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.
On August 23, 1939, Europe watched in disbelief as German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Soviet Commissar Vyacheslav Molotov signed a non-aggression pact hiding a secret map: Poland, the Baltic states, and slices of Finland and Romania were carved into German and Soviet spheres. For Hitler, the agreement wiped away the danger of a two-front war, clearing the way for his assault on Poland days later. For Stalin, it offered a crucial reprieve to rebuild an army still reeling from the 1937 purges. Behind polite diplomatic language, however, simmered bitter hostility: Nazi newspapers assailed “Judeo-Bolshevik” plots, while Soviet presses denounced “imperialist warmongers.” From an ideological standpoint, this pact caught the other European powers off guard, and without it, WWII would have begun, if at all, on an entirely different timetable.
When Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, he pulverized the façade of cooperation, igniting the Eastern Front’s bloodiest battles and proving that partnerships forged purely for convenience can implode with devastating results. A surprising side effect of this attack was that Hitler, by accident, welded together a paradoxical alliance: Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union united against the Axis. Under the 1941 Lend-Lease Act alone, Washington dispatched over 415,000 trucks, 8,000 armored vehicles and thousands of aircraft to the Eastern Front, support driven entirely by strategy, not affection for communism. At the Tehran Conference in 1943 and Yalta in 1945, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin sketched postwar Europe into Western and Soviet spheres of influence, a pragmatic division that ignored their deeper ideological rifts. Once the Nazis were defeated, those wartime bonds unraveled almost overnight, and the Iron Curtain fell, ushering in a half-century of East-West rivalry. The Yalta Conference laid the groundwork for a pragmatic post-World War II order, one that still underpins the enduring US-UK-France partnership. Its most contentious decision was the design of the United Nations Security Council: a body dominated by a five states which each have veto power over every resolution. Though the UN formally launched in 1946, the Big Three at Yalta ensured its dispute-resolution mechanism would serve their self-interest. Since 1945, and reaffirmed in 1991, when Russia inherited the Soviet seat and China replaced Taiwan (occurred already 1971 as an effect of the Sino-Soviet schism), the five permanent members (the United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, and China) have retained veto rights. This structure has enabled the UN to function as a pragmatic institution, upholding the postwar settlement even as global dynamics evolve.
In the wake of WWII, Beijing and Moscow struck the 1950 Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance with visions of a monolithic communist bloc. On the surface, this pact seemed ideologically compatible, but its pragmatic underpinnings, and the obvious economic and geographic disparities between the two nations, were overlooked. Soviet advisors flooded Chinese factories and helped lay the groundwork for China’s first atomic experiments, while China eagerly absorbed Soviet designs for tanks and jet engines. The Soviet Union provided crucial support that enabled China to embark on its industrialization process. Yet almost from the start, tensions surfaced. Mao Zedong bristled at Nikita Khrushchev’s doctrine of “peaceful coexistence,” accusing him of betraying revolutionary principles. Disputes over the winding, poorly demarcated border along the Ussuri River boiled over into artillery exchanges on Zhenbao Island in 1969, underscoring how quickly ideological solidarity gave way to security concerns. This suggests that pacts founded on ideology endure only when anchored by pragmatic considerations, geographic logic, and economic interests.
Besides their bilateral pact, Moscow and Beijing competed to extend their influence across the decolonizing world, each framing it as part of their broader anti-Western struggle. Beijing courted Albania and supported guerrilla movements in Angola, while Moscow deepened ties with India and Eastern European satellites. By 1961, Soviet technicians had withdrawn from China, and newspapers in Moscow and Beijing traded blistering denunciations. That rupture reshaped alliances: India leaned into Soviet arms supplies, and the United States seized its chance to open relations with China, culminating in Richard Nixon’s landmark 1972 visit to Beijing. The fissure in the Sino-Soviet alliance gave the pragmatic United States the opening it needed to reshape the choreography of the Cold War’s great-power dance. This crack also affected which countries were the permanent members of the UN security council.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991 effectively ended the Cold War, not through a new hot conflict, but by leaving behind a significant power vacuum. Washington briefly stood alone atop a unipolar world. Yet at the turn of the millennium two unforeseen forces had reshaped that landscape. Russia, reeling from economic turmoil and the loss of superpower status, struggled to redefine its role on the world stage. Meanwhile, China seized the opportunity to pursue rapid growth under its “reform and opening” policy, skillful blending market-driven capitalism with one-party communist rule.
