Huckabee’s World View
The final Republican and Democratic debates before the January 3 Iowa caucuses were judged ho-hum affairs by the political media. Surging Republican candidate Mike Huckabee, however, continues to generate great interest and a scramble for information about his views. Some takeaways from his new essay in the winter edition of Foreign Affairs:
- Huckabee starts out in the second paragraph asserting he will change the tone of American foreign policy by reaching out more, adding: “The Bush administration’s arrogant bunker mentality has been counterproductive at home and abroad.” Huckabee then proceeds to declare his opposition to the Law of the Sea Treaty, which he sees as a threat to U.S. sovereignty;
- Like most other candidates from both parties, Huckabee says he will reach out to moderates in the Muslim world to counter the jihadi influence. His chief tool would be soft power – helping with health care, education, institution building, etc. Huckabee says: “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.”
- Also like most other candidates, particularly Republicans, Huckabee wants to bolster the size of the military. He seeks a surge of 92,000 troops in the Army and Marine Corps over the next five years and wants boost defense spending to Reagan-era levels of six percent of GDP, from the currently 3.9 percent. Unlike many other candidates, Huckabee wants to remove active-duty forces from nation building, leaving the infrastructure, financial and associated tasks to other government agencies.
- On Iraq, he would generally stay the course but faults the Bush administration for neglecting the problem with Turkey’s Kurdish separatists launching attacks on Turkey from Iraqi territory. He would give Turkey the go-ahead to launch limited strikes to go after PKK forces in northern Iraq.
- On Iran, he joins the ranks of candidates who retain the military option for dealing with Tehran. He calls for aggressive diplomacy to contain Iran’s ambitions but also signals he would move to reestablish diplomatic ties. Huckabee says the information gaps ahead of the Iraq war are lesson that, if nothing else, U.S. diplomats on the scene provide valuable intelligence about what’s going on: “Before we put boots on the ground elsewhere, we had better have wingtips there first.”
