Instability in network in the Middle East
Today, when asked about one of the biggest threats to world stability, people will usually respond with “terrorism” or more generally, “the Middle East”. One of the main issues of today has been what is going on in Syria. From the Russian Airstrikes to bombing against rebel groups involved with the Islamic State we can quickly notice that it is not very clear as to who is fighting against whom in this situation? There must 2 defined groups that are fighting each other. This is what war usually looks like right? So is that really the case? The answer is no. From this BBC short video source we get a great snapshot of what is going on in the Middle East. It can be summarized in this graph below:
We can see that the US is friends with the Turks and Kurds who are fighting each other. The US is funding many arms and weapons to the Kurds while they are supposed to have positive political relations with Turkey. At the same time, Turkey the Kurds and the Islamic State all hate each other. These two triangles are imbalanced making the whole structure imbalanced as a whole. Studying the structural balance between the political and foreign relations between countries is a very simple way of illustrating one of the big reasons why there is so much instability in the Middle East.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-34462867