US, Turkey, and the Structural Balance Property
On October 7, President Trump tweeted “As I have stated strongly before, and just to reiterate, if Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I’ve done before!).” Turkey is a member of the NATO alliance, making it unusual and risky to threaten economic war on an ally, because he believed the Turkish government was not shouldering enough of the responsibilities in fighting the Islamic State. Trump preceded to scold the US’s Kurdish allies who have undertaken the largest portion of the Islamic state fighting, under US support. What egged on this storm of tweets was a statement from the White House that announced US troops would be withdrawn from the area, and the one of the strongest American partners would be abandoned. Trump has since followed through on his threats, as he imposed sanctions against Turkey in response to its military aggression following the deterioration on the ground after the decision to withdraw US forces. Trump’s goal in this is for Turkey to stop the invasion, implement an immediate cease-fire, and begin negotiations with Kurdish forces.
World relations such as this are directly connected to the Structural Balance Property, which states that a complete graph satisfies this property and is balanced if the edges between every set of three nodes has exactly 3 or 1 positive edges. If we considered the NATO alliance as a graph, the countries would be represented as nodes and the relationships between them would be represented as positive (allies) or negative (enemies/strained relationship). Before this tweet, we can assume that the relationships between members of the alliance was all positive. After these tweets and decisions, however, the US-Turkey edge turned negative.
This is now an unstable graph according to the Structural Balance Property, as any other node in a set with the US and Turkey will have two positive and one negative edge. This means that there are most likely three outcomes that could occur. The US-Turkey edge could turn positive because Turkey follows the US’s demands. Another option is that other countries in the alliance will start to develop negative edges with Turkey in response to their violence and US pressure. If the latter option were to occur, the structural balance property would predict that Turkey would eventually develop negative edges with all the other countries, and at that point most likely have to leave NATO. Additionally, the other countries could see the US as being in the wrong and form a negative edge with the US, leading to the US’s dismissal from NATO. However, because of the US’s power and influence, I think that Turkey is in greater danger and should try to make amends in order to have a chance at growing economically and stopping the fighting.