Several weeks ago, we shared a view of travel events planned by world leaders to visit Europe during the first half of 2012. There were many interesting meetings and interactions to be examined, but one pair of events that stood out was the close proximity of visits to Cyprus by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s during mid-February and Turkish Energy Minister Taner Yildiz at the end of February.

Territorial claims over Cyprus continue to be a contentious foreign policy item for Turkey, and are particularly divisive in its relations with Greece and the European Union. However, the confirmation of huge natural gas deposits in the neighboring Mediterranean waters claimed by Israel and Cyprus (dubbed the Leviathan gasfield) adds a new, potentially volatile element to Turkish relations in the area. Sending Yildiz to visit northern Cyprus shows its attempt to balance out the increasingly tight knit partnership between EU-friendly Israel and Cyprus related to natural gas fields in the region.

The timeline below shows how significantly the relations between Israel and Cyprus grew during the last two years with the callouts highlighting notable moments related to natural gas development:

The recent visit to Cyprus by Netanyahu comes several months after Turkey imposed further economic sanctions and severed military ties with Israel. The quote sitting at the bottom of the timeline is from Dr. Greg Reichberg, Research Professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) Cyprus Centre, that suggests energy trade could impact Cyprus in two ways: act as a catalyst that helps resolve the territorial dispute, or potentially incite further conflict over valuable, non-renewable energy sources.

The next step for analyzing this situation at a high level is to evaluate major diplomatic efforts between both Israel and Turkey. The network below shoes diplomatic relation events for Israel and Turkey as reported during the last twelve months with the nodes connecting both countries showing separate interactions. While there are states such as Iran and Greece shown that are one-sided in these relations, others are connective states (France, Germany, the United States) that have much to lose should they be forced to take sides due to heightened discord between Turkey and Israel.

Click image to view network of Turkey and Israel relations

We’ve seen recent challenges over offshore drilling territory come and go (see the dispute over oil deposits in the South China Sea), but this will certainly be an issue to watch as the Israel’s relations with Arab countries remain as stormy as ever. Additionally, we’re provided the opportunity to watch how this develops as projections show Israel’s Mari-B gas field is expected to depleted by 2013 and drilling in the Leviathan field could begin as early as 2016.

Visit Recorded Future and get registered for a trial account to try out the timeline and network tools shown above and run your own analysis on these and other geopolitical issues.

Recorded Future is hosting three intelligence-focused webcasts that will range in subject matter from monitoring current and predicted social unrest by location to evaluating emerging cyber threats to the evolution and forecast influence of political organizations.

The schedule for this series is as follows:

Monitoring for Protests and Unrest
Date: Thursday, March 22 at 11AM EST
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Details: As unrest is increasingly organized online, corporate and government analysts are challenged with a rapidly evolving set of data to consider for location specific security. The webcast will include demonstration of a custom application built to monitor news and social media for signs of unrest, and we invite you to join us to see how our temporal analytic technology supports real-time protests monitoring and forecasts.

Open Source Intelligence for Cyber Defense
Date: Thursday, March 29 at 11AM EST
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Details: Corporate security teams and government agencies are faced with fast evolving cyber threats, and Recorded Future provides temporal analysis to help analysts find intelligence buried in big data. We’ll discuss a variety of scenarios including emerging threat analysis, evaluation and scoring of sources, and monitoring known threats.

What’s Next for the Muslim Brotherhood?
Date: Thursday, April 12 at 11AM EST
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Details: The focus will be a case study of the Muslim Brotherhood’s emerging role in the Egyptian government as well as predictive indicators in light of the upcoming presidential election. We’ll demonstrate how Recorded Future enables an efficient timeline and network analysis of the Muslim Brotherhood’s ascent since the January 25th revolution.

One task that we’ve heard to be challenging for analysts (business and intelligence alike) is capturing a snapshot of how the world appeared at a past time. This could be the PR from a company leading up to a past earnings announcement or the local news that precluded a major protest event. In this case, we’ll compare the diplomatic relations for China in months leading up to their leadership visiting the United States.

Here’s how to turn back the clock by setting limits on publication time in Recorded Future to evaluate a historical period:

• Chinese President Hu Jintao visited the US last year, arriving on January 18, 2011, which we’ll use as a reference point to evaluate his country’s diplomacy.
• You can use Recorded Future to set both event time (when an event took place) and content Publication Time to October 1, 2010 – Jan 17, 2011, then choose the event type “Diplomatic Relations”, and search for China.

