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Republican presidential candidate John McCain jets off to Colombia tonight, where he'll stay for just a day before visiting Mexico. While he'll no doubt devote most of his time to photo ops with presidents Uribe and Calderon, here are a few things Senator McCain (or any future U.S. president) ought to know about Latin America before he goes:

• No "radical socialist revolution" is sweeping the region. Aside from Venezuela's Chávez, the aging Castro brothers, and to a lesser extent, Bolivia's Evo Morales and Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega, Latin American leaders are moderates (e.g. Lula in Brazil, Kirchner in Argentina, and Bachelet in Chile). These countries enjoy fairly good relations with El Norte, with which they have cooperated more closely on the trade and environmental fronts in recent years. Lula even signed an ethanol accord last year with George W. Bush, promising to boost research and production of biofuels.
• Since 9/11, President Bush has spent more time on security issues than on building Latin American goodwill. Talks on immigration reform with then-Mexican President Vicente Fox stalled and immigration enforcement got tougher. Latin American opposition to the Iraq invasion got pretty heated too -- Mexico and Chile both voted against the invasion at the U.N. in 2003, to Bush's displeasure. A transcript released last year revealed that Bush even threatened to stall a free trade agreement with Chile if the country voted against the United States. Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and El Salvador each had troops in Iraq at one point, but only El Salvador's remain.
• The drug war remains a major flashpoint. From 2000 to 2006, the United States spent $5.5 billion on Plan Colombia to combat drug production in the Andes, but cocaine production rose 14 percent from 2002 to 2007. Aerial spraying, an integral part of Plan Colombia, often kills licit crops and destroys farmers' livelihoods. And farmers in Bolivia have recently said they will stop accepting aid from USAID because the United States "undermines" leftist President Evo Morales. They plan to rely on Venezuela for help instead.
• Trade brings its own share of touchy points. NAFTA has met with mixed reviews for the less-than-expected boost it has given the Mexican economy. Many in Latin America fear that CAFTA will have a similar impact -- Costa Rica just narrowly ratified the agreement, almost two years after the U.S. Congress passed it. In Colombia, 57 percent approve of the proposed bilateral free trade agreement with the United States, which awaits congressional approval. President Bush and Senator McCain both support it, but Human Rights Watch has warned against its passage, citing the hundreds of Colombian trade unionists that have allegedly been killed by paramilitaries in recent years. Leading Democrats, including Barack Obama, also oppose the agreement in its current form.

State.gov

This may be the fresh approach American foreign policy has been looking for. According to The Miami Herald, U.S. Amb. James Cason has become a singing sensation in Paraguay after learning the native Guaraní language and recording an album of indigenous folk songs.

Cason, who became ambassador to Paraguay in 2005, has become quite the hit. His songs are in heavy rotation on local radio stations and he drew 1,000 to a sold-out downtown concert. He's used the proceeds from the concert and album sales to raise over $20,000 for English-language education scholarships, gaining plenty of attention from the locals along the way:

He's been on TV and in all the newspapers,'' said Nelson Viveros, 16, who traveled to meet the ambassador recently in Encarnación, by the Argentina border. "It's strange, but people love it.''

Not everyone is convinced. One Paraguyan senator, who has asked Paraguay's legislature to denounce Cason, said the diplomat "sings horribly and his pronunciation of Guaraní words is stammering. It is an offense to the Paraguayan people."

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Yesterday, Pyongyang submitted a long-overdue declaration of its nuclear programs to China, in accordance with agreements made during the six-party talks. U.S. President George W. Bush welcomed the move as "one step in the multi-step process laid out by the six-party talks," immediately lifted the application of the Trading with the Enemy Act, and notified Congress of his intent to remove North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism.

What does all this mean in practice? The Bush administration's moves are highly symbolic, and unlikely to have any immediate, practical impact. Most U.S. sanctions based on the Trading with the Enemy Act (pdf) were already lifted in 2000, and most of those still in place are authorized by an overlapping hodgepodge of other laws and regulations. Minor changes will go into effect -- for instance, some imports from North Korea will no longer require licenses -- but for the most part trade policies will remain unchanged.

Bush's intention to remove North Korea from the state sponsors of terror list is a similarly symbolic gambit; the actual removal cannot go into effect for 45 days after the notification to Congress, and in any case it is probably contingent on verifying North Korea's nuclear declaration. Countries on the terror list cannot receive, among other things, U.S. economic aid or loans from the World Bank and other financial institutions. Removing North Korea from the list may allow more money to flow in, but, as a U.S. Treasury spokesman noted yesterday, sanctions aimed at preventing money laundering, illicit finance, and weapons proliferation will remain firmly in place.

Practicalities aside, this development has rightly been hailed as a diplomatic success; the New York Times today declared it a "triumph." The path to a denuclearized North Korea is still long and the process could easily be derailed at any point, but it is nice to finally have some reason, however slight, for optimism.

