To understand foreign policy, understand backyard wars by Sargis Sangari

The inability by policymakers to understand this is why sometimes great powers stumbled across the global stage as they try to operationalize their foreign policy within their backyard state. Example: Both South America and Central America are backyard regions to the U.S., but their governing ideologies are different from those in the U.S., given that they are, broadly speaking, socialist in their cast.

Case in point: U.S. in rushing toward regime change in Venezuela failed to consider the depth of the sociological friction point interdependency of Venezuela to Cuba, Russia, Iran, China and others.

In Asia, U.S. efforts to bring North Korea to heel came to grief on the shoals of Chinese disobedience. China viewed those efforts as meddling in their back yard and took measures to put a stop to them by bypassing sanctions as it moved nuclear technology for North Korea within selective global markets, while at the same time allowing the U.S. to take a substantial lead in normalizing western relations with North Korea.

However, in doing so, it created a set of complicated economic and political friction points for itself at its detriment. The U.S. exploited the Chinese friction points by banning Huawei and by having the POTUS step across the DMZ on June 30 at the invitation of the North Korean leader, forcing China to relent. U.S. and China never realized that it was possible that North Korea used the nuclear threat to bring China and the U.S. to the negotiation table as it played the two greater powers against each other to empower its future economic and political viability as a backyard state to both.

• Threats from Iran
• Missile testing
• Russia's dealing with Iran
• Political Ideologies & Cultural underpinnings
• Iran's Nuclear Weapons - Trump's Message

Simply put, backyard states commonly dislike being backyard states and are opposed to viewing themselves as such. Failure to consider the sociopolitical history of a state can lead to increasing tension. Identifying and exploiting backyard tensions/friction points among rival powers can be critical to a nation's survival.

• Hardliners vs Moderates on shooting down the drone. 
• Middle Eastern Pride Issue - Is Iran ready to negotiate? Discuss the signals.
• Strategy: Is Iran isolating Saudi Arabia?
• What's the Arab League doing re: Turkey & Iran.