Over at National Review Online, Pete Wehner has a good deconstruction of Mike Huckabee’s Foreign Affairs article. I have little to add to Pete’s comments except to note the contradictory nature of Huck’s second paragraph. It runs as follows:

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.

It is telling that Huckabee seemingly cannot see the tension between the first three sentences of that paragraph, which contain standard liberal boilerplate denouncing the Bush administration’s alleged failure to “reach out” to the rest of the world, and the final line, which contains standard right-wing boilerplate denouncing the Law of the Sea Treaty, of all things.

It is odd even to mention the Law of the Sea Treaty so high up in an essay laying out foreign policy priorities. Although it has been denounced by some conservatives who claim the treaty would infringe on American sovereignty, whether you are for or against it, the treaty is a mere footnote in terms of American foreign policy priorities. It may or may not be a good idea—I’m agnostic—but it’s a stretch to claim that it “would endanger both our national security and our economic interests,” much less to suggest that it is the top threat to those interests.

But it is especially odd for Huckabee to trumpet his opposition to a treaty that has been embraced by most of the rest of the world and even by the Bush administration, while claiming that his administration will be more “open” than the current one to the rest of the world. Rejecting the Law of the Sea Treaty is exactly the kind of move—along the lines of the Bush administration’s rejection of treaties on global warming, landmines, and the International Criminal Court—that drives other countries, especially our European allies, batty. It is hardly the kind of gesture that the next president would pick to suggest that his administration is going to end an alleged “bunker mentality.”