Republican contender for the presidential nomination Mike Huckabee has a piece published in ‘Foreign Affairs’ magazine: America’s Priorities in the War on Terror Islamists, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan. For an overall look at the foreign policy he would conduct, if elected, I can’t do much better than James Joyner, at Outside the Beltway blog. Of particular note is the way in which Huckabee ‘takes his ideas’ from polar opposites Thomas Friedman of The New York Times and Neo-Conservative Frank Gaffney. Melding the world views of those two would require a force akin to nuclear fusion.

The piece takes a popular, though gratuitous, slap at Saudi Arabia:

…The United States’ biggest challenge in the Arab and Muslim worlds is the lack of a viable moderate alternative to radicalism. On the one hand, there are radical Islamists willing to fight dictators with terrorist tactics that moderates are too humane to use. On the other, there are repressive regimes that stay in power by force and through the suppression of basic human rights — many of which we support by buying oil, such as the Saudi government, or with foreign aid, such as the Egyptian government, our second-largest recipient of aid.

Although we cannot export democracy as if it were Coca-Cola or KFC, we can nurture moderate forces in places where al Qaeda is seeking to replace modern evil with medieval evil. Such moderation may not look or function like our system — it may be a benevolent oligarchy or more tribal than individualistic — but both for us and for the peoples of those countries, it will be better than the dictatorships they have now or the theocracy they would have under radical Islamists. The potential for such moderation to emerge is visible in the way that Sunni tribal leaders in Iraq have turned against al Qaeda to work with us; they could not stand the thought of living under such fundamentalism and brutality. The people of Afghanistan turned against the Taliban for the same reason. To know these extremists is not to love them.

As president, my goal in the Arab and Muslim worlds will be to calibrate a course between maintaining stability and promoting democracy. It is self-defeating to attempt too much too soon: doing so could mean holding elections that the extremists would win. But it is also self-defeating to do nothing. We must first destroy existing terrorist groups and then attack the underlying conditions that breed them: the lack of basic sanitation, health care, education, jobs, a free press, fair courts — which all translates into a lack of opportunity and hope. The United States’ strategic interests as the world’s most powerful country coincide with its moral obligations as the richest. If we do not do the right thing to improve life in the Muslim world, the terrorists will step in and do the wrong thing.
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Huckabee appeals to those who think ‘energy independence’ is something that a) is achievable and b) is desirable. On both points, he’s wrong.

As the Joyner review details, what Huckabee proposes is not a policy, but a collection of wishes. Doesn’t look like he’ll be getting my vote.