Alliance Politics in the 21st Century Great Power Competition: A Power-Balancing Coalition Framework

Abstract

US-China competition in the Indo-Pacific is setting the stage for a new tale of alliance politics. To contain Beijingʼs expanding power and influence in the Indo-Pacific, Washington is currently leading several coalitions, namely the US-Japan Alliance, Quad, Squad, and AUKUS; To counter US balancing efforts, Beijing is now strengthening its own alliances especially the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the China-Russia partnership. Using an integrative review approach, this article synergises the existing system- and unit-level theories into a “Power-Balancing Coalition Framework” (PBCF) for investigating the 21st century alliance politics. This framework hypothesises that system-level forces (i.e., relative power distribution across states/blocs of states) will dispose countries to “behave similarly” in terms of engaging a power-balancing coalition in a similar direction, on the one hand; it also hypothesises that unit-level forces (i.e., stateʼs geopolitical position, political-economic systems, and ideology) will domestically shape states to drive countries to “behave differently” in terms of engaging a power-balancing coalition in a different pace, on the other hand. Such a framework has the potential to shed light on state alliance behaviours not only in the Indo-Pacific but also all over the world.