Coalitions don’t fail because the strategy was wrong. They fail because the people building them treated alliance as a destination rather than a practice.

That’s the uncomfortable truth at the center of modern geopolitics. From the slow unraveling of the JCPOA to the resilient asymmetric networks that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force (IRGC-QF) has spent decades constructing across the Middle East, the record is clear: the quality of a coalition’s architecture determines whether it holds under pressure or fractures precisely when it matters most. For policymakers, military strategists, and national security professionals, understanding that architecture isn’t optional. It’s foundational.

This article examines the theoretical frameworks that underpin coalition building, applies them to some of the most consequential geopolitical cases of the past decade, and draws out practical principles for constructing alliances that are built to last—not just in peacetime, but through the shocks that inevitably test them.

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The Theoretical Foundation: Why Coalitions Think Before They Act

To understand why some coalitions hold and others collapse, it helps to start with the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), developed by policy scholars Paul Sabatier and Hank Jenkins-Smith in the early 1980s. Though it emerged from domestic policy analysis, its explanatory power translates with remarkable precision to international alliance dynamics.

The ACF holds that policy subsystems—whether domestic regulatory environments or international security arrangements—are shaped by competing coalitions, each bound together by shared belief systems. Crucially, those belief systems operate on three distinct tiers:

• Deep Core Beliefs: Fundamental normative values—about sovereignty, security, or the international order—that are highly resistant to change and rarely negotiable.
• Policy Core Beliefs: Strategic approaches to realizing those values across a given policy domain. These are more flexible than deep core beliefs, but still represent the “non-negotiable” of any serious coalition.
• Secondary Aspects: Operational and tactical preferences regarding specific regulatory instruments, implementation mechanisms, or procedural details. These are the most flexible and most commonly adjusted in coalition negotiations.

The ACF’s most important insight for practitioners is this: substantial, durable policy change takes time—often a decade or more—and requires sustained alignment at the policy core level, not just tactical convergence. Coalitions that only agree on what they oppose, rather than what they are pursuing, consistently underperform. They go, as Amanda Tattersall’s empirical research describes it in Power in Coalition, “a mile wide and an inch deep.”

For interagency teams and multilateral negotiators, this has direct operational implications. Transactional alliances assembled for a single objective—a vote, a summit, a joint statement—may achieve their immediate aim but will struggle to project sustained pressure or adapt when circumstances shift. Enduring policy influence requires coalitions aligned at the policy core level: partners who share not just a common enemy, but a common theory of change.

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Case Study One: The JCPOA and the Cost of Coalition Fracture

Few episodes illustrate the stakes of coalition architecture better than the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—its construction, its achievements, and its collapse.

The 2015 JCPOA represented one of the most complex multilateral policy coalitions assembled in recent diplomatic history. The P5+1—the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, and China—held deeply divergent deep core beliefs about regional influence, economic interests, and their respective relationships with Tehran. Yet they achieved sufficient alignment at the policy core level to execute a functional agreement: all parties shared the strategic belief that constraining Iran’s nuclear breakout timeline was preferable to the alternatives.

The JCPOA’s technical architecture was formidable. It required Iran to reduce its stockpile of enriched uranium by 98%, limit uranium enrichment to 3.67%, reduce its centrifuge count significantly, and accept enhanced IAEA monitoring protocols. In exchange, the international community provided sanctions relief. The agreement effectively extended Iran’s breakout timeline—the time needed to produce sufficient weapons-grade highly enriched uranium (HEU) for a nuclear device—to at least one year, providing what the Obama Administration described as a sufficient window for an international response to any Iranian breakout attempt.

Then, in May 2018, the United States withdrew.

The consequences were not merely diplomatic. According to the Congressional Research Service’s June 2025 assessment, Iran’s subsequent expansion of its enrichment program has reduced its fissile material breakout timeline to less than one week—from one year under JCPOA constraints to approximately “probably less than one week,” per a May 2025 Defense Intelligence Agency assessment. A November 2024 ODNI report noted that Iran has accumulated enough fissile material that, if further enriched, would be sufficient for “more than a dozen nuclear weapons.”

What happened at the coalition level is instructive. When the United States withdrew, it didn’t simply exit a treaty. It destabilized the belief-system alignment that held the P5+1 together. European allies—who had retained alignment at the policy core level with Washington on non-proliferation—suddenly found themselves on a different strategic footing, attempting to salvage an agreement without the leverage that U.S. participation provided. The friction that surfaced at the 2019 Munich Security Conference—where Vice President Pence called on European allies to withdraw from the JCPOA while German Chancellor Merkel publicly defended it—was the visible manifestation of a deeper coalition fracture at the policy core level.

