This is what happens when a presidential candidate knows nothing about foreign policy:

The United Nations has been an extraordinary failure of late," [U.S. presidential candidate Mitt] Romney said in response to a question at a pancake house along the coast of early voting South Carolina. "We should withdraw from the United Nations Human Rights Council."

Except that the United States, um, already boycotts the U.N. Human Rights Council.

Here's where Romney's rhetoric is less obviously mistaken, but equally wrong:

Romney also said he would support a new "coalition of the free nations of the world and bring those nations together so that we can act together."

"We should develop some of our own _ if you will _ forums and alliances or groups that have the ability to actually watch out for the world and do what's right," Romney said.

If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride. There's an idea floating out there in various guises about creating a "League of Democracies" as a way to circumvent the Security Council, where China and Russia often thwart Western initiatives. (FP contributor Paul J. Saunders explains why this is little more than wishful thinking in this Washington Post op-ed.)

The good news is that little of what presidential candidates say during campaigns becomes policy once they are in office. Once you're sitting behind that desk in the Oval Office, either reality hits you over the head with a brick or unexpected events take you in a different direction. Remember when George Bush said we weren't going to do nation-building anymore? Or further back, when Bill Clinton called for the United States to put more pressure on China over its lousy record on human rights?