Great-power alliances rarely rest on genuine friendship or shared convictions; Instead, they reflect shifting calculations of interest and threat, knitting together unlikely partners when circumstances demand and unraveling alliances once their utility expires. When Hitler and Stalin carved up Eastern Europe in 1939, they set aside mutual loathing for the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact; two decades later, Mao and Khrushchev (the Sino-Soviet schism) tore their communist kinship apart over border clashes in Manchuria and competing influence in Africa; and today Washington, Beijing, and Moscow shift between cooperation and confrontation from the South China Sea to cyberspace. In each era, raw self-interest trumps ideology, buffer zones shape security, and economic levers, whether U.S. sanctions on Russian energy firms, China’s Belt and Road infrastructure loans in Sri Lanka, or tariff wars over semiconductors, have emerged alongside tanks and battleships as a means of coercion. When it comes to great-power alliances, these three cases are driven more by pragmatism, geography, and economic interests than by ideology, a pattern that aligns with the most common historical logic. […]
The equivalent to the surprise from the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, would be if US and Russia creates a new partnership against China, by dividing the world into spheres of interests, to limit Chinas influence on the global stage. It is more likely that a new schism in the Sino-Russia pact emerge which can be exploited by the US. Therefore, it is relevant to recall both the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the Sino-Soviet Schism in today’s great power competition. […]
Alliances form and dissolve not on ideology but on what serves those interests here and now. As Viscount Palmerston reminded us, “There are no permanent alliances, only permanent interests.” Läs artikel