Simplifying Middle Eastern Relations with PCA

Chris Zhu
2 min readJul 23, 2017

Somehow I found myself reading through the relationships between the various countries and factions that occupy the Middle East. I quickly found there were too many different relationships to understand in an afternoon of reading.

I came across this article by Slate that contained this helpful graphic:

Even this simplified graphic is difficult to understand, but one thing that is noticeable is that there are clear factions. Israel and the United State for instance, have very similar relationships, which makes sense. Al-Qaida and ISIS also have similar relationships, which also makes sense.

I figured we can distill this information to a denser representation with PCA. All the code can be found here.

From my limited understanding of international relations, this seems reasonable. The far right consists of Shia ruled allies, I think if Russia was on this chart, they would also be in that cluster. The far left consists mainly of countries that are close allies of the United States. The bottom seems to consist of terrorist organizations.

Things I found surprising

Its interesting that Turkey shows up that close to terror organizations.

Iraq ends up isolated I think because they are listed as allies with the United States, and Iran / Syria.

Palestine is seemingly allies or complicated with every country except Israel, which explains why they are isolated.

It lead me to some more interesting reading topics like:

The Hezbollah, Iran and Syria Relationship

Turkey’s State Sponsored Terrorism

In Iraq Crisis, a Tangle of Alliances and Enmities

I’m not sure this was a useful exercise, I think I probably would’ve learned more had I spent the time reading instead of parsing HTML but oh well. If anyone is able to infer more from this graph, please let me know.

--

--