Alliances Are Not Friendships

The transactional truth behind every “partnership”

Introduction

The vocabulary of international relations borrows heavily from the vocabulary of personal relationships. Countries have “special relationships.” They are “strategic partners.” They stand “shoulder to shoulder” with their “allies.” This language is not accidental. It is useful, because it makes a transaction feel like a bond, and a bond is harder to walk away from than a transaction. But it is also, on the evidence of nearly every alliance in the modern historical record, misleading. States do not form alliances because they like each other. They form alliances because, for some period of time, doing so serves each party’s interests better than not doing so. When that calculation changes, for either party, the alliance changes with it, however warm the language used to describe it a year earlier.

This is not cynicism. It is simply how sovereign orders, the subject of the first essay in this series, actually relate to one another. A sovereign order, by definition, answers to no external authority. That means every alliance it enters is a voluntary, conditional arrangement rather than a permanent commitment, no matter what the treaty language says. This essay traces that transactional logic through five cases spanning the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: the founding of the U.S.-Saudi relationship, Egypt’s abrupt switch of Cold War patrons, the collapse of the Sino-Soviet alliance into near-war, and the gap between a “security assurance” and a real alliance that Ukraine discovered the hard way in 1994. Together they show a pattern worth taking seriously: the more sentimental the language surrounding a partnership, the more useful it is to ask what each side is actually getting out of it, and how long that is likely to last.

The Transactional Logic of Alliances

Interests converge, not values

Alliances are frequently justified, especially to domestic publics, in the language of shared values: shared democratic traditions, shared civilizational heritage, shared commitment to a rules-based order. These claims are not always false, but they are rarely the actual load-bearing structure of the alliance. The load-bearing structure is a converging interest, usually security or economic, that happens to align for both parties at a particular moment. Values rhetoric is the packaging. Interest convergence is the product inside it. When the two happen to overlap, as they sometimes genuinely do, the alliance feels effortless and durable. When they do not, no amount of shared-values language keeps the arrangement alive for long, as several of the cases below demonstrate directly.

Alliances are asymmetric by default

Rarely do two states enter an alliance as true equals. One side typically needs the arrangement more urgently, whether for security, resources, legitimacy, or market access, and that asymmetry shapes the entire relationship going forward. The less dependent party holds more leverage and can afford to let the relationship drift or end when its own calculations change. The more dependent party has far less room to maneuver, and often experiences the eventual unraveling of the alliance as a betrayal, even though, from the more powerful party’s side, it was simply a rational response to changed circumstances. Nearly every case in this essay features this asymmetry in some form.

An assurance is not an alliance

One of the most consequential confusions in modern statecraft is the gap between a formal alliance, which typically carries a binding mutual-defense commitment, and a security assurance, which is usually a political statement of goodwill with no binding enforcement mechanism attached. Governments have strong incentives to blur this distinction when courting a weaker partner, since the language of assurance can be made to sound almost identical to the language of guarantee, while carrying none of the same legal or political cost if it is later set aside. The Budapest Memorandum, covered in detail below, is the starkest modern example of this gap, and of how expensive the confusion can turn out to be for the party that misunderstood it.

Loyalty has a shelf life measured in interests, not years

Perhaps the hardest lesson embedded in the historical record is that the duration of an alliance is not, by itself, evidence of its durability. An alliance that has lasted twenty years has lasted twenty years because interests continued to align for twenty years, not because the two parties built up some reservoir of loyalty that will outlast a genuine interest conflict when one finally arrives. Sadat’s Egypt maintained a close alliance with the Soviet Union for roughly fifteen years, through a revolution, an arms deal, and a war, before ending the relationship within a matter of months once Soviet and Egyptian interests genuinely diverged. The length of the prior relationship bought Moscow essentially nothing when the break actually came.

The Quincy Agreement, Oil Purchased with Security

A bargain, explicitly stated as a bargain

Few alliances in modern history illustrate the transactional foundation of statecraft as plainly as the relationship established between the United States and Saudi Arabia aboard the USS Quincy on February 14, 1945. President Franklin Roosevelt, returning from the Yalta Conference where the postwar order was being drawn up among the Allied powers, met Saudi King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud in the Great Bitter Lake of the Suez Canal. What emerged from that meeting was not a declaration of friendship but an explicit exchange, later formalized in what became known as the Quincy Agreement: American security guarantees for the Saudi kingdom, in return for American access to Saudi oil (1). As one account of the meeting puts it plainly, the two leaders agreed that the United States would ensure the kingdom’s security, and the Saudis would ensure American access to their oil fields, an arrangement further cemented by the United States securing use of the Dhahran air base and by Saudi Arabia formally declaring war on the Axis powers, which in turn secured Riyadh a seat among the founding members of the United Nations (2).