The timeline below shows that diplomatic activity was relatively subdued leading up to Hu’s visit with the exception of meetings with the United States and Germany.

Diplomatic Activity for China in Lead Up to Hu's US Visit

The activity in the timeline can filtered down by the countries and officials with relationships to China, and we can actually gather up the most frequently co-occurring countries mentioned in these diplomatic relation events with China. Remember that these events occurred during the three months before Hu’s visit to the United States, and we find that after the US and Japan, the list is as follows:

Once we have an overview, we can compare that list to the network shown below of China’s relations for just the month prior to Hu’s trip. Interestingly, you’ll find that the most controversial relations from the US geopolitical perspective are absent. To view this yourself, click the network image and then use the time slider underneath to shift the frame in focus.

Diplomatic Relations Close to Hu Jintao's US Trip

All of this initial research builds into an opportunity to identify recurring themes or divergence from past behavior with respect to a current event. We can now contrast the above results with China’s diplomatic relations leading up to Vice President Xi Jinping’s visit to the US this past week.

Recent Xi Jinping US Visit Timeline - Click to View

The first thing that stands out looking at the timeline is the significant difference in China’s diplomatic activity leading up to Xi’s travel as well as the negative sentiment surrounding recent events. This stands in contrast to the generally positive sentiment in the month prior to Hu’s visit.

You can also take a step further and see that several of those controversial countries absent ahead of Hu’s 2011 visit are now very much in the picture (Syria, Iran, Sudan) leading up to the recent China-US meeting.

Network of Month Leading Up to Xi's Visit - Click to View

What’s to be learned? On the first take, we can pick up on the negative sentiment found in media surrounding China’s diplomatic relations during the recent months leading up to Xi Jinping’s visit to the US and the presence or mention of China’s relations with country’s at odds with the larger international community.

What’s still to be examined:

• Are there distinctions in the media coverage leading up to the separate visits made by Xi Jinping and Hu Jintao to other countries?
• Are there patterns to be found by mapping out the countries with whom China engages prior to visits by it’s officials to particular states or regions?

The stage is set for answering those types of questions now that we’ve gone about segmenting media coverage based on both event time (when something happened) and publication time (when those events were reported). If this type of analysis would be valuable to your organization, go ahead and try Recorded Future or contact us for more information.

The Chinese are stuck with one foot in each camp of a contentious battle for control of oil in East Africa. The most recent conflict between the nascent state of South Sudan and its controversial neighbor raises real concerns that China’s controlling stake in 40 percent of Sudan’s oil industry and 60 percent of its export will be seriously disrupted.

This current conflict, which arose earlier this month after claims that Sudan is stealing oil being piped to ports from South Sudan, unfolds just a little more than six months after China put in immediate diplomatic legwork with the new South Sudanese state. They did so with good reason given that estimates suggest the new country is responsible for around 75% of the region’s crude oil output. In the below timeline, you can see how the Chinese publicly responded to the new state in July:

China's response to South Sudan's Independence in July - Click for Live View

History Between China and Sudan

From where does this interest in the stability of Sudan arise? The storyline of relations between China and Sudan includes a backdrop of sanctions imposed on the Sudanese government by the US and UN that left a trade void for the country. China was willing to fill it especially given their increasing need for energy resources, and looking back to 2008 we find a series of investments and diplomatic actions between China and Sudan:

If you look back further than the time frame of the above discussion, you also find that China has been running one of its biggest oil projects in Sudan since 2004. The relationship is ever contentious: China took heat from world leaders when it hosted Sudan’s wanted leader Omar al-Bashir in June of 2011 ahead of the South Sudan’s formal independence, and there are claims that more than $55 million worth of Chinese weapons have been sold to Sudan.

Current Diplomatic Efforts

For some time after al-Bashir visited China, relations between the countries went fairly quiet. There were few, if any, publicly highlighted diplomatic relation events from July to the middle of November (note the time slider on the bottom of the network that shows the time frame being analyzed):

Diplomatic Relation Events for Sudan - July through Mid-November

However, relations suddenly saw a flurry of activity beginning with a pledge from Chinese defense minister Liang Guanglie on November 16 saying that his government would bolster military cooperation with Sudan, and since then, you can see below that China is the second most prominent state (after the United States) for diplomatic relation events with Sudan. The density of lines between network nodes indicates the number of events connecting those entities:

Diplomatic Relation Events for Sudan - Mid-November to Present

Why the sudden action even before the most recent allegations of Sudan stealing in-transit oil from South Sudan? Well, it’s possible that there was anticipation about the United States formally announcing its lifting of sanctions on oil trade with South Sudan after drawing up guidelines for companies to avoid infringing on the sanctions still imposed on Sudan. There also may have been hints that non-Chinese companies such as French oil giant Total would suggest alternative plans to pipe oil through Uganda for export via Kenya or Tanzania; ultimately, a bad solution for China.

