فهرست مطالب mohammad reza jalali barenji

Obama’s announced policies and approacheshad realistic consequences despite  his emphasis  on economic cooperation, new regional and international capacity building, democracy, human rights, multilateralism, and smart power, whereas the focus in  Trump’s unilateral and offensive  policies was on American values. Trump’s administration regarded national interest as the most influential factor in foreign policy.This descriptive-analytical study aimed to examine its hypothesis using the data collected from printed and online sources together with  the propositions of the theories of defensive and offensive realism, and to answer the following question: “How can the United States’approachtoward the world order under Obama and Trump’s administrationsbe explained using the theories of offensive and defensive realism?” According to the findings, Obama’s foreign policy improved the functional capacities of the international organizations and institutions despite observing the principles of realism by paying special and intelligent attention to national interests, military power, and the importance of diplomacy and soft power. Incontrast, Trump’s foreign policy increased the importance of hard power, decreased the importance of diplomacy and negotiation, reduced the importance of international institutions, facilitated the trend of moving towards a multipolar world order, and increased pessimism about security trends, occurrence of new regional and international arms races and, finally, the level of differences.

This article compares the role of Obama and Trump in the US foreign policy approach to the international system; In the Obama administration, the use of all components of power and not only militarism was used. While Trump's foreign policy has axes such as power-seeking, nationalism or protectionism, and opposition to the promotion of democracy in the world, in this framework, power-oriented becomes important in American foreign policy. This article is responsible for answering the question, what was the foreign policy approach of the United States of America in restraining the great powers during the presidency of Obama and Trump? In response to this question, the hypothesis of the article is that what differentiates presidents from each other is only in relation to their management methods and priorities and their perception of the quality of the US foreign policy approach to the international system.

Considering that politics is not anything more than a set of decision-making, foreign policy and international politics can be viewed as crystallization of decision-making by the actors of the international system. At this level, decision-making theories evaluate foreign policy by examining the general milieu and parameters of decision-making. This paper draws upon Rosenau's pre-theory model for analyzing the foreign policy of the Islamic Republic of Iran, for it is a combination of micro- and macro-levels in studying foreign policy. Through this study, it became clear that in four significant decisions made in Iran's foreign policy the variable of international system has consistently played the major role in making of decisions and before the amendment of the constitution in 1989, the individual variable has been the second determining variable. After the constitution was amended, this variable was replaced with the variable of role. Furthermore, bureaucratic and community variables have been at next places.