A blistering editorial from National Review:
On Iran, Huckabee is at his most troubling. He accuses the administration of “proceeding down only one track with Iran: armed confrontation.” This is false, and the kind of rhetoric you’d expect from DailyKos bloggers, not a Republican presidential candidate. Huckabee thinks it has been a lack of diplomatic engagement that has soured our relations with Iran: “We haven’t had diplomatic relations with Iran in almost 30 years, my whole adult life and a lot of good it’s done. Putting this in human terms, all of us know that when we stop talking to a parent or a sibling or a friend, it’s impossible to accomplish anything, impossible to resolve differences and move the relationship forward. The same is true for countries.”
This is the kernel of Huckabee’s foreign policy. He wants to anthropomorphize international relations and bring a Christian commitment to the Golden Rule to our affairs with other nations. As he told the Des Moines Register the other day, “You treat others the way you’d like to be treated. That’s to me the fundamental issue that has to be re-established in our dealings with other countries.”
This is deeply naive. Countries aren’t people, and the world is more dangerous than a Sunday church social. Threats, deception, and - as a last resort - violence must play a role in international relations. Differences cannot always be worked out through sweet persuasion. A U.S. president who doesn’t realize this will repeat the experience of President Jimmy Carter at his most ineffectual.
Read the whole thing, and this as well by Clarice Feldman, and this by Ace. I’m warming to Huckabee’s electability; he’s a likeable guy and a great speaker. One could make the case that his ardently pro-life convictions matter, in the grand scheme of things, more than his un-conservative approach to economic issues and the size of government. But any president’s Job #1 is being the Commander-in-Chief and “decider” in foreign affairs. And the more I see of Huckabee’s views on foreign policy, the more he looks like a guy who has no business doing the most important part of the job.
You can read reams and reams of discussion by people who like Huckabee without ever once running across foreign or national security policy (this is true to a lesser extent of Romney; both of them seem to have teleported here from the 2000 or 1996 primaries). And I wonder: is that large a segment of the primary electorate just disinterested in the fact that there’s a war on? If so, that certainly is bad news for Rudy, who more than anyone is the candidate whose appeal is to ‘Jack Bauer’ voters who want the guy who will most relentlessly and remorselessly take on the bad guys. Rudy’s whole appeal and whole career both before and after September 11 has been based on being the guy who takes it to the bad guys of every variety - from the Mafia to Marc Rich, from Al Qaeda to Arafat, from insider traders to squeegee men. If we are re-entering a period of national hibernation - and real good news from Iraq coupled with phony good news from Iran, Palestine and North Korea suggests we are - Rudy will not go anywhere (nor will McCain, the other candidate who relies heavily on his credibility on national security).
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