Can Great Powers Compete Without Alliances?

It will be less well-remembered than the other moments marking the end of the Cold War – the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the final lowering of the Soviet flag on Christmas Day, 1991 –  but this year, the first of July marks another anniversary worth remembering: 30 years since the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist.

The under-the-radar anniversary might have something to do with the relative orderliness of the occasion. July 1 marks the day when the Warsaw Pact formally ceased to exist, but that date reflected the end of a process that formally began at a meeting in February 1991. Moreover, the writing had been on the wall since the Berlin Wall came down and East Germany – one of the Pact’s most powerful militaries and the geographic center of European strategic contestation – reunified with the West.

Today, in retrospect, the Cold War is usually portrayed as a struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. This is an understandable substitution, given that the U.S. and the USSR were the primary ideological drivers of the conflict, and the leading military powers to boot. But a coalition – even a lopsided one – offers political and strategic advantages relative to going it alone: support in multilateral institutions, additional capabilities (especially backup or specialist ones), and crucially, providing at least a patina of political legitimacy in contested circumstances.

This is all worth bearing in mind as the United States and China square up for, if not a new Cold War, then at least some kind of new grand strategic competition.

Thus far, however, the alliance structures around Beijing and Washington look very different from the NATO/Warsaw Pact model. On the U.S. side, this is a remnant and a function of the different American alliance structures at play in the vicinities of the Soviet Union and China. Both NATO and the Warsaw Pact were multilateral, tying their participants together and promising mutual aid regardless of which one was targeted. In the Pacific, by contrast, the United States has used a hub-and-spoke system, allying itself (with varying degrees of closeness) individually with various states throughout the region rather than combining them together into a single coherent unit. And while Washington has made various efforts to bring its Pacific allies closer together – or at least to be a more active mediator in their disputes – there is nothing approaching a Pacific NATO on the horizon.

In Beijing’s case, the problem is more fundamental. China is part of some multilateral strategic groupings, most notably the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), but none of these represents a mutual defense pact like the Warsaw Pact – indeed, Chinese troops continue to intermittently clash with those of fellow SCO member India along their disputed border.

China does have some powerful friends. Its defense relationship with Pakistan is significant, and it continues to maintain cordial ties (including technological and defense cooperation) with Russia. While its diplomacy is often hard-edged and its development investments come with lots of string attached, its largesse (combined occasionally with political support) has bought it a degree of admiration outside the ranks of nuclear-armed powers, too. But friends are not the same as allies. Absent some much deeper, much more codified set of ties, it is hard to imagine Russia or Pakistan or North Korea sending military forces to aid the PLA in a putative conflict with the United States.

The U.S., on the other hand, has far more diplomatic cards to play. As President Joe Biden’s recent trip to Europe demonstrated, Washington can rally its allies in the G-7 and NATO at least as far as rhetorical condemnation of China is concerned. And its mutual defense treaties do mean “mutual defense” – NATO, after all, went into Afghanistan after the United States was attacked on September 11. Admittedly the political calculus would be significantly different in the event of a conflict with a nuclear-armed state possessing the world’s largest and second-best-funded military. But the same calculations would apply to potential Chinese allies: what would Pakistan or Russia stand to gain from joining a war with the United States, and what of theirs could the U.S. hold at risk? The answer to the latter question is as clear as the answer to the former is unclear, and neither suggests that Beijing is close to being able to construct a counter-U.S. alliance along the lines of the Warsaw Pact.

On the other hand, perhaps it doesn’t need to. In keeping with the theme of history not repeating, it would be a mistake to assume that the next great power competition will echo the last one. Notwithstanding some Marxist language, the PRC is a very different actor than the USSR, and its rise is taking place during a largely peaceful era defined by globalized commerce, which was not the case for the Soviet Union. More to the point, Beijing’s tactical need for a mutual defense pact is far less: With a much greater population and a far more robust and sophisticated economy than the USSR, it is unlikely to encounter a military problem that could best be solved with supplementary forces from smaller, poorer states.

The fundamental question is a political one. The G-7 and NATO summits brought at least a few indications that the U.S. is beginning to successfully steer its existing alliance structures towards competition with China. To the extent that that trend creates meaningful pressure, it may well incentivize the PRC’s leaders to construct a modern-day Warsaw Pact, though focused more on political rather than military mutual defense.