Endurance without sentiment

What makes the Quincy Agreement instructive is not merely its longevity, the relationship has survived for eight decades through Cold War tensions, the 1973 oil embargo, and periodic crises in bilateral relations, but the near-total absence of sentimental language in its original construction. Contemporary accounts describe a meeting between two men who could not have been more different in background, outlook, or worldview, brought together not by affinity but by a hard-edged recognition that each had something the other urgently needed (3). The kingdom, newly formed and militarily vulnerable, needed an external guarantor of its security. The United States, emerging from the Second World War as the preeminent industrial and military power, needed guaranteed access to the oil reserves that would fuel that power for the rest of the century. Neither side pretended otherwise, and it is precisely because neither side pretended otherwise that the arrangement has proven durable: both parties have continued, decade after decade, to independently recalculate that the exchange still serves their interests, rather than assuming loyalty alone will carry the relationship through a genuine conflict of interest.

This durability through interest recalculation, rather than despite the absence of sentiment, is the clearest possible illustration of Part One’s central claim. The relationship has weathered enormous strain, including deep American public anger after the September 11 attacks, carried out predominantly by Saudi nationals, and periodic congressional pressure over Saudi human rights conduct, precisely because both governments have continued to conclude, independently and repeatedly, that the underlying security-for-oil exchange remains worth preserving. It has not been preserved by affection. It has been preserved by ongoing interest convergence, renegotiated in substance if not in name, generation after generation.

Sadat’s Flip, When Fifteen Years of Alliance Ended in Months

Building the Soviet-Egyptian alliance

Egypt’s Cold War alignment offers perhaps the cleanest natural experiment in how quickly an alliance can end once the underlying interest calculation shifts, precisely because Egypt switched sides once and nearly switched back, all within roughly a decade. After the 1952 revolution that brought Gamal Abdel Nasser to power, Egypt initially sought Western arms and aid, was rebuffed, and turned instead to the Soviet Union, striking a major arms deal in 1955 that gave Moscow its first significant foothold in the Arab world (4). Over the following fifteen years, Soviet influence in Egypt grew substantially: military advisers, economic aid, and diplomatic backing flowed from Moscow to Cairo, particularly after Egypt’s catastrophic defeat in the 1967 Six-Day War left the country dependent on Soviet resupply and support.

Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, initially continued this alignment, signing a formal Soviet-Egyptian Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation in May 1971 (5). On paper, this looked like an alliance entering its second decade, formalized, deepened, and seemingly secure.

The break, and what actually caused it

It was not secure, because the underlying interests that had sustained it were shifting. Sadat wanted advanced offensive weaponry and unambiguous Soviet backing for a renewed military confrontation with Israel to recover the Sinai Peninsula, lost in 1967. The Soviet Union, pursuing its own strategic interest in detente with the United States, which reached a symbolic high point at the Brezhnev-Nixon summit in Moscow in May 1972, was unwilling to supply the offensive weapons or the political backing Sadat wanted, judging that a new Middle East war would jeopardize the broader superpower relationship Moscow was cultivating with Washington (6). In July 1972, within weeks of that summit, Sadat ordered the expulsion of the bulk of the Soviet military advisers in Egypt, a rupture that historians and Sadat’s own later statements attribute directly to Moscow’s refusal to prioritize Egyptian interests over its own detente calculations (7).

The scale and speed of the reversal is worth dwelling on. This was not a slow drift, of the kind traced in the previous essay in this series on imperial decline. This was a fifteen-year alliance, recently reaffirmed by formal treaty, that unwound within a matter of weeks once Sadat concluded the relationship was no longer serving Egypt’s core interest, in this case, the recovery of the Sinai. The relationship did not end because Egypt or the Soviet Union stopped valuing each other’s friendship. It ended because the specific transaction underlying the alliance, Soviet weapons and backing in exchange for Egyptian alignment, had stopped functioning to Egypt’s satisfaction, and Sadat had a credible alternative patron, the United States, waiting in the wings.

