Open    Access



American Foreign Policy and Diplomacy During and After the Arab Spring, the Challenge of Democratization & the Legacy of President Obama’s Administration



Author(s)

Ahmed Y. Zohny

Full-Text PDF XML     644 Views

DOI:10.17265/2328-2134/2017.07.001

Recent scholarship on great-power foreign policy and diplomacy undermines President Obama’s realist approach compared to his predecessor Bush’s neoconservative idealism approach to the Middle East’s geopolitical enduring Arab-Israeli conflict, the rising power of political Islam, the unexpected events of the Arab Spring, along with the challenge of democratization. This article genealogically examines President Obama’s foreign policy and diplomacy in response to the chronology of the unfolding events of the Arab Spring in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, Bahrain, and Yemen that witnessed the Arab Spring of 2011. President Obama and his top diplomats’ performances in response to each country recounting events were assessed, critically analyzed, and compared to the other in terms of the U.S. bilateral relations with each country, U.S. national interests, and her strategic goals in the Middle East region. The researcher analyzed the aforementioned issues within the complicated realities of the Palestinian/Arab Israeli conflict, the rising power of political Islam on the Middle East’s ground manifested by the Muslim Brotherhood rise to power in Egypt, ISIS in Iraq and Syria, and Libya, and the rivalry between Sunni and Shia’a—supported by Iran in Lebanon, Syria, Bahrain, and Yemen. The research findings indicate that in a broader sense Obama’s foreign policy and diplomacy has been a movement away from the U.S. foreign policy and diplomacy since World War II, particularly when he (Obama) decided that the U.S. should abstain from exercising the veto power at the United Nations (UN) on resolution 2334 in support of the Palestinian right to have their own state, thus following the consensus of other permanent members of the UN security council and international law.

American foreign policy, diplomacy, Arab Spring, political Islam, national interests