The Arab Spring: The Failure of the Obama Doctrine

As a prelude to examining how the U.S. reacted to the first wave of the Arab Spring in the 21st century, this book begins with an examination of how the U.S. reacted to revolution in the 19th and 20th centuries and a summary of how foreign policy is made. Each revolution in the Arab Spring (in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Bahrain, and Yemen) and the Obama administration's action--or inaction--in response is carefully analyzed. The United States' role is compared to that of regional powers, such as Turkey, Israel, and Iran. The impact of U.S. abdication in the face of pivotal events in the region is the subject of the book's conclusion.

While other treatments have addressed how the Arab Spring revolutions have affected the individual countries where these revolutions took place, U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East, and former president Obama's overall foreign policy, this is the only work that provides a comprehensive examination of both the Arab Spring revolutions themselves and the reaction of the U.S. government to those revolutions.