The controversy continues unabated. Stephen Schlesinger, former Director of the World Policy Institute at the New School University in New York City, writing on The Huffington Post:
The Republican presidential frontrunner, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, has just written his foreign policy credo for Foreign Affairs magazine. It is a truly unnerving pronouncement — even worse than Bush-ism. Not unexpectedly, Mr. Giuliani backs all of the most brazen features of the Bush administration’s global agenda. But he tosses in several deeply scary initiatives of his own that George W. never touched.
That’s his opening paragraph. His ending:
Now we come to the ex-mayor’s most bizarre suggestion — that NATO be encouraged to act “globally,” be reconfigured to confront “significant threats to the international system,” and “we should open the organization’s membership to any state” — though it is a European-based body. Is Mr. Giuliani thus proposing that NATO replace the UN as the world’s arbiter? And why not? Since the US dominates NATO, this would give Washington a direct means to extend its security purvey over the entire planet. This is a vision consistent with the authoritarian instincts with which Mr. Giuliani governed NYC. Still his retro-policies appear to be out of kilter with the times. He will have a lot of explaining to the American electorate about his foreign policy weltanschauung. It should be an illuminating exercise that may actually remind voters of why the only elected post he has ever risen to is mayor.
Now read all of the stuff in between.
Giuliani’s foreign policy has its strong backers and strong detractors and there seems to be little in between. If you strip away any political spin (negative or positive) what you can say for certain is this: (love him or hate him) Giuliani is not coasting in his campaign and not doing a “me too” type campaign. He’s running and intensely invidualistic one. It’ll be interesting to see if actor/former Senator Fred Thompson follows suit if he jumps in (Thompson has already made rumblings about how his campaign won’t be a boilerplate one but one that will stir things up).
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.