Depending upon my mood, I either think Obama is doing everything right, or just continuing the same ol same old, but in his slightly new way.
Honestly, it's a complete dilemma for me. I think we need to remove ourselves from most of the Middle East, but in today's age this doesn't mean we have to completely remove our ability to "police" the region. If you haven't been able to tell on this board, I'm not one who thinks violence solves anything. However, I'm not so naive as to think that everyone thinks this way. When you're the most powerful body on the planet, then, what is your role? To what degree does power, the presence of power, the show of power, promote peace? I'd be one that would argue nuclear weapons have made things more peaceful in the world. Without nukes, there would've been a direct War between Russia and the US. Proxies became the thing, and as ugly and horrendous as they were and are, they probably pale in comparison to basically WW3.
This continues to today. Conventional War against the US is basically a suicide wish, and so we see war being fought in proxies. Afghanistan is horrible, but it doesn't really compare to the atrocities of pretty much any war before WWII. Hell, it might not do well against some battles. The fact that America spends more than the next, what, 15 countries combined?, on our military, turns into a deterrent against other countries actually performing direct aggressive actions against us.
Being a measly human, and one without great resources, it's hard to know what's better. Continuing the arms race, showing power via drone strikes, computer viruses, etc, or trying to defuse the situation right now. The pessimist in me says that both are just really equally bad, that in the end, there will be enough asshole humans to always fuck things up. But since the arms race means more powerful weapons, this means one asshole can do much worse damage, theoretically. That makes me lean towards defusing he situation, or trying to.
The optimist in me says that just possibly, the arms race can actually achieve world peace. When you read neocons justifications for war, it's often admirable, if misguided. They want to spread democracy, which is saying they want to spread freedom. It's hard to conceive how us American's can say this is bad, on the basic level. What's misguided, is their failure to connect socioeconomic conditions with the possibility of stable democracies, or even stable countries. In poorly developed countries, monarchies / centralized power maintains order better than a democracy. A middle class is vitally important for a stable democracy existing, and for a moderate state coming about. This isn't something you can just give, you can't give a country a middle class. So then, what if the US did become so powerful, that it really did effectively become the World government? Historically, modernizing countries have a king, who finds himself in a Dilemma. This dilemma can cause problems, but not if the power's that be are the US, and they side with the people. In the long run, and after economic development, this could lead to more or less stable democracies, a realization of the Kantian dream, and at the very least, one of the largest Pax era's of all time.
/rant
Hopefully I was able to edit myself enough to make sense. But basically, I find myself torn between something like Obama's foreign policy - ending direct occupation (Iraq and Afghanistan), supporting democratic uprisings as opposed to our history of supporting the monarchs (though Syria is enigmatic) - and Pauls solution of getting our troops out, and trading with the reason. Economics is an important factor in considering a countries modernization, so trading is a very good long-term strategy.