The full pivot to Washington

What followed confirms just how transactional the underlying logic was. Having expelled the Soviets, Sadat launched the October 1973 war against Israel anyway, achieving enough of an initial battlefield success to restore Egyptian political leverage even though the war itself ended inconclusively. That leverage, combined with the changed strategic picture, allowed Sadat to pursue an entirely new alignment: normalized relations with the United States by 1974, a historic visit to Israel in 1977, the Camp David Accords in 1978, and a formal peace treaty with Israel in 1979, accompanied by substantial American military and economic aid that continues to this day (8). By 1981, Sadat had expelled the last remaining Soviet personnel from Egypt entirely, completing a reversal from Moscow’s principal Arab ally to Washington’s principal Arab partner within less than a decade. Interests, not sentiment, explain every step of that reversal.

The Sino-Soviet Split, Ideological Allies to the Brink of War

An alliance built on shared ideology, which turned out not to be enough

If the Egyptian case shows a transactional alliance ending cleanly once its purpose was served, the Sino-Soviet split shows something arguably more revealing: an alliance built on what looked like the strongest possible bonding agent, shared revolutionary ideology, collapsing into armed border clashes within roughly fifteen years of its founding. The People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union entered the 1950s as the two largest communist states in the world, bound by what both governments described as fraternal solidarity in a shared global struggle against Western imperialism.

That shared framing did not survive a genuine divergence of interest and strategy. Tensions began building in the late 1950s over the Soviet Union’s reluctance to help China develop nuclear weapons, which Chinese leaders interpreted as a form of great-power condescension inconsistent with genuine alliance, and deepened sharply after Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 speech denouncing Stalin and his pursuit of peaceful coexistence with the West, both of which Mao Zedong publicly denounced as ideological revisionism and a betrayal of true Marxist principles (9). In 1960, Khrushchev abruptly withdrew the thousands of Soviet technical advisers stationed in China, halting joint industrial and military projects and marking the first unmistakable sign that a genuine break, not simply a disagreement, was underway (10).

From ideology to territory to near-war

What is particularly notable about the Sino-Soviet case is how quickly the dispute, once it took hold, expanded from ideology into hard territorial and military terms, exposing how thin the ideological bonding had actually been once real state interests came into conflict. By 1963, Mao was publicly asserting that Russia had annexed Chinese territory in the nineteenth century and had not yet been made to answer for it. Border tensions escalated steadily through the 1960s, compounded by Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which further inflamed anti-Soviet sentiment domestically, and by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, which Chinese leaders read as a demonstration of exactly the kind of intervention Moscow might someday attempt against Beijing (11). The conflict peaked in March 1969 with an actual armed clash between Soviet and Chinese forces at Zhenbao Island on the Ussuri River, serious enough that both nuclear-armed communist giants seriously prepared for the possibility of full-scale war before tensions were defused through negotiation later that year (12).

The strategic consequences ran deeper than the two countries themselves. Once Washington recognized that the supposedly unified communist bloc had fractured into open hostility, the United States moved to exploit the opening directly: Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China in 1972 was explicitly built on capitalizing on the Sino-Soviet rupture, flipping what had briefly been the world’s most ideologically bonded alliance into an opportunity for American diplomacy (13). An alliance justified in the deepest possible values language, shared revolutionary destiny, proved just as conditional, and just as reversible under a genuine interest conflict, as the purely transactional Quincy Agreement examined above. The lesson is not that ideology never matters. It is that ideology, like values language generally, describes the packaging of an alliance far more reliably than it predicts the alliance’s durability once real interests diverge.

The Budapest Memorandum, When an Assurance Is Mistaken for an Alliance

What Ukraine actually gave up, and what it actually received

The final case in this essay is not a story of an alliance breaking down but of a document widely misunderstood, at the time and since, as an alliance in the first place, a confusion with consequences that continue to shape a live conflict decades later. When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, Ukraine found itself in physical possession of the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world, roughly nineteen hundred warheads, though operational control and launch codes had always remained in Moscow (14). Both the United States and Russia had a strong shared interest in Ukrainian denuclearization, and pressed Kyiv to give up the weapons on its soil and accede to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear state.

Ukraine agreed, but not unconditionally. In exchange, on December 5, 1994, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia signed the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, committing to respect Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty, and existing borders, to refrain from the threat or use of force against Ukraine, and to seek United Nations Security Council action should Ukraine ever be attacked with nuclear weapons (15).

