The Abraham Accords: A Comparative Perspective on American Foreign Policy in the Middle East

Abstract

This Master’s thesis explores the Abraham Accords and the Iran Nuclear deal in order to compare former presidents Trump and Obama on their approaches to multilateralism in security cooperation in the Middle East. This relates to their efforts in resolving conflicts and attempts at stabilising the region and will look at the specific impacts of the two deals, as well as detail how and why the deals were realized, looking into both domestic and international factors. The thesis aims to do this mainly from the theoretical foundation of offensive and defensive realism, as well as some key insights gleaned from the perspectives on the two-level game theory, neoclassical realism, the ‘Hub-and-Spoke’ approach, and the Revisionist vs. the Status-quo alignments in the Middle East. A qualitative literature review was used as the methodological basis for gathering, interpreting, and synthesising the information presented in this research project. The two Presidents both approached security situations in the Middle East multilaterally, but in different ways. Obama’s nuclear deal was a classic multilateral agreement involving international institutions cooperating towards a single goal, whereas Trump’s Abraham Accords saw the US negotiating from a central position, trying to forge stronger bilateral ties between Israel and four Arab states. The thesis finds that the geopolitical changes in the Middle East, specifically uncertainties in the Gulf states about continued American involvement in the region, combined with the nature of President Trump’s transactional style of negotiation and zero-sum foreign policy ideology, was among the main factors as to why the Abraham Accords came to fruition. The Abraham Accords impacted the region in many ways and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future. Among the most important impacts is the economic and security dimensions, which holds vast potential for future peaceful development in the region.