Is Rudy Running for Editor of the Weekly Standard, or President of the United States?

Lest one worry that Rudy Giuliani's campaign consists of little more than repeating "9/11" over and over again, it's worth having a look at his appearance yesterday at the "Politics and Eggs" event in New Hampshire to see what he's up to. It appears he's most focused on currying favor with the couple dozen or so die-hard neoconservatives who buzz around Washington complaining that President Bush isn't hawkish enough.

First, Giuliani assembled a world class cadre of extremists to staff his foreign policy team, including David "End to Evil" Frum, Norman "I Hope and Pray that President Bush Will Bomb Iran" Podhoretz, Michael "The Case for Assassinating Foreign Leaders" Rubin, and a host of others.

But then, at yesterday's Politics and Eggs breakfast, Giuliani played some dog-whistle politics, blasting away at the State Department for having undermined the Bush administration's foreign policy. "We have to do a better job of explaining ourselves," Giuliani observed. "The core of diplomacy is being able to explain the United States in various parts of the world, in cultures that might be very different, and it's our job to understand them better."

And then came the time to take in the State Department, a bête noire for neoconservatives, for a drubbing. (I'm loosely transcribing from a video of the speech.)

I would change the mission of the State Department. The State Department exists not just for the purpose of explaining other countries to us--it's real important--as I said, with the Middle East, maybe we didn't do a good enough job with understanding them....but the main purpose of an Ambassador is to sell the United States...

I think we need to reinvigorate the State Department. When you tell me America's reputation is in trouble in various parts of the world, I say "what has our Ambassador done to protect that reputation? How much explanation has the Ambassador done on television? How much explaination has the Ambassador done in the media and in meetings, explaining what the United States is all about?"...

We've got to have a State Department that understands that we have a reputation that needs to be defended and respected... We don't want to force things on anyone in the world--we'd like to share it with them. That's what diplomacy is about, it's about sharing who we are with others and getting them to understand us better, and to understand our motives, because we don't have bad motives...

Rarely has such banality been married to such obtuseness. It's as though this is somehow a revelation: Giuliani has discovered that the State Department should be concerned with America's image abroad! Eureka! But this rests on the comfortable fallacy that our problem is fundamentally one of perception rather than reality. Foreigners understand our policies quite well. They dislike them. So flogging the State Department for apparently not understanding the platitude that "we have a reputation that needs to be defended and respected" is a bit much. Particularly when coming from a man who holds such easy-to-explain-to-the-world views as that the United States has favored the Palestinians too much in the Israel-Palestine dispute.

Public diplomacy isn't a magic bullet. If the medicine tastes bad enough, all the sugar in the world isn't going to help it go down.

Giuliani decided to finish the talk with a flourish. Discussing his views on diplomacy further, he observed that:

You need to know when to negotiate and you need to know when not to negotiate. Because negotiating when you're not supposed to negotiate, you can kill more people. I know that's hard for some people to understand, but if you negotiate at the wrong time, you can cost human lives...

I'll just leave you with this example: What about Hitler? Should Chamberlain have negotiated with Hitler? Or should England have listened to Churchill in the 1930s? The answer is pretty simple: We'd have saved millions of lives if we'd stood up to Hitler at a much earlier stage. We'd have saved a lot of lives if we'd stood up to Islamic terrorism at an earlier stage.

Ah, the Hitler analogy. The last refuge of a neocon.