Isaiah Berlin's startling admission befits the mood of this book. It is written not from the wisdom of old age but the folly of youth. It is a book about alliances and yet alliances are quite unimportant to it. They illustrate my argument, but this argument itself potentially has much wider implications as well as applications. Our theorizing about alliances, so I argue, may benefit from relaxing any a-priori assumptions we may have traditionally taken to them: expectations of finding constancy, homogeny, teleology, progress or pattern. This is especially important when considering that we may have relatively little empirical evidence that these are ordinarily their properties. What if this is no more than a metaphysical attitude? True to our intellectual origins, we may have persisted in three, relatively unexamined, beliefs, namely that to every genuine question there is but one answer; that these answers can be discovered by applying reason; and that, together, such answers must be compatible in amounting to a coherent, stable, and universal body of theory (cf. Berlin, 1999a). As in simple arithmetic, the parts add up reliably to the same sum total.