Assurance, not guarantee, and the gap that mattered

The word choice in that summary is doing significant work, and it was chosen deliberately at the time. As former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer, who was part of the American negotiating team in 1994, has explained directly, American officials were explicit internally that these were assurances, a term of art distinct from a binding guarantee, and structured the entire document specifically so that it would not require the kind of formal alliance commitment, such as the mutual-defense obligations found in the NATO treaty, that would have needed a two-thirds vote in the United States Senate to ratify (16). A real alliance guarantee was, in other words, never actually on the table. What was offered, and what Ukraine accepted, was a political statement of intent, not a legally binding security commitment, and the distinction was understood by both American and Russian negotiators at the time even if it was not always communicated with equal clarity to the Ukrainian public.

The consequences of that gap became impossible to ignore in 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea in direct violation of the territorial commitments in the memorandum, and again in 2022, with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine (17). Both events triggered widespread public commentary describing the Budapest Memorandum as a broken security guarantee, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky himself has repeatedly invoked the memorandum in exactly those terms, arguing that Ukraine surrendered its nuclear deterrent in exchange for security it never actually received (18). The memorandum’s actual drafters, and a range of subsequent legal analysis, note that this framing, while emotionally understandable, is not strictly accurate to what the document itself promised. What Ukraine received in 1994 was consultation and condemnation in the event of an attack, not military intervention to prevent or reverse one.

The lesson for reading any modern security commitment

This case is the sharpest illustration in this essay of a principle stated in Part One: the language used to describe a security arrangement between states is frequently designed to sound more binding than the underlying legal instrument actually is, precisely because a genuine alliance guarantee is expensive and politically difficult for a great power to extend, while an assurance costs almost nothing to promise. Ukraine’s experience since 1994 is, in this narrow but important sense, a cautionary case study for any state currently relying on a partnership that has not been tested by a genuine crisis. The question worth asking of any such arrangement is not how warmly it is described, but precisely what mechanism, if any, would actually compel the other party to act, and under exactly what circumstances that mechanism would be triggered. Where that mechanism does not clearly exist, what looks like an alliance may, on close reading, be closer to an assurance, a promise that costs its author very little to make and, as 2014 and 2022 demonstrated, very little to set aside.

Reading Today’s Partnerships Through the Same Lens

The pattern is not confined to history

Every one of the mechanics traced above is visible, in real time, in the alliance structures dominating current headlines. NATO’s ongoing internal debate over member states’ defense spending targets is, at its core, an argument about whether the underlying transaction, collective security guaranteed substantially by American military capacity, still holds when some members are judged by others to be under-contributing to their side of the exchange. The recurring friction is not a crisis of shared democratic values among NATO members. It is a dispute, entirely consistent with Part One’s framework, over whether each side is still delivering its half of the original bargain.

Elsewhere, states increasingly hedge openly rather than commit to a single bloc, treating alliance itself as a portfolio to be diversified rather than a loyalty to be pledged. A state can simultaneously deepen security cooperation with one power while maintaining significant energy or defense-technology dependence on that power’s rival, not out of confusion or bad faith, but because doing so is a rational response to a world in which, as every case in this essay demonstrates, no partnership can be assumed to outlast a genuine conflict of interest. Reading a state’s alliance behavior this way, as a live, continuously renegotiated calculation rather than a fixed loyalty, tends to predict its actual conduct far better than reading it through the language of friendship its officials use in public.

Why the transactional lens is not cynicism

It is worth being precise about what this framework does and does not claim. It does not claim that shared values, cultural affinity, or genuine goodwill play no role in how alliances are formed or sustained; the Quincy Agreement’s eight-decade endurance owes something to genuinely cultivated relationships between successive generations of American and Saudi officials, not to the original transaction alone. What the framework does claim is that none of that affinity has ever, in the cases examined here, proven sufficient on its own to sustain an alliance once the underlying interests genuinely diverged. Values and affinity can extend an alliance’s life at the margins, buying time for interests to be recalculated or a transaction to be renegotiated. They cannot indefinitely substitute for the transaction itself.

