During the Cold War, you were a hawk or a dove, but this new world requires us to be a phoenix, to rise from the ashes of the twin towers with a whole new game plan for this very different enemy. Being a phoenix means constantly reinventing ourselves, dying to mistakes and miscalculations, changing tactics and strategies, rising reborn to meet each new challenge and seize each new opportunity. ~Mike Huckabee (from his official campaign site, no less)

Via Alex Massie

So Mike Huckabee promises us a foreign policy that will make sure that America repeatedly bursts into flame for all of eternity.  That’s the kind of bold, new thinking you don’t get from just any candidate.  You do almost have to admire how this strained metaphor sits awkwardly beside the call for a “whole new game plan,” while said plan is, of course, nowhere to be found.

Meanwhile, Sweden should be concerned:

When I make foreign policy, I want to be able to treat Saudi Arabia the same way I treat Sweden, and that requires us to be energy independent.

Implicit in this statement is that he would really like to treat Saudi Arabia badly (on behalf of, as he says, “the good guys,” who remain conveniently unnamed), but cannot because of oil dependence.  What did Sweden ever do to Mike Huckabee?

P.S.  Lost in the jungles of Huckabee’s rhetoric are at least a couple reasonable views (e.g., support for the Powell Doctrine in the event of military action).  Unfortunately, I fear that Huckabee’s national security and foreign policy ideas are as muddled and incoherent as his domestic policy proposals.  One moment he will say something refreshingly sane, and then start barking about Islamofascism.