U.S.-Russia ties, once warming in the 1990s, have also unraveled amid strategic distrust. NATO’s 1999 enlargement to include Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic stirred Russian fears of encirclement. It is important to point out that all former Warsaw pact member countries and former Soviet republic member states, voluntarily applied for membership and were granted. In the beginning Russia accepted this, but over time became increasingly vocal about their discontent to the NATO enlargement. When Moscow annexed Crimea in 2014 and backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, Washington responded with sweeping economic sanctions targeting energy giants like Rosneft and major banks. On the cyber front, allegations that Russian operatives hacked the 2016 U.S. presidential election and orchestrated the 2020 SolarWinds breach only deepened mutual suspicion, reinforcing the sense that Moscow and Washington have returned to a new kind of cold contest. The conflict line in Ukraine became a full war as Russia attacked Ukraine in February 2022. As a result of this both Sweden and Finland jointed NATO, which further fuels Russian fears of encirclement.
From the 1990s onward, U.S.-China relations slid from cautious optimism into outright rivalry. China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 was hailed as a win-win: American consumers enjoyed low-cost goods, and Beijing gained access to foreign markets. Yet bilateral tensions steadily mounted over massive U.S. trade deficits, accusations of forced technology transfers, and intellectual-property theft. In 2018, the Trump administration imposed 25 percent tariffs on some $250 billion of Chinese imports, to which Beijing retaliated in kind. During Trumps second term as president, the usage of tariffs has increased to affect most of the countries trading with the USA, but still with a focus on China. At sea, China’s transformation of submerged reefs in the Spratly Islands into fortified outposts, from Subi Reef’s runways to Fiery Cross Reef’s missile batteries, prompted the U.S. Navy to begin regular “Freedom of Navigation Operations,” sailing warships within twelve nautical miles of disputed features to challenge Beijing’s claims.
At the same time, Beijing bristled at democracy-promotion efforts and perceived encirclement. These shared grievances gradually transformed Sino-Russian suspicion into a comprehensive strategic partnership built on energy agreements, arms transfers, and coordinated diplomatic efforts. By the mid-2000s, what had begun as a marriage of convenience had solidified into one of the more durable alliances in the post-Cold War era. In December 2019, the Power of Siberia pipeline began delivering up to 38 billion cubic meters of Russian gas annually to northeastern China, cementing a long-term energy tie. Their naval forces have conducted joint exercises in the Mediterranean Sea and the Arctic, from joint drills off Syria’s coast in 2019 to icebreaker escort missions along the Northern Sea Route. At the UN, both countries routinely coordinate vetoes and abstentions to block resolutions they view as Western-led interference.
Together, these moves illustrate how two former Cold War rivals have reinvented their relationship in the service of shared strategic interests, while each separately squares off against Washington. In simple terms, the old mistrust between Russia (as heir to the Soviet Union) and China has given way to cooperation because both now agree that the United States poses the bigger challenge. Despite their different economic models and political systems, and the fact that each country has different positions regarding raw materials (Russia mainly supplier whiles China is mainly an importer) and have different production capacities makes the match more convenient. By focusing on what unites them against U.S. influence, they’ve effectively patched over historical and geographic disputes to stand together. An extension of this is also the formalization of institutions under the BRICS-umbrella.
