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Rudy Giuliani on Free TradeFormer Mayor of New York City; Republican Candidate for 2000 Senate (NY) |
A: The reality is that we need to develop friends in the Middle East. We need to develop friendships with the Emirates, with Qatar, with Kuwait. These are countries that we have t get closer to. We should trade more with them, we should be involved more with them as we stand up to Islamic terrorism. If they’re asking an American company to help them deal with the Islamic terrorist threat in a more secure way, the people involved in this are people that are some of the biggest experts on Islamic terrorism who had been with the FBI. This is a good thing to do. This is a thing that helps us kind of work on the other side of how do you remain on offense against Islamic terrorists?
A: That’s just totally wrong. The relationship is not with any of those people.
A: I think we’re on a verge of going in one direction or another. I mean, for example, if you want to get specific, the four trade deals with Peru, Colombia, Panama, South Korea that are in front of Congress right now, which the Democrats are trying to block, would be good deals for the US. In 3 of the 4 of them, we would actually get to export more than we’re importing. Why they would want to block this I can’t understand. We’re already importing about 98% from those countries. [Regarding protectionism], I think you got to almost separate them into two different categories. There’s economic protection, and then there’s protection for safety, security and legal rights. And I don’t think we’ve done a particularly good job on the second. We can’t say because these agreements weren’t perfect, because they have problems, because they have issues, we’re going to turn our back on free trade.
A: Actually, the way to balance that is to sell more things overseas. That’s the usual Democratic pessimistic approach. How about we try an optimistic approach? The way to balance the books is sell more overseas. Sell energy independence. Sell health care. Let’s do it in a positive way.
A: Generally a bad idea and generally self-defeating. And certainly not an agenda for the future, kind of an agenda for the past. The best way to deal with the global economy is to take advantage of it in an aggressive way, in an optimistic way. Let’s build industries that we can sell in this new part of the world where we have a growing number of consumers.
Let’s think of the strength of American health care rather than just the weaknesses of it. We’re still the place where more people want to come to get medical treatment. People aren’t flooding hospitals in Europe and Asia to get brain surgery and cancer treatment, they’re coming to America. We’re perilously close to pushing them in the other direction of socialized medicine, but we still have the best health care system in the world. Let’s market that. That’s a product we can sell. We’re ahead of everybody else on that.