John Arquilla: Want To Understand Obama’s Foreign Policy? Read Hegel, not Hagel

John Arquilla is professor of defense analysis at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, author of Worst Enemy: The Reluctant Transformation of the American Military, and co-editor of Afghan Endgames: Strategy and Policy Choices for America's Longest War.

The centuries-long dispute over whether and how much the United States should intervene in world affairs may at last be headed toward a resolution. A prominent early view, held by many of the founding fathers and aptly summarized by John Quincy Adams, enjoined Americans not to "go abroad in search of monsters to destroy." In the 1930s, the "America First" political movement clearly grew from this perspective. The most recent exposition of the case for a far less activist foreign policy has come this month in the form of MIT Professor Barry Posen's admonition in Foreign Affairs to limit commitments, downsize the armed forces, and "pull back" from the world.

The other side of the debate articulates a view about the crucial need to remain fully engaged in international affairs and has a similarly deep lineage, most notably going back to the Monroe doctrine (1823), which aimed to carve out a de facto hemispheric no-go zone for European colonial powers. President John F. Kennedy's call to in 1961 to "pay any price, bear any burden" in the cause of protecting liberty is also in sync with this perspective. As is the "lean forward" argument currently being advanced by Stephen Brooks, G. John Ikenberry, and William Wohlforth -- though they are much more cognizant of the need to be attentive to cost issues.

Somehow, over the course of his first term, Barack Obama has skillfully blended the best of both sides of the debate, along the way advancing a very cool doctrine that I would sum up as "lean back." It is very much in the spirit of German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's concept of finding the middle way between sharply opposing views -- that is, to "synthesize" them. This is exactly what the Obama doctrine does. It respects the need to remain engaged in the high politics of world affairs, but it does so in an extremely economical fashion...