Pete Wehner, who used to work in the White House (he was on Karl Rove’s staff, number one behind Rove) has a piece today on Huckabee.

It’s at National Review Online, and he also wants to take issue with the first two paragraphs of Huckabee’s essay that he wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine, particularly the claim by Huckabee that we’re too mean around the world; we’re trying to dominate the world, and we need to be more like a top high school student, modest about our abilities and achievements, generous, and then we will be loved. If we keep dominating people, we’ll be despised, and “the Bush administration’s arrogant and bunker mentality has been counterproductive at home and abroad.”

Now, understandably, Mr. Wehner, is a former member of the president’s staff working with Karl Rove. So keep that in mind as I share with you just some brief comments from his essay today.

“The fact is that the United States has sacrificed an enormous amount of blood and treasure to help other nations. Any suggestion otherwise is wrong and even offensive.” This animus against the US. “We have, for starters, liberated more than 50 million people from two of the most repressive regimes in modern history (the Taliban and the Baathist police state in Iraq).” That doesn’t count all the others that have been liberated over the course of our existence. “The global AIDS initiative qualifies as among the most humane and generous acts in the history of American foreign policy. We give billions in additional foreign aid, including the enormous generosity America displayed in helping Indonesia and other nations in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami … The United States, while imperfect, ranks as perhaps the most benevolent superpower (to say nothing of its status as a benevolent nation) in human history.

Unlike past empires, we are using American power and influence for great good instead of as a means of advancing oppression.

“Beyond that, the belief that if we are modest and generous we will be ‘loved’ by other nations, and that anger at America is based on our attempts to ‘dominate,’ is both naive and foolish. Some nations (like Cuba, Syria, Iran, North Korea, and others) will oppose us because they are totalitarian states that hate our efforts to curb their ambitions and advance freedom and self-determination. They are not the loving kind. Other nations (like France under Jacques Chirac) will oppose us because they can’t stand the idea of a unipolar world and want to counterbalance it. And other nations (like [the ChiComs] and Russia) will oppose our efforts to end genocide in Darfur and keep Iran from gaining nuclear weapons because of their economic interests. Memo to Mike Huckabee: Sometimes we are despised for all the right reasons” — Pete Wehner.

That’s just an excerpt from his piece at National Review Online today.

If you really want the world to love us, really want the world to love us, stop foreign aid. Just cut ’em off! You’ll see every country on this planet look at us with love, affection, open arms. They’ll come begging on bended knee.

I guarantee you, it will never happen, but it would make us the most loved nation on the face of the Earth