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.
Giuliani first provides a post-facto assessment of the Vietnam War which serves as his base doctrine. He believes we could have won the war but we precipitously "withdrew" our support in 1972. Had we stayed, he says, South Vietnam would have achieved "political self-sufficiency." Instead, by caving into an "expansionist Soviet Union." we created a "weaker America." Few historians, foreign policy experts or political figures give any credence to this thesis. And, aside from the irony that Giuliani is criticizing Richard Nixon, a president of his own party for such "errors," he fails to acknowledge the fact that 58,000 American soldiers had already died for a South Vietnamese government that was hopelessly corrupt and had no popular support -- and that the American public was utterly fed up with the conflict. Nor does the former mayor address the secondary point that the putatively omnipotent USSR 17 years later lost the Cold War to the apparently "enervated" USA.
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