Abstract:
What explains American foreign policy in the Arab World? What does the US reaction to the
Arab Spring tell us about Washington’s presumed determination to promote democracy in the
Arab world? This thesis operationalizes these research questions by looking at three case studies:
the US reaction to the 2006 Lebanese-Israeli War, the US reaction to the 2011 Bahraini uprising,
and the March 2011 uprising against Bashar Al-Assad’s regime in Syria. It does so by
interrogating Washington’s policies toward these three cases against the geopolitical calculations
of realism and the legacy of neoconservatism. The thesis also spells out the implications of the
decisions taken in the aforementioned three cases on the US’s image in the region and its
geopolitical interests in the Middle East.
