U.S. Decision Making Approaches toward Iran (2008-2010)

In two recent years the U.S. administration through its unilateral policies against Iran, has been trying multiple attempts to impose its illegal wishes to the country. The most important of them is disagreement of George W. Bush administration to Iran's absolute right of enrichment of uranium and using the peaceful purposes from nuclear energy. Coming to office president Obama tried to change its policy toward Iran and adopted new policies such as sending congratulation message for Nowroz ceremony and apologizing for the U.S intervention in the coup against Iran's prime minister in 1954, tried to decrease the tensions between Iran and the U.S to facilitate the conditions of negotiation between the countries. On the other hand Iran always tried to send this clear message to Washington that Iran is going to step forward if the legal requests of Iran are taken into consideration. The ideological conflicts trend between Iran and the U.S, caused the United States impose new sanctions against Iran and tries its best to siege Iran economically, politically and regionally, but the outcomes of all these actions against Iran was a failure in deterring Iran from its absolute right of using nuclear energy. This article is going to answer this question in the period of two recent years from the last days of George W. Bush administration to the new area of Barack Obama that what kind of viewpoints and attitudes in U.S. decision making system toward Iran has been formed and is going on now. The hypothesis of the article is that in spite of imposing new sanctions against Iran, during Obama's presidency has been emphasizing on soft power elements and adopting realistic approach and on the other side cooperation and engagement with Iran is pursuing in a way that the United States is trying to re-engineering the power production system and changing the negative balance between hard and soft power in Bush era to positive balance in favor of the soft power in Obama administration.