Military Balance and Alliances in the Middle East: A Process Tracing between the WWI and the New World Order (1918-2010)

Abstract

There are several lacunas in both Turkish and English literature regarding security and the military balance in the Middle East which has become a hotbed for International Relations discipline. This study forms the first part of a two-staged analysis including the first stage as the period between the WWI and the Cold War's end whereas the second state is the period between the establishment of the New World Order and the Arap Uprisings. This article utilizes the defense expenditures, military conflicts, regional alliances and global alignments as independent variables within the framework presented in the study. Through these variables, the course of the military balance in the Middle East and the causes behind trend swings is attempted to be explicated. A complementary part of this study indicates the alliance typology for the Middle East based on the alliances formed in the last century. The utmost aim of this study is to present an analysis on the military developments and the history of military balance in a methodological summarizing format. The impact of economy and non-security political processes are omitted as control variables in terms of both feasibility and maintaining the focus in the military domain. The main findings of this study are that the projection of the international political competetion plays a transformative role in the region expecially during the Cold War; the prolonged Arab-Israeli conflict provided a platform for the Middle Eastern states to challange the status quo and the alliances are formed mostly on three certain criteria.