Cold War and Structural Balance
In the recent video “The Middle East’s cold war, explained,” Sam Ellis of Vox details the recent history of the unrest in Middle East. The Middle East is experiencing a cold war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, dating back to the 1970’s when the US was highly influential in both countries. More recently, rather than engage in a direct conflict, Saudi Arabia and Iran fight proxy wars by supporting opposing sides in conflicts—such as civil wars—in the region.
The current condition of the Middle East may seem unstable, but Structural Balance Theory tells us that maybe these proxy wars keep happening because they create structurally balanced graphs. For example, Ellis highlights the conflict in Yemen where Saudi Arabia has sent their military to support the central government, and Iran is supporting the Houthi Rebels against that government. The graph of this conflict looks like this, where a positive edge is support or alliance, and a negative edge is conflict:
This graph is structurally balanced, because there are no unbalanced triangles. Additionally, this graph is representative of most of the proxy wars in the Middle East—with Saudi Arabia and Iran supporting opposite sides—just with different groups being supported, in a different country. Though these wars lead to great unrest, graph theory tells us that they are likely to continue as long as Saudi Arabia and Iran are in conflict and have the resources to support these types of groups because they exist in a structurally balanced network of international relations.
—Jack Schluger
Fascinating and well written