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Middle East Alliances More Tangled Than Ever

The alliances of regional countries are based on seemingly contradictory interests.
Arab foreign ministers arrive to an emergency meeting to discuss the Syrian crisis and the potential military strike on President Bashar al-Assad's regime, at the Arab League headquarters in Cairo, September 1, 2013. Saudi Arabia told fellow Arab League states on Sunday that opposing international intervention against the Syrian government would only encourage Damascus to use weapons of mass destruction. REUTERS/Amr Abdallah Dalsh  (EGYPT - Tags: POLITICS CIVIL UNREST) - RTX1341M
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The equations upon which the Middle East is currently built have nothing to do with the calculations upon which traditional political analyses are made. In fact, the Arab Spring revolutions that coincided with the overwhelming sectarian tensions that prevailed in the region transformed the Middle East into a spiderweb of overlapping positions that are nearly impossible to decode.

The variety of pertinent factors affecting discussions and relations in the region make the Middle East conflict one that is completely different and much more complex than anything else, anywhere in the world. Here, we find a religious factor greatly affected by the multitude of existing sectarian entities, alongside an economic factor convolutedly intertwined with the dynamic of oil reserves, in addition to traditional political conflicts between various belligerents. The overall context of the battle between modernity and tradition also plays a role in the ongoing generalized conflict, with the social factor of tribal affiliations thrown into the mix. All these factors therefore come to play their roles in an effective manner, making the Middle East conflict an impossibly hard dilemma to discuss or approach.

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