This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, December 18th, 2012.

I'm Caleb Brown.

With the election behind him, President Obama should focus more on the interventionism he's inherited from himself.

Afghanistan, Syria, and a bloated military budget will loom large for the Obama administration

in 2013.

That according to Chris Preble, Vice President for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute.

Well, the next big piece of information that we should all be kind of focused on is the number of

troops that are likely to remain in Afghanistan and under what circumstances

and that and so much of the debate about Iraq ultimately

kind of boiled down to the the status of forces agreement and the kind of the legal status that our troops in Iraq would have, would they be protected

from prosecution or that is in the event that they were accused of a crime, would they be dealt with in American courts?

This is a fairly traditional expectation

when we have US troops stationed permanently overseas.

Most of the places where they are, we have extraterritoriality,

which would give them those protections.

That's going to be a really big point of contention, I'm afraid,

and negotiation with the Afghans because Karzai and others have

taken a position very similar to the Iraqis, which is if you're going to stay here, you're going

to be subject to our laws.

And I think rightly the Obama

administration did not kowtow to the Iraqis, did not capitulate, did not expose our

troops to those risks and chose to withdraw from Iraq.

...