Barack Obama: Stealth Libertarian? As unlikely as it sounds, anti-interventionists may miss the 44th president when he's gone.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: From the top - Editorial

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."

Depending on how you view the world, the president is alternately prostrating himself before Vladimir Putin, as in a recent National Review cover illustration, or engaging in a campaign of "subvert and overthrow," as at Antiwar.com. He is waging a "foreign policy of retreat" if you ask Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, or one of "bellicose... interventionism" if you're listening to the Ron Paul Institute's Daniel McAdams. He is imperiously refusing to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, or he is recklessly releasing Gitmo prisoners into the wild.

This interpretative disconnect does not stop at the water's edge. Obama has been a profound disappointment to civil libertarians who hate the drug war (see reason's October 2011 cover: "Bummer"), and an active encourager of marijuana culture, according to Sean Hannity's recent "Stoned in America" series on Fox News. Fiscal hawks condemn the president as a profligate promise-breaker when it comes to the national purse; New York Times columnist David Brooks counters that Obama is "the most realistic and reasonable major player in Washington," and that "if he had some support" on long-term debt reduction issues, "he'd do the right thing."

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, here's a potentially awful scenario to consider: What if Barack Obama turns out to be the most libertarian president of the post-Cold War era?

Before you go screaming for the exits, let me quickly stress that "most libertarian" within a small group of people does not equal "libertarian"--just as being the tallest kindergartner...