Talk:List of military alliances

Untitled
Active alliances overlap with "20th century Cold war alliances", but not all currently active are copied below - ECOMOG, AZNUS, but also others. Alinor (talk) 11:55, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

Brazil deleted
I deleted Brazil as a major non NATO ally, due to the fact the country is never mentioned neither by NATO nor by its own defense forces as such. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2804:7F4:1180:AD5A:4EC:C2A0:40F9:430D (talk) 17:00, 24 January 2017 (UTC)

SCO - not a military alliance
While states of SCO conduct military cooperation & discussions, joint exercises, etc. - this is different from "military alliance" of the NATO or even CSTO type. Alinor (talk) 11:58, 30 October 2010 (UTC)
 * I agree, it is strange to it is included still, India and Pakistan are allies huh, no way...109.93.37.220 (talk) 02:07, 24 May 2022 (UTC)

Don't tell the fanboys, it's fun watching the SCO conferences having to say the same stuff over and over about how they are not a military alliance outside of anti-terrorist and anti-secession agreements. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.187.116.238 (talk) 02:04, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

What about NORDEFCO? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.201.44.244 (talk) 18:42, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

Active Military Alliances
Map is wrong. Austria isn't and never was part of NATO. While Greenland should be marked under NATO as it is part of Denmark. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Schmichaeln (talk • contribs) 15:35, 25 December 2012 (UTC)

This article is not matching up to its name
So, this contains a whole lot of alliances which are not military alliances at all. It's downright misleading to people who are just glancing at the article. I think it should be renamed something else, or I'll come back here later and delete all the non-military alliances. Citizen Premier (talk)

Map
This article is about all military alliances, according to LadyBeth, Nagihuin is a great map maker, so then it should be quite easy to make a map of the world's different military alliances. This article isn't about the US and that map has no place in it. The only part of the map that should be moved is NATO and the other treaties listed there because they are military alliances between nations and would belong in a map on military alliances of the world. - SantiLak  (talk) 19:12, 27 April 2015 (UTC)


 * Good luck! There's been a request for such a thing since 2009, as far as I can tell. The Collective security article has a map of arbitrarily-selected "major" alliances. Creating a more detailed map seems like it would be devilishly complicated, as you'd need to figure out how to organize them (some of them are mutual defense pacts, some only cooperate on specific things like "anti-terrorism", many of them overlap to varying degrees), and for that you'd need to actually read the legal documents and find out what they say, because this information doesn't seem to be widely known. As much as I think it's a great idea, a map of just the US alliances is probably better than no map at all. Esn (talk) 11:17, 1 May 2015 (UTC)

WHERE BRICS?
Why is there no BRICS? Jake544 (talk) 09:18, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

BRICS are an economic block. They don´t have military objectives. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2804:7F4:1180:AD5A:4EC:C2A0:40F9:430D (talk) 17:06, 24 January 2017 (UTC)

Flags are inaccessible
The lists of flags pictures are not lists of countries.

Since they are lists of little pictures, they are unreadable unless I memorize 190 flags and get better glasses. If these were lists of countries, I could also search on the page for a country name and see which alliances it belongs to.

Wikipedia is not a rebus.

Any objections to changing these to English? —Michael Z. 2017-09-23 14:04 z 

Haudenosaunee-British Alliance
Can we put this? 

1647-2018? 216.223.90.33 (talk) 20:14, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

South America
So where is the evidence that the following organizations are military alliances? Military cooperation is not the same as military alliance. There no source for either UNASUR, South American Defense Councilor PROSUR being military alliances. Dentren |  Ta lk  09:17, 31 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Flag of UNASUR.svg Union of South American Nations - Includes Venezuela, Uruguay, Bolivia, Guyana and Suriname, with Peru being a suspended member of UNASUR.
 * South American Defense Council (SADC) 🇵🇪 🇺🇾 🇻🇪 🇸🇷 🇬🇾 🇧🇴
 * Forum for the Progress and Development of South America (PROSUR) - currently being reformed to replace the Union of South American Nations. 🇧🇷 🇨🇱 🇦🇷 🇨🇴 🇵🇪 🇪🇨 🇵🇾 🇬🇾

