The Impact of Interventions on the National Capabilities of Target Countries and the Balance of Power in the Middle East

Abstract

In recent decades the number of interstate conflicts decreased, while internal conflicts – which often escalated into civil wars – have become the most recurrent form of conflict, and most of them are characterized by active foreign involvement. Since the beginning of the so called Arab Spring, the world witnessed a number of foreign military interventions in the crisis of Libya, Iraq, Yemen and Syria on different scales and form. The concept of foreign intervention and its impact on the target country and the balance of power theory have a substantial background in the literature of international relations on their own. However, changes in the regional balance of power systems due to foreign involvement in civil wars still remain under-researched. This paper is an attempt to fill this gap through briefly reviewing the literature on the topic and the balance of power theory, and then pointing out the connection between foreign interventions and changes in the national capabilities of the target countries. Our findings support the claim that foreign military intervention tends to lead to diminishing national capabilities through increasing conflict intensity, thus could result in decreasing power status together with a change in the regional balance of power. This could mean, that a further viewpoint can be added to the popular discourse of intervention (for example in case of Syria), and can be the basis of additional research on the connections between the regional balance of power, foreign interventions and the activity of non-state actors.