Matt Welch Asks, Is Barack Obama a Stealth Libertarian?
For two groups who share a strong antipathy toward the current president, libertarians and conservatives sure don't agree on much when it comes to Barack Obama. On foreign policy, neoconservatives tend to think Obama is an appeasement-addicted driver of America's perilous withdrawal from the world, while libertarians portray him as essentially serving out the third and fourth terms of George W. Bush. When the president announced in May that U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan would be reduced to 9,800, Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol called the plan "unbelievably irresponsible" and "totally crazy," while Reason's own Nick Gillespie lamented that "Obama gives 10,000 men opportunity to be last man to die for our mistake." It's always a healthy exercise to check your premises and examine whether the people you disagree with may be onto something. But even if you're 100 percent secure in your assessment of the commander in chief, Matt Welch proposes a potentially awful scenario to consider: What if Barack Obama turns out to be the most libertarian president of the post-Cold War era?