The Obama Administration and the Arab Spring: Waiting for a Doctrine

Abstract

For almost a decade prior to the inauguration of President Obama, US policy on the Middle East had been dominated by the G. W. Bush administration’s Global War on Terror (GWOT), which incorporated the so-called Bush Doctrine of preemption in response to new, uncertain, and unconventional threats to US national security. By the time of the 2003 Iraq War, the GWOT had provided the necessary context and political cover for interventionism that supported a broad democratization agenda. However, since the war failed to establish a well-functioning democracy in Iraq and an expected “domino effect” that would topple other authoritarian regimes across the Middle East, the underpinning assumptions of the policy were baseless.¹ The Bush administration’s pursuit of a vague democratization agenda ran into further difficulties when Hamas, a proscribed Islamist party that does not recognize Israel, won a large majority in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections in Gaza.²