The risk of President Giuliani
The tough-guy approach worked well for him as mayor of New York, but it wouldn't as president. Niall Ferguson
September 17, 2007
There are two things that are futile to try to predict a year or more ahead: the exchange rate of the dollar and the next president of the United States. But let's just suppose the most probable thing -- based on current opinion polls -- happens. By that I mean that Hillary Clinton wins the Democratic Party's nomination and Rudy Giuliani wins the Republican Party's.
If that is the choice Americans confront on election day, Giuliani could very well emerge as the next president of the United States.
Let me be clear: I do not think Giuliani is the best of the Republican candidates. I have been playing a (frankly very minor) role as an advisor to John McCain, who never ceases to impress me with his guts, grit and gumption. Nevertheless, the fact is that Giuliani is, and has been for some time, the clear front-runner. This week, Giuliani is taking time out from pressing the unyielding flesh of Iowa farmers to speak at a London think tank. It is time to start pondering what a Giuliani presidency might mean.
Conventional wisdom among political commentators is that Giuliani is about as welcome in the Midwest as a sub-prime mortgage is on Wall Street these days. It's not just the liberal positions he took when he was mayor of New York. It's also his distinctly messy private life. Asked recently about his religion, he gave a true New Yorker's answer: "I pray like a lawyer. I try to make a deal: 'Get me out of this jam and I'll start going back to church.' "
No wonder Mitt Romney's Mormon faith suddenly seems less of a handicap. Yet the polls are telling us something. In an insightful portrait in the New York Times Magazine, Matt Bai argued that it's precisely Giuliani's edgy persona that is his biggest asset. Six years after Al Qaeda's attacks on New York and Washington, with U.S. soldiers fighting and dying in two distant and dangerous lands, we may well be in the market for a proven tough guy who gets results.
I remember visiting the pre-Giuliani Manhattan. It was like one long episode of "Kojak." The professions then open to young New Yorkers were dealer, hood, hooker, junkie, pimp -- or bent cop. Yet by the time I moved to the city, not long after 9/11, the analysts outnumbered the psychos. "Kojak" had been replaced by "Seinfeld." A large share of the credit for that transformation belongs to Giuliani. His presidential bid is based on the notion that what worked for the world's capital city can work for the world.
America, Giuliani says, must remain "on offense" to win the "terrorists' global war on us." What, like George W. Bush? No, no, no, no, no. In common with nearly all the Republican candidates, Giuliani's hero of choice is Ronald Reagan. But he also makes a point of likening himself to Winston Churchill.
That worries me. It shows that Giuliani buys the idea that since 9/11, the U.S. has been fighting World War III. You know how this routine goes. Al Qaeda is made up of Islamo-fascists; 9/11 was Pearl Harbor; Saddam Hussein was the Arab Hitler; the fall of Baghdad would be like the liberation of Paris. And so on. Now it's Giuliani's turn. "We should try to accomplish [in Iraq] what we accomplished in Japan or in Germany," he says. What, like bombing the place flat?
The reality is that the threat posed by Islamist terrorism today is wholly different from the threat posed by the Axis powers in 1941-42. To judge by Osama bin Laden's latest rant, he aims at mass conversion, not conquest (with low-interest loans as the latest inducement).
The Islamists have thousands rather than millions of trained warriors. Their most dangerous weapons are land mines and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, not aircraft carriers and guided missiles. The total number of American fatalities that can be attributed to this supposed world war is about 6,000 (adding together 9/11 victims with U.S. passports and the service personnel killed in action in Iraq). On average, the Axis powers killed about 20,000 Allied soldiers and civilians a day.
The trouble is that the more Americans imagine they are in a world war, the less attention they pay to the more profound strategic threats their country faces. I can think of four in particular:
* the descent of the greater Middle East into a large-scale war;
* the disintegration of the system of nuclear nonproliferation;
* the escalating competition between developed and emerging economies over scarce raw materials;
* the breakdown of the system of multilateral trade liberalization.
Taken together, these challenges will sorely test whoever occupies the White House after Bush. Has Giuliani given any of them serious thought? Does he have any strategic vision beyond preventing another 9/11 (his nightmare, he says, is an Iranian-made dirty bomb "in London or Rome or America")?
Applied to cleaning up the mean streets of New York, Giuliani's offensive approach worked pretty well (though it eventually ended in overkill). How well it can work as foreign policy is another matter altogether.