The United States' Interests in the Middle East During the Obama Administration

Abstract

This chapter aims to analyze the US's foreign policy priorities toward Jordan in the communications of Obama, through the period from 2009 to 2017. It answers the questions: what were the US's priorities in Jordan during the Obama administration? And how Jordan was described by Obama's communications. This work is a creative one, it uses qualitative and quantitative to investigate Obama's activities toward Jordan. In order to classify the US interests in Jordan, we use Byman and Molle's classification of the US's foreign policy interests in the Middle East: counterterrorism, security of Israel, democratization, nuclear proliferation, and oil. This chapter finds that Obama's foreign strategy and approach had been driven by the maxim of ‘multilateral retrenchment', which designed to achieve the United States foreign commitments, reshape its standing among the world powers, and transfer burdens onto foreign partners. The United States of America under the Obama administration substantially depended on Jordan to solve many regional complex issues and crisis.