A roundup of more or less random thoughts on the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. First, of course we've all read yesterday's horrible faux pas by Mike Huckabee -- the man who would be Bill Clinton: With about 150 supporters crowded......

Is there any way for me to avoid having to write about Mike Huckabee? It's one thing to contemplate an Obama versus Romney race, but Huckabee versus Obama? Right now, the polls show Obama defeating him by more than 10......

(2) I also look forward to him explaining how Huckabee's statement that "I will never surrender ANY of our sovereignty" can be reconciled with any belief in self-restraint through international agreement whatsoever, under any circumstances. Which, of course, was the point that both Joyner and Drezner were (obviously) making. Actually, this is a good place to cite Huckabee's and Drezner's ENTIRE comments:

" 'American foreign policy needs to change its tone and attitude, open up, and reach out. The Bush administration's arrogant bunker mentality has been counterproductive at home and abroad. My administration will recognize that the United States' main fight today does not pit us against the world but pits the world against the terrorists. At the same time, my administration will never surrender any of our sovereignty, which is why I was the first presidential candidate to oppose ratification of the Law of the Sea Treaty, which would endanger both our national security and our economic interests.'

"Really, you just have to stand back and marvel at the contradiction of sentiments contained in that paragraph. It's endemic to the entire essay -- for someone who claims he wants to get rid of the bunker mentality, Huckabee offers no concrete ideas for how to do that, and a lot of policies (rejecting the Law of the Sea Treaty, using force in Pakistan, boosting defense spending by 50%) that will ensure anti-Americanism for years to come."

As for Huckabee embracing Friedman and Gaffney simultaneously: well, I still remember Jimmy Carter being asked in 1976 who his two favorite national security strategists were and replying, "Paul Nitze and Paul Warnke." Whether this is a peculiar trait of Southern governors, I don't know, but it doesn't bode well for Huckabee.

Maybe the upshot is that in both high school and foreign relations, nobody acts like a grown-up?

Something else might be of interest: he begins by comparing US foreign relations to high school. This is silly enough, but if working with students (and being a student myself) has taught me anything, it's that young people's socializing is nowhere near as simple as Huckabee makes them out to be.

If I may quote my own post on this:

"And does Huckabee remember what high school is even LIKE? I'm not so old that I've forgotten. High school is full of cliques and clubs and tribes, and very often you can be hated not for being you as an individual, but because of your "tribe." High school, if anything, is a social minefield. Since Huck refers to a "top high school student," he *might* mean "nerd" or "geek." But I remember high school -- my friends and I were all top high school students, and I can tell you that high school life did NOT look remotely like the Huckabee Thesis of High School Social Networking. We nerds could be as modest and nice and generous as Huck could want; the "popular" kids were still going to hate, reject, despise, ignore, and belittle us. On the other hand, the star athletes were dominant in all kinds of ways, and sometimes they were jerks, but they most certainly were not despised -- and in fact, sometimes they were even more popular. Go back to high school, Huckabee!"

Ross Douthat finds Huckabee unprepared to become president and considers his foreign policy amateurish:When I interviewed Mike Huckabee last month, the most amusing detail of the whole experience came when his (lone) aide murmured to me, apologetically...

I'm taking a very short break from my blogging sabbatical just to express a moment of disgust: This — from a foreign affairs white paper purportedly written by GOP presidential candidate Michael D. Huckabee and entitledAmerica's Priorities in the W...

We already spend more than all the nations on the planet, combined, on national defense and we need to up it by a third?

That's a horrible, horrible standard for judging the appropriateness of American defense spending. Were it not for the effective Pax Americana among major nation-states since 1945 -- by which I refer not to the absence of regional conflicts, because some of those have continued, but of world-wide ones like WW1 and WW2 -- the traditional pre-1945 "players" in world affairs would doubtless have spent many multiples of their current defense budgets. Their current budgets reflect our combined (but emphatically American-led) victory in the Cold War.

There are long-term advantages to the U.S. from that comparatively nonmilitaristic state of the world, and we can afford the costs of maintaining the preeminent military in the world on both a short- and long-term basis. Unless you're content for us to have the power-projection of Belgium, don't use its military spending as a measure of what's appropriate for ours.

We could let our military sink back to "mere deterrent superiority," enough to deter, say, Iran or Venezuela from not just an outright attack but (far more likely) the lesser sort of complicity in an attack comparable to that which Afghanistan's Taliban had with 9/11. But if we want to be able to project power more affirmatively and continuously (as we have done in Iraq), Huckabee's right on this point: We need to spend more than we're spending now and return to a genuine "two regional wars at once" capability.

But so, too, is this statement above, from Dr. Joyner rather than him:

One either joins the world to find common agreement on issues or one asserts the unilateral right to make rules outside ones borders.

It's profoundly silly (and, not coincidentally, very much like something you'd hear at a Democratic presidential debate) to submit these as mutually exclusive alternatives.

A nation can — and, I would argue, most American administrations have — both join the world to find common agreement on issues in which the rest of the world is willing to be reasonable, while nonetheless acting unilaterally (albeit at a cost) on other issues if that nation has the practical power to do so. Getting to an agreement for joint action is not the ultimate goal; furthering America's short- and long-term interests is. Often it's in America's short- and long-term interests to make agreements with many other countries; sometimes it's in America's short- and long-term interests to make agreements with only a subset (and sometimes a very small subset, e.g., a few on which the U.K. and the U.S. stand alone with one another); and sometimes it's in America's short- and long-term interests to say, "We're going to do our own thing."

To use a conspicuous example, the rest of the world would have been delighted to see the United States self-shackle its economy by agreeing to the Kyoto Accords, without regard to whether there's a genuine scientific justification for them or whether they proposed to treat the United States fairly. Have we paid a price for that? Oh, sure -- in whatever way you measure the cost of "derision" from demagogues like Al Gore at home or abroad. But the costs of "going along to get along" would have been vast, and not at all speculative, and would have enormously outweighed those costs -- which is why, of course, even the administration of which Gore was a part never bothered to even submit the Kyoto treaty to the Senate for consideration.

And after the fact, only genuinely irrational actors -- those who can't identify and promote their own states' rational self-interests -- will use the United States' past examples of self-interestedness as a reason to refuse to make future agreements with the U.S. that indeed are in all of the participating states' self-interest.

It is true that there is some degree of credibility that comes from a nation being willing to sometimes -- for idealistic reasons -- act in ways that are contrary to its own (usually short-term) interests (see, e.g., the Marshall Plan for a conspicuous example). But that's simply another way of saying that long-term interests may sometimes justify short-term sacrifices. And anyone, anywhere, who argues that America fares badly by comparison to any other country in sacrificing its short-term self-interests for long-term ones is a very poor student of history, badly misinformed, and/or lying for purposes of his/her own self-interested agenda.