Alliances are a holdover from nineteenth-century European geopolitics, kept alive by political pundits’ juvenile obsessions with strategy games.
“It has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, continuously rule, and that public opinion, expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters.”
— Winston Churchill, in Parliament, 1947