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.