Former New York City Rudy Giuliani has made up his mind as to whom, in the wake of his failed presidential bid, he will support for the Republican nomination. That honor has been bestowed upon Sen. John McCain.

But among at least two of Giuliani's hawkish foreign policy advisers, the choice between McCain and Mitt Romney is split.

Daniel Pipes, the founder and director of the Middle East Forum, and former Senator Bob Kasten said they remained undecided as to which GOP candidate they would support. But the two were, as of Thursday morning, leaning to Romney and McCain respectively.

Pipes and Kasten comprised part of a team that accentuated Giuliani's hard-line, neoconservative tilt on foreign affairs. Kasten, a former Wisconsin Senator, is a strident supporter of Israel and a critic of the United Nations. Pipes, meanwhile, warned of a war against Islamic terrorism well before 9/11 but has also held consistently hostile views to Muslims, including advocating for profiling at airports.

In separate interviews with the Huffington Post the two expressed reservations over jumping into the GOP primary race so soon after their preferred candidate had dropped out. Pipes, for one, described a "lingering sense of shock" over how fast Giuliani's presidential prospects had crumbled. Of the remaining candidates, he said, each brought assets and liabilities to the table.

"I like many things of both of them, but in McCain's case there are some flamboyant issues, from the immigration campaign and finance reform and others," said Pipes. "I disagreed with Giuliani on a number things, but they weren't that important. With Romney, I like what he has to say and have no problem with him changing his views... But I was taken back by his statements in Michigan and Nevada, which had a populist tension to them. It looked like he was pandering, changing his message according to his audience. That kind of threw me. So I'm generally favorable to both of them with reservations but right now I would say I'm favoring Romney."

Kasten, who currently serves as the president of the consulting firm Kasten & Company, expressed similar ambivalence towards the remaining candidates but claimed to be drifting towards his former congressional colleague.

"I don't know what role I'm going to play in future campaigns," he said. "If I support anyone it would be McCain because I believe he has the best chance of defeating Hillary Clinton. But right now I am not sure how."

The two advisers were joined by Norman Podhoretz, a founding father of neo-conservatism, Martin Kramer, who decried Middle East scholars for being too soft on terrorist, as well as Peter Berkowitz and Nile Gardiner, in what Newsweek dubbed Giuliani's "Used Hawks."

Through these advisers and his own experiences, the former New York City mayor adopted a Cold War framework to combating "radical Islamic fascism." It was a worldview in many ways derived from the works of Bernard Lewis, the scholar known as the "doyen of Middle Eastern studies."

Asked what kind of policies or statements they would hope to see from Romney and McCain, both Pipes and Kasten stressed national security and the maintenance of an aggressive posture towards combating terrorism.

"The most important issues are the defense of our country and what we do with regard to our foreign policy and I think that McCain is best qualified on defense and foreign policy issues," said Kasten.

Echoed Pipes: "On Iraq, Senator McCain has been very stalwart on that issue and vindicated." But, he added, "On Israeli politics, McCain has taken position that have been troubling to me and Romney is a relative unknown."

The subject of Giuliani's campaign implosion was also broached. And Pipes expressed obvious befuddlement over how a candidate with such promise had been stumble to such an afterthought status.

"I think it will make the subject of a very interesting book," he said. "I don't think there has ever been a campaign that has fallen apart as massively and quickly as his did in presidential history."

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