“The message here is that the US must seek to re-define its core interests in the region more clearly.
Well-meaning statements about the spread of democracy or women’s rights are fine as aspirations, but the West as a whole needs to be more realistic about the time it takes to encourage social change – which in any case must come from within.
A measure of the Obama Administration’s failure to address the complexities of the region is shown by the irrelevance now of Mr Obama’s 2009 Cairo Address which, though hailed at the time as marking a new departure in relations between the US, the Middle East and the wider Muslim world, largely proved to be a false-start.”
IR Theory & Practice 