Middle East's Developments in Obama Era and Transformation of the United States Policy towards Iran

The United States policy towards Iran has been driven by geopolitical considerations during the Obama tenure; consequently, the bilateral relations between Tehran and Washington have been a dependent variable to geopolitical competitions. The Islamic Awakening in the Middle East and North Africa left important imprints on the geopolitics of the region and thereafter on the nature and domain of Iran-U.S. competition. The most noticeable characteristic of this phenomenon was that people turned into the primary and active actors of the regions’ political scene. As a result, geopolitics of the region underwent changes by this previously absent factor. In fact, the Islamic Awakening has shifted the balance of power in the regional countries internal politics in favor of people who have long been discursive addressees of the Islamic Republic of Iran and to the detriment of the U.S. allies in the region i.e. the despotic rulers. In other words, the waves of the Islamic Awakening placed Islamic Republic of Iran in powerful and the United States weak positions. As a result, in the midst of regional revolutionary developments, the United States found Iran one of its most important rivals and took measure to counter the Iranian influence. Intensification of counter-Iranian measures was even seen as one tactic to manage and divert the Islamic Awakening. The present article seeks to deal with the issue of the impact of the Islamic Awakening on the U.S. policy towards Iran. The hypothesis the article follows is that “the United States’ failure to anticipate and manage the Islamic Awakening in the Middle East and North Africa led to intensification of its offensive policy towards Tehran with the aim of countering Iranian use of the new regional opportunities and also introducing the Islamic Revolution model as inefficient to the peoples of the region.” This strategic approach was manifested in the policy of sanctions intensification.