His work draws heavily on the philosophical legacy of Martin Heidegger, and while it does show the influence of the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, Spanos's vocabulary and concepts remain closer to Heidegger's Destruktion ("destruction") of metaphysics than to its philosophical successors.
Spanos takes a post-modern approach to the West, globalization, colonization, and general interventionist foreign policy.
He talks about a problem/solution mindset that America was in during the Vietnam War, and how all foreign policy now is still stuck in this framework.
Spanos' work derives from philosophers ranging from Heidegger and Nietzsche to Foucault.
It was a singular experience that he only recounted fifty years later in his autobiographical book, In the Neighborhood of Zero.