The United States' Middle East policy: The Barack Obama era

In this study, Obama's Middle East policy in the first period and in the second period were compared. In this context, Obama's first and second term Middle East policies were analyzed. In the first term of Obama's presidency, there hasn't been any crises that deeply affected the Middle East yet. For this reason, in this study, Obama's Middle East policy in the first term was analyzed through his projects, doctrines and discourses. In the second term of Obama 's presidency, many crises occurred in the Middle East. The most important of these crises were the emergence of the terrorist organization ISIS and the peoples who expected democracy with the Arab Spring who didn't get what they want, and the resulting crisis environment which has reached the present day. In this perspective, Obama's second term Middle East policy was analyzed over the strategies he developed against these crises. The main assumption of the study was that Obama did not want America to intervene in the Middle East region alone in both periods and implemented a low-intensity policy. The difference between Obama's Middle East policy during the two terms was that he had many idealistic discourses in the early years of his presidency and he developed projects and plans about those. However, in the following years, Obama preferred realistic policies instead of these discourses.