A new article in the Baltimore Sun describes Mike Huckabee's recent foreign policy discussion as being closer to Ronald Reagan than George W. Bush.  Frank James points out that Huckabee is doing his level best to channel the spirit of President Ronald Reagan into his campaign.  The recent hiring of Ed Rollins as Huckabee's new national campaign manager is one example.  Rollins was the architect of the 1984 Reagan landslide presidential election of 49 of 50 states.

Huckabee created some headlines over the weekend when the text of his article in the January/February 2008 Foreign Affairs magazine was released.  His full comments can be read here in his article entitled "America's Priorities in the War on Terror: Islamists, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan."

Here is the beginning excerpt from Huckabeen's essay:

Huckabee actually sounds a lot like the Year 2000 version of George W. Bush. Remember, it was Bush, then styling himself as a compassionate conservative, who said during the 2000 presidential campaign that America needed a "humble" foreign policy.

Anyway, not long after that, Huckabee veers into what is assuredly Reagan territory, that he opposes the obscure Law of the Sea Treaty. 

Reagan opposed the treaty many conservatives disparagingly refer to as LOST as a threat to U.S. self-determination. By saying he was the first Republican presidential candidate to come out against the treaty, Huckabee is telling conservatives he was the first to see what Reagan saw, hoping that makes him more Reaganesque in their eyes than the other candidates.

This position on LOST actually puts Huckabee to the right of Bush since the president supports the treaty.

Here's another example of Huckabee trying to assume Reagan's mantle. He wants to increase military spending to Reagan-era levels when they were six percent of the gross domestic product versus 3.9 percent today. Again, this goes far beyond anything Bush has tried to achieve, even during a period when he was leading the nation's fight in two wars simultaneously.

Huckabee goes on to take a very Reaganesque view of the use of the U.S. military. He's opposed to nation-building. Bush was too, of course, until he got caught up in the neocon vision to remake Iraq as part of a new domino theory in which the nations of the greater Middle East would tumble towards democracy.

Huckabee writes:

And we must stop using active-duty forces for nation building and return to our policy of using other government agencies to build schools, hospitals, roads, sewage treatment plants, water filtration systems, electrical facilities, and legal and banking systems. We must marshal the goodwill, ingenuity, and power of our governmental and nongovernmental organizations in coordinating and implementing these essential nonmilitary functions.

 

 

 

 

Not that Huckabee disagrees with Bush on every particular. There's no discernible light between Huckabee's position on Iraq and Bush's. Here's a passage from Huckabee's essay that could have just as easily been lifted from a Bush speech:

As president, I will not withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq any faster than General David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander there, recommends. I will bring our troops home based on the conditions on the ground, not the calendar on the wall. It is still too soon to reduce the U.S. counterterrorism mission and pass the torch of security to the Iraqis. If we do not preserve and expand population security, by maintaining the significant number of forces required, we risk losing all our hard-won gains. These are significant but tenuous.