Catch Gingrich at the right moment and he'd enthusiastically embrace most or perhaps all of those strategies, and others besides, never acknowledging the necessary tradeoffs or committing to one approach if it requires granting that others are thereby foreclosed. He isn't a man of vision or grand strategy, but a treasure trove of tactics that he sporadically recommends, usually talking about whichever one he's settled upon as if it is actually a grand strategy, or the only logical step to take given the stylized account of reality he has most recently conjured.

Usually, there are smarter ways to think about the subject at hand.

In a recent episode of RadioLab, the podcast explored the origin stories of various ailments, including AIDS. Listening to the episode, I couldn't help but be struck by the fact that, amid all of the worrying our culture has done about pandemic diseases, whether after the publication of Richard Preston's The Hot Zone or during the anthrax attacks on the United States postal system, most of us have in fact lived through the rise of a killer virus that spread through the population and killed many millions. As the National Institute of Health puts it, "AIDS is the sixth leading cause of death among people ages 25 - 44 in the United States, down from number one in 1995. The World Health Organization estimates that more than 25 million people worldwide have died from this infection since the start of the epidemic." That's the 9/11 attacks times roughly 8,500!

A sane strategy to protect Americans from death by pandemic would be premised on possibility of a naturally arising scourge or a terrorist created bio-weapon, then apply our scarce resources to guard against both. In reality, even establishment politicians who don't mind spending money on public health and scientific research are more likely to treat military endeavors and other counterterrorism spending as the primary way Americans can be protected from pandemic disease, if you judge by their actual funding decisions and the focus of their rhetoric.

The total CDC budget request for 2011 was $10.8 billion. The NIH requested $32 billion. A small fraction of those sums will be dedicated to protecting Americans against future pandemics. The Iraq War has so far cost $800 billion and is ultimately going to cost $4 trillion, or perhaps even more. Whatever you think of that war's wisdom, it is highly dubious to argue that waging it for years on end was justified as part of a strategy to keep us safe from a pandemic.

Yet that's why Gingrich wanted to stay -- to help alleviate the future threat of biological and nuclear weapons.

Gingrich's problem isn't that he thinks our military and CIA should seek to stop terrorists from acquiring or using bio-weapons. They should! The point is that we have a scarce resources to fight pandemic diseases, and waging a series of foreign wars over the next several decades -- that's what Gingrich envisions when he talks about World War III - is a dubious way to allocate them if massive death via pathogen is one of the primary threats about which you're worried.