Obama döneminde ABD'nin Ortadoğu politikası

Abstract

The scope of this thesis consists of the US foreign policy towards the Middle East region between the years 2009-2017. The purpose of this study is to identify the US' strategy in the Middle East, the dynamics behind this strategy, and to determine by which orientation and methods can the policy choices be explained during the Obama era. In the thesis, the method of case analysis has been used. In the study, it has been determined that the US during the Obama era, seeing its national interests as the continuation of its hegemony, re-evaluated its foreign policy and the national capacity components in order not to lose its power against the rivals whose influence increased within the framework of the security dilemma and to protect its position in the international structure. Impacts of long-term wars and internal factors such as financial situation, public opinion and foreign policy trends had not been disregarded in this re-evaluation. It has been determined that to reduce the increasing political and economic costs of its hegemony, by transforming into a strategy of Restraint and Offshore Balancing and changing its foreign policy tendencies and methods, the USA, restricted its interventionist foreign policy understanding by seeking consent and legitimacy in the international system and revised its resource allocation accordingly. It has been pointed out in the thesis that the US in the Middle East during the Obama era, as a result of this re-assessment, followed a neo-isolationist foreign policy by reducing the number of combat forces in the region, avoiding military interventions, engaging in multilateral, short-term and narrow-scale operations when necessary and using collaborative methods, and approached its hegemony based on multilateralizm and cooperation. The result of the study demonstrates that the Middle East policies of the USA during the Obama era can be explained with the Neoclassical Realist Approach.