Strategic partnerships, international politics and IR theory

Strategic partnerships (SPs) constitute a novel form and feature of the evolving international relations system and represent a new principle for organizing international life. Seen broadly, strategic partnerships represent a type of special relationship and thus are not unique or new at all. However, should one take a closer look into the internal mechanics of the partnership phenomenon and explore its distinctive foreign-political functions from its changing geostrategic context, it becomes clear that with the reconfiguration of the international relations system since the early 1990s, strategic partnerships have become the necessary key to cope with systemic and issue-specific international challenges. It is difficult to trace the path back to the first strategic partnership formed post-1990. The problem is of both an empirical and analytical nature as there is still no consensus in the literature as to what elements constitute the idea of a strategic partnership and whether labelling a relationship as such is sufficient to regard bilateralism as a strategic partnership. Most authors who searched for the roots of the phenomenon contend that the agreement between US President Bill Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin in 1994, which set forth ‘a new stage of mature strategic partnership based on equality, mutual advantage, and recognition of each other’s national interests’ (Moscow Declaration, 1994), encompasses the first of its kind (cf. e.g. Envall and Hall, 2016, p. 89; Michalski and Pan, 2017b, p. 13; Nadkarni, 2010, p. 46). However, the long abandoned strategic partnership between the US and Turkey, which was re-invigorated in early 2018, was in fact established in 1992. Brazil and China forged their strategic partnership in 1993. Thus, at least two other partnerships of this kind were in place before the 1994 US–Russian deal was struck. Since 1993, when China made its first strategic partnership with Brazil, and by 2014 China had forged close to 70 strategic partnerships