UNASUR has been listed on this page for years. It does maintain the South American Defense Council, which is a legitimate organization. It's the South American equivalent of the European Union & African Union. They themselves are not alliances, but intergovernmental organizations that maintain a defense council, and thus in practice, function as an alliance. Granted, due to the recent Venezuela crisis, UNASUR has largely broken up, but is still in existence, just with less countries. PROSUR is currently being formed as a replacement organization, made from the former members. - User:Behr116 18:41, 1 September 2019 (EST) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.65.57.137 (talk)
 * Being listed for many years is not a valid reason to keep material. There are many pages with misleading content that manage to survive scrutiny for years. Being a "legitimate organisation" does not mean it is a military alliance, not all military cooperation organisation are alliances. Because there no source saying explicitly UNASUR and PROSUR include military alliances it is WP:OR (original research to treat them as such). What you claim, that "in practice, function as an alliance" needs a citation otherwise it is just some thoughts that are yours. Actually its a mystery to me how you come that conclusion. Dentren  |  Ta lk  10:33, 2 September 2019 (UTC)

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Introduction
I fixed a punctuation error in the introduction. This article needs more maintenance Sashynilasen (talk) 19:06, 12 September 2020 (UTC)—

Add a definition of Military Alliance
The Military Alliance wiki page has the definition "A military alliance is an international agreement concerning national security in which the contracting parties agree to mutual protection and support in case of a crisis that has not been identified in advance.[1] Military alliances differ from coalitions, which formed for a crisis that already exists."

If that was included in the introduction, readers would better understand the list, and there would be a common basis for adding to/removing from the list.

Anyone else care about this page? If no one else is listening, in like three days I'm going to start editing in line with what I propose. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.220.177.218 (talk) 10:27, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

I have added the definition, and have started removing alliances that do not meet the definition, according to the information given in their wikipedia article.

I'll broach the subject again: what is the definition of a military alliance? I put one in, as indicated above. However, editors continue to include all kinds of agreements/organisations that do not fulfil this definition.

Countries order
IMO, the members of any alliance shouln't be in a random order but in a globally defined (for this entire article) order e.g. alphabetical, or by population, or by area, or by GDP, or by military spending, or by accession date (though in this case, often, many members, especially founding members, might have the same value). Grillofrances (talk) 00:32, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

Shanghai Cooperation Organisation - Asia or Eurasia?
Shouldn't the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation be moved from the Asia section to the Eurasia section? Grillofrances (talk) 02:42, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

Turkey and Azerbaijan
Shouln't the Shusha Declaration and the Agreement on Strategic Partnership and Mutual Support be in the same section (either Asia or Eurasia - my preference is Asia)? Maybe they could be even within the same row as they both involve exactly the same set of countries (Turkey and Azerbaijan)? Grillofrances (talk) 02:47, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

Military Alliances?
At the beginning of the list it says: "A military alliance is a local agreement concerning national security in which the contracting parties agree to mutual protection and support in case of a crisis that has not been identified in advance." Looking through the actual list of "current military alliances", a lot, probably the majority, are not military alliances by this definition. It contains things like Eurocorps, which is a joint military corps, something completely different; economic alliances that don't have military components; loose security cooperations; random friendship treaties; and the Taiwan Relations Act, which is not even a an agreement between countries, but an act of US congress. Either the list should be significantly reduced, or it should be made clear that it doesn't contain 'military alliances' in the stated definition, but a list of all kinds of cooperation treaties between countries (and even then a few entries probably need to be removed).2A02:C7D:9B72:9A00:18BA:D80B:4CD6:3292 (talk) 19:35, 11 May 2022 (UTC) I totally agree. QUAD for example isnt a military alliance but is listed. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 12.237.208.66 (talk) 20:51, 11 May 2022 (UTC)

