Now that the Iowa caucuses have confirmed his position as a top tier candidate for the Republican nomination, Mike Huckabee's frighteningly slim knowledge of foreign policy actually matters. If they know anything about his views at all, most Americans have probably heard about his statement on the Don Imus radio show that "I may not know anyting about foreign policy, but I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night." It was a decent joke, and a good way to deflect attention from the real issue.

But the time for joking about Huckabee's lack of foreign policy expertise has passed. What does he actually think about Iraq, Pakistan, Iran and other hot button foreign policy issues? The answers are more complicated than you might expect.

First, what about the vast store of things Huckabee doesn't know about the world? After all, he's the one who claimed that the second largest flow of immigrants into the United States across the Mexican border is made up of Pakistanis. And, he was not aware of the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran four hours after it was released, and long after other candidates had read and publicly commented on it. When confronted with his slow response, Huckabee said of President Bush "he hasn't read it in four years, why should I have to read it in four hours?" Of course, this only compounded the problem, since the NIE was of much more recent vintage -- this particular document didn't exist four years ago.

Compounding Huckabee's problem on this front is that, unlike George W. Bush, he has not assembled a team of experienced advisors to school him on key foreign policy matters. During his first run for office, Bush seemed to be joined at the hip with Colin Powell; Huckabee is joined at the hip with that well known foreign policy expert, Chuck Norris. Bush was also being tutored by Condoleezza Rice, and he had an inner circle of advisors that included Richard Armitage, Paul Wolfowitz and (of course) Dick Cheney. Whatever one thinks of their views (and I don't think much of them), there was no question that these were people with experience at crafting and implementing foreign and national security policies.

Who's advising Huckabee? The only known experts are J. French Hill, a former Treasury department official in the George H.W. Bush administration, and Frank Gaffney, a neo-conservative in good standing who runs the Center for Security Policy in Washington. Huckabee also tried to claim former UN Ambassador John Bolton as an informal advisor, but when contacted on the matter Bolton indicated that the two men had never spoken to each other. And to round out a rather sketchy picture, in a New York Times magazine profile Huckabee cited both Gaffney and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman as key influences on his foreign policy thinking.

So, he doesn't exactly have a deep reservoir of advice to draw upon (this could obviously change later, if he remains the frontrunner). But what has he said on the key issues? One would think that a guy with Frank Gaffney on his team and a desire to "learn" from John Bolton might have a straight neo-conservative line. But that's only half of the story.

In an attention-grabbing article in the new issue of Foreign Affairs, Huckabee has asserted that "the Bush administration's arrogant bunker mentality has been counterproductive at home and abroad." In the Foreign Affairs piece and a September 2007 speech at the Center for Strategic and International studies that served as the basis for the article, Huckabee takes a number of positions that would fit comfortably into the platform of a liberal Democrat.

In a call for nurturing "native moderate forces" in the Middle East, Huckabee has suggested that "we have existing repressive governments that stay in power by force and suppression of basic human rights -- many of which we support, either with our oil money, like the Saudis, or with our aid, like the Egyptians." While noting that "we can't export democracy as if it was Coca Cola or KFC," he argues that the U.S. can support the development of governments that are "better than either the dictatorships they have now or the theocracy they would have under the radical Islamists."

On Iran, Huckabee is far more open to wide ranging negotiations than are any of his Republican rivals, as noted in his CSIS speech: "We have valuable incentives to offer Iran in exchange for helping to stabilize Iraq; not supporting the Taliban, Hamas, and Hezbollah; and abandoning its nuclear ambitions -- trade and economic assistance, full diplomatic relations and security guarantees . . . we have substantive issues to negotiate with them."

Huckabee also takes a much more skeptical view of the Musharraf regime in Pakistan than many of his rivals do (a position he held well before the recent crisis spurred by the assassination of Benazir Bhutto). He essentially sees Musharraf as a man attached to his own power and privileges at the expense of U.S. interests in the region. In addition, Huckabee targets inequality as a major force in the destabilization of the country: "Both civilian and military governments have consistently favored the rich . . .Social progress has lagged dramatically behind economic progress, with per capita income in 2006 at $720 per year. Estimates of its literacy range from 30 to 50%. While the mililtary gets 25% of the budget, health, education, and social services get less than 3%."

This is the "liberal" Mike Huckabee, the man that his conservative critics have derided as "the Republican Jimmy Carter."

But Huckabee's surprising stands on the above-mentioned issues are counterbalanced with a much more standard menu of conservative stances. He wants to add 92,000 troops to the armed forces -- a hawkish position, but more or less in line with what Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have advocated. More startlingly, he wants to jack up the military budget from 3.9% of GDP to 6% of GDP, a huge increase at a time when U.S. military expenditures are already at their highest levels since World War II.

Then there is his promise to launch unilateral strikes into Pakistan if the government in Islamabad doesn't eliminate Taliban and Al Qaeda havens in the tribal areas. Huckabee has tried to package this aggressive proposal in a homey analogy, saying that it would not be akin to a military occupation but to a kid retrieving a baseball that went over the fence into his neighor's yard. Quick, short, then get out. Where have we heard that before?

And on Iraq, Huckabee is straight out of the Bush mold. He talks of a "path to victory" and pledges that "We will remain in Iraq into the next administration, and I am prepared to finish this war with honor and victory."

So, if elected (still a long shot), which Huckabee would it be? The liberal diplomat who's concerned about increasing education and reducing inequality in Pakistan and elsewhere, or the conservative hawk who wants to increase the military budget by 50%, launch unilateral strikes in Pakistan, and "stay the course" in Iraq? Or both?

Stay tuned -- if he stays near the front of the pack, he will hopefully be pressed to set out a more consistent foreign policy perspective.