Iran’s Nuclear Program and Structural Balance
It’s no secret that Israel and Iran aren’t exactly the best of friends. In recent years, the two countries have been increasingly at odds due to Iran’s nuclear program. Israel sees the nuclear program as a major threat to its existence, a sentiment compounded by former President of Iran Ahmadinejad’s harsh rhetoric towards Israel and Iran’s funding and support of Hamas and Hezbollah. Iran, though, views Israel’s threats and actions against the nuclear program as warmongering. Iran has asserted that its nuclear program is peaceful and only directed towards development of nuclear energy, while Israel believes that it is being used to develop nuclear weapons.
Meanwhile, the United States has close diplomatic and military ties with Israel, while Iran-U.S. ties have been extremely strained since the 1979 Iranian Revolution; the U.S. has imposed sanctions on Iran and the countries have been engaged in cyberwarfare. With the election of Rouhani, a moderate, in Iran earlier this year, though, Iran and the U.S. (and U.N.) have been inching towards a thawing of relations and potentially an easing of sanctions and threats. However, Netanyahu has decried Iran’s attempts to warm up to the West, declaring Rouhani a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” that is continuing to build nuclear weapons, and reiterating that the only acceptable solution is one that fully dismantles Iran’s nuclear program, or a military strike.
Although it may be oversimplifying a complex geopolitical situation to do so, the three countries can be described as a three-way network with positive and negative relationships, as described in chapter 5 of the course book. Right now, the network is such that there is a positive relationship between the U.S. and Israel, and negative relationships between Iran and each of these countries. From the point of view of structural balance, this network is balanced; the U.S. and Israel are allies, and they each have a common enemy in Iran. This type of network might help explain why Israel is against any sort of rapprochement between Iran and Israel. Let’s say that Iran and the United States reconcile enough for their relationship to be reclassified as positive. The resulting network is structurally unbalanced; hence, the statements by Israel against rapprochement represent internal forces to drive the network back towards the balanced state of the U.S. and Israel being united against Iran. Interestingly, the other situation that could result is one in which the internal forces in the unbalanced network drive Israel to establish a positive relationship and form a network with new, but balanced, social relationships between the three countries. However, a positive relationship between Israel and Iran would be much more difficult to establish due to their tensions and fundamental differences in governmental structure (Israel being a Zionist democratic state, Iran being an Islamic theocratic republic). Thus, with the possible easing of tensions between Iran and U.S., turmoil in the relationships between the Israel, Iran, and the U.S. could result.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/01/us-un-assembly-israel-idUSBRE9900Z920131001
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Israel_relations
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93United_States_relations
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%E2%80%93United_States_relations