The circumstances are fast changing and carry ramifications for the markets, the stability of the entire region, and international relations between China and the Western countries long at odds with Sudan. Monitor further updates by creating an alert for the most recent and near future events related to oil in East Africa.

Pop over to Drew Conway’s blog Zero Intelligence Agents and check out his latest post “Who are the most central members of the China’s leadership as we enter 2012?” Drew is a PhD student in political science at New York University. Drew studies terrorism and armed conflict; using tools from mathematics and computer science to gain a deeper understanding of these phenomena. He analyzed a massive amount of Recorded Future data gathered from open source, did some math magic and came up with a pretty compelling analysis.

A recent report from the IAEA on Iran’s alleged efforts to develop nuclear weapons heightened speculation of over Israel making a preemptive strike on Iranian nuclear facilities (action that may seem even more real given speculation about a recent explosion at an Iranian missile site over the weekend).

However, the recency effect can sometimes be blinding in a conflict as perpetual as this one. The most current threat always seems riskier than the last one. And anyone that even casually follows this issue knows that Israel has threatened Iran before, and even allegedly sabotaged its rivals’ nuclear development through assassinations and cyber warfare.

So, in evaluating the prospects of any near term action, it’s at least worth putting the most recent media coverage of a preemptive Israeli attack in perspective. The image below shows a timeline of references from the last three years related to Israel striking Iran over nuclear weapons concerns.

Threats from the last two weeks are clearly not the first of their kind, but one of several flare ups in the ongoing security conflict for both countries. And while emotionally charged rhetoric drives media coverage today, it often fails to provide the supplemental information that similar threats from Israel took place almost exactly a year prior.

Outside of evaluating the density of media coverage during recent years, there are other ways to contextualize the significance of this most recent threat of military conflict between Israel and Iran. For example, who are the figures out there talking about this issue?

Using the same timeframe, 2009-2011, we can identify individuals discussing the combination of Iran, Israel and nuclear weapons capabilities.

Using the time slider under the network view, we can go back to May 2009 to find Israel’s ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, saying that his country would not allow a nuclear Iran while months later Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon said “there was no guarentee Israel would not launch a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities…” Separately, clear throughout are the retaliatory consequences that would accompany Israeli military action. In addition to the state military response from Iran, Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal made it clear that any attack would generate support for Iran from militant groups in Gaza.

It’s also clear from the network above that the Turkish government is active in the political maneuvering with Recep Erdogen saying that any preemptive attack would be “disastrous for the entire region”. Separately, the Russian government figures prominently as do connections to the country through alleged support from scientist Vyacheslav Danilenko.

Now we have a clear indication that the issue of Israel preemptively acting against Iran is one that’s been prominent in geopolitical discussion for years, let’s shift back to evolution of the recent news. When did this issue really heat up? Well, we can see from an analysis of sources that there was the typical, scattered discussion about Israeli concerns over a nuclear Iran, at least up until October 30.

However, on October 31, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a parliamentary speech warning that Iran continued to develop nuclear weapons, and suggested that “a military option should not be ruled out.” This spurred mainstream news (shown in pink) coverage on the potential for a preemptive strike even ahead of an IAEA report that came out days later suggesting Iran’s program may in fact be one designed for weaponization.

Now about two weeks past the hottest media coverage of the issue, we look out for any predictions about the days ahead. What we find is London’s Daily Mail reporting, by way of an unidentified source, that Israel would take action against Iran by the end of the year.

The Daily Mail report, so far, does no seem corroborated by other notable sources, and this issues is one of those that is notoriously difficult to dissect. How do we know what is political posturing versus concrete evidence of action? Without inside sources, we may not know, but the open source is useful in garnering perspective around inflammatory issues.

Without getting into conspiracy theory territory, what further angles would be interesting to view here? Maybe we want to examine US media sentiment about Iran leading up to Netanyahu’s speech at the end of October, or try to identify abnormalities (whether it’s unique individuals or sources) calling for a preemptive strike. We’ll return to the issue in a few weeks to see how the scenario changes.

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Whatever your every day research interest, the open web provides an invaluable resource for better understanding geopolitical activity. We’d love for you to give these approaches and experiment with your own through free trial access to Recorded Future.