Return of the alliances

Right now, the existing regional alliances seem to be consolidating into a single all-embracing system. Only three years ago, there was only one big alliance in the world: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

China's more belligerent style under Xi Jinping, left, accounts for the speed at which a counter-balancing alliance took shape in the region, writes Gwynne Dyer, but the equal and opposite reaction to this enterprise was the 2022 announcement of a ‘no limits’ partnership by Xi and Russian President Vladimir Putin.Photographs courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Opinion

BY GWYNNE DYER

January 19, 2023

LONDON, U.K.—Alliances are as old as civilization. Older, actually: almost every hunter-gatherer band that anthropologists have studied, from the New Guinea highlanders to the Yanomami in the Amazon, made alliances with other groups to try to protect themselves.

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