The lesson isn’t simply that U.S. withdrawal was strategically costly—though the breakout timeline data makes that case clearly enough. It’s that a coalition’s resilience is only as strong as the depth of shared belief among its core participants. When a principal member shifts its policy core beliefs—or, more precisely, when a change of administration produces a fundamental reorientation of strategic priorities—coalitions without robust institutional anchors will fracture. The JCPOA had no such anchors.

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Case Study Two: Iran’s Axis of Resistance and the Asymmetric Coalition Model

While Western policymakers were navigating the JCPOA’s collapse, Iran’s strategic planners were demonstrating a very different approach to coalition building—one that, on its own terms, has proven remarkably durable.

Iran’s network of non-state partners—Lebanese Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis in Yemen, and various Iraqi militias including Kata’ib Hezbollah, Harakat al-Nujaba, and Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq—is not a coalition of convenience. It is, according to U.S. intelligence assessments, a coordinated regional network managed with strategic coherence by the IRGC-QF. These groups “sometimes style themselves the ‘Axis of Resistance,'” as the Congressional Research Service notes, and have conducted attacks on U.S., Israeli, and other targets for years, with the number, pace, and scope of operations surging sharply since October 7, 2023.

What makes this network analytically significant isn’t its capacity for violence—it’s its coalition architecture.

Consider how it maps against the ACF framework. The participating groups hold different deep core beliefs: Hezbollah is a Shia political and military organization; Hamas is a Sunni Islamist movement; the Houthis operate within a Zaydi Shia framework; Iraqi militias reflect a range of Shia political traditions. Their theological and ideological differences are real. But at the policy core level, they share a strategic orientation: resistance to U.S. and Israeli influence in the region, and alignment with Iran’s “forward defense” model of projecting power through proxies rather than conventional military force.

This architecture has produced strategic effects disproportionate to any single group’s individual capacity. Houthi attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea since November 2023 have disrupted global trade and compelled the deployment of significant U.S. and partner naval assets to the region. Iraqi militia strikes have killed U.S. servicemembers—including three in a January 2024 attack in Jordan—and complicated U.S. force posture in Iraq and Syria. Hezbollah’s decades-long development as a state-within-a-state in Lebanon has created a persistent deterrence challenge for Israeli planners.

The IRGC-QF functions, in essence, as a coalition coordinator—the role Amanda Tattersall identifies in Power in Coalition as “critical for holding together organizational relationships and strengthening the coalition.” It smooths differences, provides resources and training, and maintains strategic coherence across a geographically dispersed network of partners with distinct operational priorities. The nature and degree of Iranian support varies across groups—some act more independently than others—but the shared policy core orientation persists.

For Western defense strategists, this asymmetric coalition model presents a structural challenge that goes beyond countering individual groups. Degrading one node of the network—as Israeli operations against Hezbollah in late 2024 demonstrated—does not necessarily unravel the coalition’s strategic coherence. The architecture is designed for resilience through distribution.

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Five Principles for Building Coalitions That Hold

Understanding why coalitions succeed or fail under analytical frameworks is one thing. Operationalizing that understanding is another. Amanda Tattersall’s empirical research across multiple case studies in Power in Coalition identifies five consistent principles that distinguish high-performing, durable coalitions from fragile ones. Applied to the geopolitical and interagency environments that policymakers navigate daily, these principles carry direct strategic relevance.

1. Less Is More: Depth Over Breadth

The instinct in coalition building—particularly in multilateral diplomatic contexts—is to aggregate. More partners, more legitimacy, more pressure. But Tattersall’s research consistently shows the opposite: coalitions with restricted, deeply committed membership outperform broad but shallow alliances.

Wide coalitions tend toward “lowest common denominator” positions—agreeing only on what they oppose, rarely on what they are building. Narrower coalitions with genuine policy core alignment build the trust necessary for decisive action under pressure, rapid decision-making, and the sustained organizational commitment that long campaigns require.

For interagency strategists, this suggests a counterintuitive discipline: resist the expansion of coalition membership beyond the point where trust and shared belief can be maintained. A smaller alliance of genuinely aligned partners will consistently outperform a larger one built on performative consensus.

2. Individuals Matter: The Human Architecture of Alliances

Coalitions are defined as alignments of institutions, but they live and die on the decisions of specific people. Tattersall identifies three categories of individuals as critical: organizational leaders who provide visible commitment and decision-making authority; internal champions who sustain alignment within their organizations; and coalition coordinators who manage relationships across partners, smooth friction, and maintain strategic coherence.

In interagency environments—where State, Defense, Intelligence, and other departments routinely hold competing institutional interests and operational timelines—the coalition coordinator function is frequently underinvested. The absence of a skilled interagency liaison can allow manageable friction to become structural fracture. Building effective coalitions requires deliberate investment in the human architecture, not just the institutional one.

