Its been a slow road but I've truly come to despise Rudy Giuliani. I mean it. Not just disagree with him or his policies but to find everything he represents to be utterly despicable. Here, the ghost-written Rudy Doctrine of Foreign Policy, is all you need to know about the man. His ignorance--still breathtaking even after the horrors of George W. Bush--is appalling. Yet his main selling point is that he has the experience necessary to guide us through these dangerous terrorist-infested waters due to being New York's mayor on 9/11. That's it. Here's the beginning of the Rudy Doctrine:

We are all members of the 9/11 generation.

The defining challenges of the twentieth century ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Full recognition of the first great challenge of the twenty-first century came with the attacks of September 11, 2001, even though Islamist terrorists had begun their assault on world order decades before. Confronted with an act of war on American soil, our old assumptions about conflict between nation-states fell away. Civilization itself, and the international system, had come under attack by a ruthless and radical Islamist enemy.

In other words, the World War IV thesis. This isn't surprising since the bloodthirsty senile lunatic Norman Podhoretz is advising him on foreign policy. How are we supposed to take seriously a foreign policy that assumes, from the beginning, that civilization itself is under attack from terrorism, as if such violent political action is an utterly unprecedented novelty in the history of the world? But then again I don't expect someone as dense as Rudy Giuliani to ever crack open a work of history. Here is the core of the policy:

The next U.S. president will face three key foreign policy challenges. First and foremost will be to set a course for victory in the terrorists' war on global order. The second will be to strengthen the international system that the terrorists seek to destroy. The third will be to extend the benefits of the international system in an ever-widening arc of security and stability across the globe. The most effective means for achieving these goals are building a stronger defense, developing a determined diplomacy, and expanding our economic and cultural influence. Using all three, the next president can build the foundations of a lasting, realistic peace. (my emphasis)

This sounds like typical foreign policy boilerplate that is big on goals, short on context. First of all, the idea that we're "at war" with terror. Why would it advantage us in the slightest to elevate terrorists to the status of nation-states by declaring war on them? Doesn't that legitimize their cause and make them the equal of United States? Furthermore, why lump all terrorists together? Obviously different terrorist organizations have different goals and agendas. Wouldn't be more productive for the United States to use the old divide and conquer technique? Giving terrorists who have no reason to work together a reason to work together actually creates truly "global" terrorism. This is like the GI Joe foreign policy creating Cobra to give it a raison d'etre. In short, Giuliani actually wants a unified terrorist front to confront, instead of the considerably more messy but less dangerous task of dealing with them separately.

The desire for a unified terrorist front also conflicts with his third foreign policy challenge. He's talking about nation-building here, and even refers to the creation of a "hybrid military-civilian organization" tasked with "building roads, sewers, and schools; advising on legal reform; and restoring local currencies." He continues: "The United States did similar work, and with great success, in Germany, Japan, and Italy after World War II. But even with the rich civic traditions in these nations, the process took a number of years. We must learn from our past if we want to win the peace as well as the war. (my emphasis)" Here is a perfect example of Rudy's abuse of history. Reforming/rebuilding postwar Germany and Japan worked precisely because those states existed as liberal democracies before they started down the road to fascism and imperialism, respectively. For what remained of the civilian population of those nations there was a context to work within. Marshall Plan dollars fueled the exercise, but the people could envision the results of their labor because they had been there before. Presumably the nation-building Rudy is referring to would take place in states we would generally label "failed" or "backward." These places have known only colonialism, kleptocracy, authoritarianism and military dictatorship. Their best days were literally in the ancient past. So while I am sympathetic to the nation-building argument (specifically the idea of putting people to work on large public works projects to create class and nationalist solidarity) as a means for deterring potential terrorism, trying to simply copy the success of the Marshall Plan ignores why it was successful.

This leads, of course, to the role of international organizations in the process. It may be true that some terrorists wish to see the end of the international order. But they will never accomplish that. The international order--let's call it the globalized world--is a rather decentralized phenomenon. True, it is dominated by wealthy and powerful states who receive the lion's share of the system's largess, but it can only be disrupted, not destroyed. Only the states who benefit from and shape the system can destroy it through, not surprisingly, bad foreign and domestic policy. What is unclear in the entire article are the questions of the relative merits of soft vs. hard power and whether sovereign states have the right to act unilaterally or withing the framework of a larger international legal and political order. Since the article doesn't address these crucial questions, we are left with the vague suggestion that IOs are important but perhaps less so than shared defense pacts like NATO, which Giuliani seems eager to expand. I consider myself receptive to the idea that organizations like NATO are terrific at preventing states from warring with each other. But the focus of this article is not on war between states but war between states and terrorists. NATO wasn't designed to confront terrorism, it was designed to confront Soviet communism. It seems the IOs Rudy is actually arguing for are the ones he trashes, particularly the UN. And the UN, while far from perfect, is an ideal organizing vessel for the task of nation-building (noting of course that the very charter of the UN would need to be changed from promoting international peace between states to something more proactive). Rudy claims to be adhering to the realist school of international relations but the posture he asserts is highly neoconservative--e.g. "we have learned that evil must be confronted -- not appeased -- because only principled strength can lead to a realistic peace." Neoconservatism is the antithesis of Realism. It is guided by moral responsibility and strength projection. Realism is amoral--you deal with the bad actors to the best of your own interest. Rudy tries to combine the two and the results are incoherent.

Now if I may recuse myself from the confines of the polite discourse of Foreign Affairs and return to Giuliani himself. It is unclear whether this foreign policy statement is one that is written with conviction or simply for the purpose of fooling the foreign policy "community" into thinking he's a reasonable man. There are enough internal contradictions that sound reasonable enough on the surface to lead me to the latter interpretation. But on the other hand the willingness of the neoconservative mind to suppress cognitive dissonance and never assess reality realistically seems to be at play here as well. We know Rudy couldn't come up with this stuff himself, so the document appears to be little more than a cover letter for a national security post in a Giuliani administration (shudder). Thus it is a rhetorical exercise designed to demonstrate "serious" thinking in foreign policy that has zero bearing on the real world. It is, in short, a lie. This is not how Rudy intends to govern. He simply can't have both a robust international community bound by law, led by the United States and a unilateral World War IV eternal struggle against Islamofasicsm. The two are incompatible. And so he will have to choose. Suffice it to say, he already has. This is, in other words, Bush's "compassionate conservative" campaign. The only difference is that what Giuliani says on the campaign trail doesn't hide his true intentions. The real Giuliani is the one in this video. Electing Rudy Giuliani president would be--this is not hyperbole--a disaster for the United States. Worse than Bush. Further than Bush. More deranged. He must be confronted by an adversarial press and a skeptical public. He will wilt under that scrutiny, its just a matter of making the effort.