Israel and Saudi Arabia: Togetherish at Last?
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/06/israeli-saudi-relations/395015/
“Opposition to U.S. negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program is helping unite two long-antagonistic American allies.”
Graph theory applies itself very well to international relations (IR). In IR, the countries are considered the nodes, and their relationships (entirely intangible, but still very much important) are the edges. Although the strength of the edges, or ties, can certainly be analyzed, in this instance I’m going to be looking at the principle of structural balance, and therefore I’m going to be classifying ties either as positive or negative (ally or enemy).
In this example, we look at the three-way relationship between Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel. Up until very recently, all of these countries considered each other their enemy (for various reasons which I wont be getting into). However, in graph theory this would not be stable, because every edge would be labeled with a minus and that isn’t a stable graph. As the saying goes, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, and one of those three relationships should in theory turn into a positive relationship.
In fact, that is exactly what happened. As the Iran deal approaches approval by the US government, Saudi Arabia and Israel have both expressed a partnership with each other against a nuclear Iran. What’s most interesting is that Israel and Saudi Arabia don’t fully accept each other as friends: “Our standing today on this stage does not mean we have resolved all the differences that our countries have shared over the years”, but they are willing to put differences aside to band together against what they perceive as a bigger threat. Thus, their “triangle” has changed from three negatives, which is very unstable, to a stable formation of two negatives and one positive.