Conclusion

Four cases, spanning a Saudi desert kingdom, a post-colonial Arab republic, the two largest communist states of the twentieth century, and a newly independent post-Soviet nation, tell a consistent story. The Quincy Agreement endured for eight decades not because of sentiment but because the underlying oil-for-security exchange kept being renewed, deliberately, by both sides. Egypt’s alliance with the Soviet Union ended within weeks of Moscow declining to deliver its half of the bargain, fifteen years of formal friendship notwithstanding. The Sino-Soviet alliance, built on the strongest ideological bonding language available, fractured into near-war once Beijing and Moscow’s actual strategic interests diverged. And Ukraine discovered, at enormous cost, the practical difference between a security assurance and a security guarantee, a distinction its 1994 negotiating partners understood clearly even when the Ukrainian public did not.

None of this means alliances are worthless, or that states should refuse to enter them. It means reading any partnership for what actually holds it together, the specific, ongoing exchange of value between two sovereign orders, rather than for the language its participants use to describe it in public. Friendships can survive a shift in what each party needs from the other. Alliances, as every case in this essay demonstrates, generally cannot, and the states that understand this distinction tend to navigate the moment interests diverge far better than the ones that mistook the partnership for something more permanent than it ever actually was.

References

1. On the Quincy Agreement of February 14, 1945, and the exchange of American security guarantees for Saudi oil access. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Kings-and-Presidents_CH1.pdf
2. On the specific terms agreed between Roosevelt and Ibn Saud, including U.S. use of Dhahran air base and Saudi Arabia’s entry into the United Nations. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/75-years-after-a-historic-meeting-on-the-uss-quincy-us-saudi-relations-are-in-need-of-a-true-re-think/
3. On the contrasting backgrounds of Roosevelt and Ibn Saud and the strategic logic behind the meeting. https://realclearworld.com/2023/01/03/a_new_world_energy_order_takes_shape_873548.html
4. On the 1955 Egyptian-Soviet arms deal establishing Moscow’s foothold in the Arab world. https://calhoun.nps.edu/entities/publication/7841f7fe-8a4e-4dc9-8e3c-3217741bb40a
5. On the Soviet-Egyptian Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation signed in May 1971. https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/egypt/sadat.htm
6. On the May 1972 Brezhnev-Nixon Moscow summit and its role in the Soviet refusal to supply Egypt’s requested offensive weapons. https://digitalprojects.palestine-studies.org/jps/fulltext/38258
7. On Sadat’s expulsion of Soviet military advisers in July 1972 and his own stated reasoning. https://countrystudies.us/egypt/41.htm
8. On Egypt’s subsequent pivot to the United States, the Camp David Accords, and the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty. https://www.aljazeera.com/focus/2009/08/200981710100793616.html
9. On the ideological origins of the Sino-Soviet split, including Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization and pursuit of peaceful coexistence. https://tutorchase.com/notes/cie-a-level/history/9-2-3-sino-soviet-relationship-evolution
10. On the Soviet withdrawal of technical advisers from China in 1960. https://cognito.org/courses/alevel/history/aqa/notes/bnZVaW1zTUk/4.21-sino-soviet-split-ideology-territory
11. On the escalation of Sino-Soviet border tensions through the 1960s, including the Cultural Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. https://kids.britannica.com/students/article/Sino-Soviet-split/313563
12. On the March 1969 armed clash between Soviet and Chinese forces at Zhenbao Island. https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1968/chinese-border/
13. On Nixon’s 1972 visit to China as a direct exploitation of the Sino-Soviet split. https://alphahistory.com/coldwar/sino-soviet-split/
14. On Ukraine’s inherited Soviet nuclear arsenal following the 1991 Soviet collapse. https://www.npr.org/2014/03/09/288298641/the-role-of-1994-nuclear-agreement-in-ukraines-current-state
15. On the terms of the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, signed December 5, 1994. https://encyclopediaofukraine.com/pages%5CB%5CU%5CBudapestMemorandum.htm
16. Steven Pifer, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, on the deliberate distinction between security “assurances” and a binding “guarantee” in the 1994 negotiations. https://glenndiesen.substack.com/p/the-budapest-memorandum-the-fake
17. On Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and 2022 invasion as violations of the Budapest Memorandum’s territorial commitments. https://brunch.co.kr/@andrewohe0te/3587
18. On President Zelensky’s public invocations of the Budapest Memorandum as a broken security commitment. https://glenndiesen.substack.com/p/the-budapest-memorandum-the-fake
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