Today’s great-power rivalries unfold as much in trade flows and boardrooms as on battlefields. Washington leverages sanctions to freeze Russian bank assets and curtail Chinese tech firms’ access to cutting-edge semiconductors, hoping to hobble both Moscow’s war chest and Beijing’s innovation engine. Beijing, in turn, has deployed its Belt and Road Initiative, over $1 trillion in roads, railways, ports, and power plants from Asia to Africa, to solidify geopolitical influence. When Sri Lanka could no longer repay Chinese loans, Hambantota Port slipped into a 99-year Chinese lease, a clear example of infrastructure financing morphing into strategic control. Cut off by Western penalties, Russia now sells oil and gas to China at deep discounts, a form of debt-for-equity swap that binds Moscow ever tighter to Beijing’s orbit. These economic levers, tariffs, loan agreements, export bans, can be applied with surgical precision, yet their ripples reshape commodity markets, national debt ratios, and political alignments from South America and Africa to Central Europe.
Although rooted in the great-power carve-ups of 1939, today’s sphere-of-influence dynamics have taken on new forms. Today’s mid-sized states must chart a course between three great powers. Pakistan balances the lure of billions in Chinese Belt and Road projects against decades of U.S. security aid. Myanmar’s generals lean on Beijing to blunt Western sanctions, even as China urges calm on its frontier. Ukraine and Georgia have learned that choosing NATO or EU alignment can invite economic reprisals or military actions from Moscow. In each case, these countries weigh immediate carrots and sticks alongside which institutions, NATO, the European Union, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, or others, offer the most lasting guarantees of security and prosperity.
Over eight decades of shifting alliances, three constants persist. First, Practical needs outweigh ideological loyalties: Poland was once carved up by fascists and communists, then recreated with new boarders after WWII. In total there were four counties divided during the cold war era. During the eight decades, the main blocks have been stable unless pragmatics reasoning (the Sino-Soviet schism and the fall of the Berlin wall) alters the balance. Second, geography remains destiny: buffer states and forward deployments still shape security strategies. This has been rediscovered in international relations as all talks about geopolitics nowadays. Third, economic tools now rival military force, realigning power without a single shot fired. The geoeconomically toolbox, trade agreements, sanctions, foreign aid, investments, industrial policies and control over strategic resources have seen increasingly in use the last decades, all to further states geopolitical goals. Great powers can, when the circumstances are right, strike a deal with an ideological adversary if the pragmatical reasons are right. Just as Hitler and Stalin did 1939. History shows that when nations face a common strategic imperative, long-standing rivalries and ideological divides can be set aside almost overnight. Pragmatism often trumps principle, producing alliances that seem counterintuitive, like the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 or China’s opening to the USA in the 1970s. Today’s Sino-Russian partnership, born of shared concerns about U.S. power, is a fresh reminder that politics makes strange bedfellows when the stakes are high and national interests coincide.
Today’s global order resembles a scalene triangle in which each side differs in length and strength. The China-Russia axis is the most robust, bound by converging strategic interests and growing economic complementarity. The U.S.-China relationship sits in the middle, oscillating between cooperation and competition. And U.S.-Russia relations remain the most adversarial, characterized by deep mistrust and open rivalry. Each bilateral dynamic inevitably reshapes the other two, making this triangular interplay the defining architecture of twenty-first-century geopolitics. 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.
Ultimately, the lessons of 1939 and 1960 resonate powerfully today: alliances will form for convenience and fracture in unforeseen ways, with dramatic effect; spheres of influence remain the currency of great-power politics; and economic leverage has become as consequential as fleets and armies. Understanding these continuities not only illuminates the dynamics among the United States, China, and Russia but equips policymakers and scholars to anticipate the next realignment, whether it emerges in cyberspace disputes, energy politics, or new regional blocs. In a world where strategic interests perpetually outpace ideological commitments, the struggle among superpowers continues to follow a familiar script, however with twenty-first-century tools and stakes. In the great-power contest, change is the only constant, each country follows the short-term, pragmatic gains that economic needs and geography dictate. 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.”