Reaching a consensus on what to include/exclude here
Hi all, I would like to start a conversation and ask for the additional input of others to reach a consensus and decide what determines which treaties/organizations would be included or excluded from this List of military alliances. How do we determine what constitutes a military alliance? What separates it from a non military alliance? For instance, would every bi-lateral treaty or multi-lateral organization with a security clause constitute a military alliance or at what level are they determined to be a military alliance? The quote below is from From Military alliance: (

"A military alliance is a formal agreement between nations concerning national security. Nations in a military alliance agree to active participation and contribution to the defense of others in the alliance in the event of a crisis. In the event a nation is attacked, members of the alliance are often obligated to come to their defense regardless if attacked directly. In the aftermath of the Second World War military alliances usually behave less aggressively and act more as a deterrent. Military alliances differ from coalitions, which formed for a crisis that already exists."

I think the above is a pretty narrow definition of military alliance (which I support). Whatever the consensus ends up being, how do we determine if articles listed on List of military alliances fit that bill or not? —  dain  omite   19:12, 14 May 2022 (UTC)


 * Hello all. So why don't we first start by taking on the alliances one-by-one and talking about them, that way we don't write off something entirely without giving it a fair discussion. - Jake 2601:340:C402:4F20:383D:5981:489E:B993 (talk) 21:21, 14 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Wow - this list is a mess. A good half of the listed "military alliances" aren't even alliances, but just security treaties or sometimes even less than that. This list should just be restricted to those treaties that actually pledged mutual protection obligations, or those that are referred to as alliances in reliable sources. The historical section is a mess too, a few entries are just the participants in the war, which essentially means we can list every historical war ever as well? I see Jake's suggestion to go through treaties one-by-one but really I'd support just nuking the entire list and starting over, given how endemic the issues are with this page. //Lollipoplollipoplollipop::talk 22:39, 14 May 2022 (UTC)
 * I think part of what adds to that mess is the main two top sections "historical" and "current" are sorted differently. The "historical" section being by date, and the "current" section being by rough geographical footprint. I think it would go a long way in having there being a unified method to sort both (if we indeed keep both sections). I would prefer what was done in the "historical" section and just going by date for both. —  dain  omite   16:37, 15 May 2022 (UTC)
 * I agree we should combine historical and current sections. Perhaps a big table or list just sorted by date, and not by continent, would be a better system. See how List of treaties does it. We could also highlight those rows in green that are still active. //Lollipoplollipoplollipop::talk 07:14, 17 May 2022 (UTC)
 * I like how List of treaties is laid out as well, sections for timeframes and tables within. Highlighting in a soft green is a good idea for active military alliances since some are quite old. —  dain  omite   13:43, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

Layout example
Thoughts on this layout as an example? —  dain  omite   13:51, 17 May 2022 (UTC)


 * Perfection, pretty much exactly what I was thinking. //Lollipoplollipoplollipop::talk 20:00, 17 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Thanks for updating the List, it looks so much better, wow. —  dain  omite   18:13, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

Hello, well conduct of military cooperation & discussions, joint exercises, some information sharing and from time to time ministerial or so meetings is not enough for to something is called a military aliance. Main participants of military alliance are members and members are allies, so lets say the SCO, India and Pakistan are military allies, China and India? Well nop. Maybe some people would like to see it, but we here edit one encyclopedia, we should as editors care just about facts and what is recognised by numerous indipendent sources and consensus, not by wishes of some fans. Thank you dear editors.109.93.37.220 (talk) 02:31, 24 May 2022 (UTC)

ASEAN?
ASEAN has no military alliance... Jumark27 (talk) 06:52, 31 January 2023 (UTC)


 * Agreed. Removed it. //Lollipoplollipoplollipop::talk 21:05, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

JEF - why it is not listed?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Expeditionary_Force 2001:999:408:6C26:C0CA:C9FC:51D8:F0E8 (talk) 22:06, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

EU isn't a military alliance
The EU is an economic alliance, not a military alliance. 2601:346:581:8DE0:9AE:B66:C546:A4DC (talk) 09:06, 14 March 2024 (UTC)


 * See Common Security and Defence Policy //Lollipoplollipoplollipop::talk 10:19, 14 March 2024 (UTC)