraq and Afghanistan (already) fell that the consequences would be as disastrous as Vietnam. Conservative blogger Dan Drezner points out that Giuliani accidently debunks his own argument.

Actually, the fall of Saigon was, in the end, the final falsification of the domino theory that Giuliani's essay unconsciously accepts. South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia collapsed. That was it. The Soviet Union's subsequent expansionism proved to be its ruination, as it found itself bogged down in Afghanistan.

There is the question of how Giuliani expects to get enough recruits for ten more ten new combat brigades" with a volunteer. He makes it very clear he has no intention if leaving Iraq. Ever. That doesn't entice young men and women to enlist. Even if Giuliani got enough recruit, ten brigades is only an "appropriate baseline." We may need more soldiers. Perhaps he can use clones like Emperor Palpatine.

I could go on, but I don't have the time. This foreign policy paper is Gigli bad.