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Giuliani on the Islamic State, Russia, and China
Shortly after reporting that Rudy Giuliani is on President-Elect Donald Trump’s shortlist for secretary of state, the WSJ asked him about how he would approach the Middle East and two of America’s most powerful rivals:
Mr. Giuliani suggested several times that he would be interested in the post, going into great detail about how he views foreign policy and how his views overlap with Mr. Trump’s. “ISIS, short-term I believe, is the greatest danger and not because ISIS is in Iraq and in Syria, but because ISIS did something al Qaeda never did—ISIS was able to spread itself around the world,” he said.
And:
Published in Foreign PolicyMr. Giuliani also said that the Trump administration would work to reset relations with both Russia and China. He said the Obama administration had made Russia into an adversary and said Russian President Vladimir Putin didn’t respect President Barack Obama. Messrs. Trump and Putin spoke on the telephone on Monday and pledged to work together on a number of issues. […] Mr. Trump has repeatedly said he wants to work more cooperatively with Mr. Putin, but Mr. Giuliani gave a slightly more confrontational view of how that relationship could develop.
“Russia thinks it’s a military competitor, it really isn’t,” Mr. Giuliani said. “It’s our unwillingness under Obama to even threaten the use of our military that makes Russia so powerful.”
On China, Mr. Giuliani said the Trump administration would prefer to engage with that country on economic issues such as trade. Mr. Trump plans to label China a “currency manipulator” shortly after taking office, a move that will likely escalate tensions between both countries, economic analysts have speculated.
The last thing we want is for China to drastically revalue and be in position to blame us for the resulting financial turmoil. The way a country revalues is to dump dollars. Others would follow them into Yuan and and people like Soros will borrow dollars to buy yuan. More important than global financial turmoil and a falling dollar inflation and higher interest rates in the US is that it would raise China’s economic power. Think for a moment what a significant increase in China’s purchasing power would do. Would they buy more from us? Well yes they will buy companies that own patents they want, the patents themselves, companies they can reverse engineer, other technologies and people to go with them, minerals production around the world and land, more influence in Africa and Latin America. I’m afraid folks believe that a strong revaluation of the Yuan would cause stagnation and a decrease in Chinese exports because they wrongly interpret Japan’s revaluation as the cause of their subsequent stagnation. It wasn’t. Japan used their new purchasing power to buy prestige items and fueled the real estate bubble that they then refused to fix. However, their exports didn’t lose a beat and in very short order were even more competitive because so many of the inputs are imported and their costs dropped by half. This is the worst thing Trump has talked about far worse than opening up a lot of questionable trade deals.
Giuliani is right on Putin. He just needs a slight amount of steely pushback to put things back on an even keel.
I found him quite impressive in that interview.
Bolton might have the higher qualifications but he would be a far harder sell to the rest of the world.
Guiliani is still “the Worlds Mayor” and it would be impossible to frame him as an “neocon [warmonger] on steroids” (this just happened to Bolton on the nominally conservative “Morning Joe” format on MSNBC).
Rightly or wrongly he would be reassuring to the mostly hostile rest of the world and allies like Israel, Japan, Australia and the UK would still have a staunch ally on their side.
Maybe there is a very high management position for Bolton at State where he could do away for good or at least for the time being with the “Foggy” in “Foggy Bottom” while “the Mayor” represents the new American administration around the world.