U.S. State Department

The U.S. embassy in Cairo is a fortress-like compound, sequestered in the leafy, decaying neighborhood of Garden City along the east bank of the Nile. Merely to stand before the outer blast wall, you have to pass through a security checkpoint and explain your business.

But maybe the U.S. mission to Egypt isn't as impregnable as it seems. A body was recently discovered on the embassy's lush grounds, and Margaret Scobey, the new U.S. ambassador, has demanded a full-scale investigation. The body was sent out for autopsy to experts in Cairo and swiftly returned to the United States for burial.

Thing is, it's the ambassador's dog that we're talking about, not a person. The animal might have died accidentally after eating poison intended for feral cats. But Scobey wants to make sure, pan-Arab daily al-Hayat reports:

Americans in Egypt say that the ambassador's state of extreme anger has forced the embassy's security to cooperate [with] Egyptian authorities in spending considerable time on proving that the incident was not a premeditated attack and that the embassy's security measures, employees and the ambassador's home and household are safe. After all, a successful attempt to murder the ambassador's dog sends a message that it is possible to commit the same crime against Americans working at the ambassador's home or against the ambassador herself.

(Hat tip: Brian Whitaker)

I see that Andrew Sullivan wants Barack Obama to keep Bob Gates as his secretary of defense if he wins in November. That would certainly be neat, but it remains highly implausible. Matt Yglesias and Spencer Ackerman suggest a few alternatives from within the Democratic Party, some more realistic than others.

From left: Holbrooke, Madeleine Albright, Lake, and AL Gore; FILE: Getty Images

Barack Obama is fond of citing Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals, not least because the Illinois senator styles himself as Lincoln's heir, but also because, as he put it to Time's Joe Klein, "The lesson is to not let your ego or grudges get in the way of hiring absolutely the best people."

But if Obama really wanted to put this proposition to the test, he might consider bringing Richard Holbrooke into the fold. Holbrooke, a Democratic Party heavyweight on foreign policy and the point man on the Dayton Accords that ended the Bosnian civil war, was conspicuously absent from Obama's national-security working group, announced Wednesday.

Yes, Holbrooke strongly backed Hillary Clinton in the primary, which probably wasn't a good way to endear him to the eventual nominee. But I mention Holbrooke because of his famous feud with Anthony Lake, who was Bill Clinton's first national security advisor and is now a key member of Team Obama's inner circle. As the late David Halberstam recounts in War In a Time Peace, his book on Clinton-era foreign policy, Holbrooke and Lake were once close friends and rising stars in the diplomatic establishment. But their friendly rivalry turned ugly when Holbrooke was made ambassador to Germany instead of scoring a top job. Halberstam writes:

His slippage in the pecking order in the world of foreign policy was especially painful for Holbrooke friends thought, because Lake ended up with one of the two prized jobs, national security adviser. Their friendship had always had an unstated competitive quality, and now Lake seemed to be the clear winner and had, in Holbrooke's eyes, worked against his place in the administration. As a result, a simmering tension now existed between the two old friends, turning them into genuine enemies.

Their relationship was apparently no better when Holbrooke returned from the German wilderness to take the lead on Bosnia:

Their personal friendship, once so close, had long ago been shattered, and they worked in an atmosphere of barely disguised rivalry and distrust.

So, if he really wanted to be the second coming of Lincoln, Obama would put his money where his mouth is and bring Holbrooke back. At the least, it might inject some much-needed drama back into the campaign.

The Telegraph reports on top Obama advisor Richard Danzig's recent talk at the Center for a New American Security. "Winnie the Pooh seems to me to be a fundamental text on national security," Danzig began.

Mr Danzig spelt out the need to change by reading a paragraph from chapter one of the children's classic, which says: "Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump on the back of his head behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming down stairs. But sometimes he thinks there really is another way if only he could stop bumping a minute and think about it."

Danzig was secretary of the Navy in the Clinton administration and would be a prime contender for national security advisor if Obama won in November.

The authors of the controversial book on the influence of the Israel lobby on U.S. foreign policy have made their first trip to Israel since the book was published. A few hundred students and faculty at Hebrew University turned out to see Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer argue their case. The result? A lively and largely cordial debate. Their visit had its fair share of detractors, but a threatened boycott failed to materialize. In fact, this is about as heated as it got:

International relations student Liad Gilhar, 25, accused the professors of distorting facts and providing fodder for anti-Semites.

"You need to choose your words carefully," Gilhar said.

Walt shot back: "With all due respect, I don't think it is my words that harm Israel, but rather Israel's actions."

A professor criticized the authors for failing to condemn Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called for Israel to be wiped off the map. "I don't think he is inciting to genocide," Walt responded.