3. Wield Self-Interest With a Sword of Justice

Durable coalitions require what Tattersall calls “mutual self-interest”—a shared interest that is simultaneously genuine for each partner and connected to a broader public good or strategic purpose. Organizational self-interest is necessary to sustain coalition commitment, but it is insufficient to build political legitimacy or withstand external scrutiny.

In the national security context, this principle explains why coalitions framed around narrow, transactional interests—a specific sanctions regime, a bilateral trade concession—tend to erode faster than those anchored to broader strategic narratives. A coalition built around the shared interest in nuclear non-proliferation and regional stability, as the JCPOA attempted to construct, carries more inherent resilience than one assembled purely around immediate economic or political pressures. The key is identifying where discrete organizational interests genuinely intersect with the broader strategic common good—and making that intersection explicit.

4. Timely Exercise of Power Through Conscious Planning

Successful coalitions don’t react to events. They shape them through disciplined long-term planning calibrated to specific political opportunities: election cycles, budget windows, treaty renewal timelines, or legislative sessions. Tattersall’s case studies show consistent patterns: coalitions that built two-year plans with periodic pressure releases—tied to predictable political moments—achieved significantly greater policy impact than those responding reactively to the media cycle.

For defense and policy strategists operating in multi-year program environments, this principle is both familiar and frequently violated. The urgency of near-term operational demands regularly crowds out the long-term coalition management that durable strategic success requires. Disciplined planning that reserves coalition pressure for high-leverage political moments is a force multiplier—one that requires protecting, even when the immediate environment pushes for reaction.

5. Multi-Scaled Capabilities: Coherence Across Echelons

Most significant policy challenges cannot be resolved at a single scale. They require coherent action at the international, national, and operational levels simultaneously—with genuine feedback loops between each tier. Coalitions that coordinate at the top without rooting strategy in local realities tend to see participation fall away over time, as top-down campaigns lose relevance to the communities and organizations they depend on for sustained pressure.

In national security terms, this means a strategy must maintain coherence from the multilateral diplomatic level through interagency federal coordination to tactical operational implementation. A coalition that achieves strategic alignment at the summit level but fails to translate that alignment into coherent operational guidance at the working level will find its commitments evaporating at the moments of execution they were designed to enable.

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The Enduring Challenge: Institutional Friction and How to Address It

Even well-designed coalitions face the persistent problem of institutional friction. In international alliances, divergent threat assessments, incompatible intelligence-sharing protocols, and the political constraints of domestic constituencies all create drag. In interagency environments, competing resource priorities, jurisdictional ambiguities, and organizational culture gaps between diplomatic, military, and intelligence communities can slow coordination to strategic irrelevance.

There is no formula that eliminates this friction. But several practices consistently reduce it.

First, invest in shared situational awareness. Coalitions fracture fastest when partners are operating from fundamentally different pictures of the problem. The more that partners share common assessments—even imperfect ones—the more resilient their coordination becomes under stress. This is where real-time geopolitical intelligence platforms and collaborative data environments provide structural value: not as decision-making substitutes, but as shared epistemic foundations.

Second, stress-test coalition cohesion before crisis strikes. Scenario modeling and tabletop exercises that simulate coalition friction under adverse conditions—a partner’s domestic political shift, an unexpected escalation, a disagreement over attribution—reveal structural vulnerabilities that routine coordination conceals. Coalitions that have practiced navigating disagreement are significantly more resilient than those that have never had to.

Third, build explicit mechanisms for managing divergence. The assumption that coalition partners will sustain alignment indefinitely is consistently falsified by events. Building explicit consultation mechanisms—triggered by defined thresholds of divergence—ensures that friction surfaces as a managed process rather than a sudden fracture.

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A Strategic Imperative, Not an Academic Exercise

The geopolitical landscape of the mid-2020s is not forgiving of coalition weakness. Iran’s nuclear breakout timeline, measured in days rather than years, reflects the long-term consequence of coalition fracture. The Axis of Resistance’s demonstrated capacity to disrupt international shipping, project lethal force across multiple theaters, and complicate deterrence strategies for Western planners reflects the strategic return on sustained coalition investment—even an asymmetric, non-state coalition built on shared ideological orientation rather than formal treaty architecture.

The U.S.-European tensions visible at successive Munich Security Conferences reflect a deeper structural question: whether the transatlantic alliance retains sufficient policy core alignment to function as a coherent coalition under pressure, or whether it is drifting toward the same “mile wide, inch deep” fragility that characterizes the coalitions Tattersall identifies as strategically underperforming.

These are not abstract questions. They are the operational environment in which policymakers, strategists, and defense leaders are making decisions today.

The organizations that will shape the next decade of geopolitical outcomes are not those with the most partners on a letterhead. They are those that have built the depth of shared belief, the quality of human architecture, and the discipline of long-term planning that enables coalitions to hold—and to act decisively—when the pressure is highest.

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