F04: From Special Relationships to Strategic Situationships

Bottom Line

As multilateral reliability recedes and great-power alignment fades, states meet near-term needs through narrow, bilateral arrangements rather than treaty-grade pacts. Verification and reversibility displace value alignment. Corridor optionality, maintaining multiple routes and partners, becomes bargaining power. After shocks, parties suspend, tighten and rapidly renegotiate instead of litigating. Short, reversible memoranda of understanding (MOUs) become the default as treaty grade, values-informed deals survive only as exceptions. What were once special relationships become strategic situationships: deliberately under-defined partnerships that maintain ambiguity about depth, duration and exclusivity. This ambiguity is not slippage but strategy. Legibility becomes liability, the party that can be pinned down loses leverage to the party that cannot. 

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