In case you haven’t seen enough refutations of Giuliani’s crazy Foreign Affairs essay, George Ajjan offers his own commentary that eviscerates Giuliani’s claim to be any kind of credible candidate on foreign policy.  Zeroing in on Giuliani’s chatter about globalisation in the Middle East, George writes:

As for the Middle East, Giuliani has it wrong there too. Modernization and globalization do not at all go hand-in-hand with approval of the political/military plans of the United States. I suppose it never occurred to Giuliani that a young Muslim’s ability to enjoy a shake from McDonald’s subtracts nothing from his admiration and hero-worship of an evil man whose claim to infamy is his commitment to the taking of innocent American lives, as my Dubai experience illustrated.

George has shown Giuliani’s invocation of the “international system” to be a lot of hot air, since he consistently misunderstands what “the international system” actually is.  (He seems to use “international system” to mean “policy goals of Washington,” thus emptying it of its real meaning just as others like him have done to the word “democracy,” as George noted.)   While superficially consistent with the preoccupations of his chief foreign policy advisor, Charles Hill, Giuliani’s “international system” talk is mostly window dressing for self-defeating, hyper-aggressive interventionism that seeks to lump non-state actors together with those states Giuliani et al. deem to be worthy targets. 

P.S. There is also more than a little irony in one of the leading backers of the invasion of Iraq talking about the importance of the same system for the survival of civilisation.  The invasion was a fundamental attack on the structures and rules of the actual international system and a violation of international law.  Supporters of the invasion have had great fun speculating about how “international law doesn’t really exist” (except when it can be twisted and manipulated to justify an invasion of a sovereign state), but watch how they wrap themselves in the mantle of preserving international order after they have done so much to undermine that order.  If the great conflict of the moment is between non-state actors and the stability of the international state system, who would be worse to have as a defender of the latter than someone who supports policies of violating other nations’ sovereignty, dismantling existing state apparatuses and turning stable countries into lawless zones where no legitimate authority holds sway?