America. (c2014)

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.