The question does not differentiate between 'serial-alliancers' who maintain a limited number of relatively short-term alliances and 'parallel-alliancers' or 'compulsive-alliancers' who, as a matter of preference, effectively outsource production, operations or distribution through the strategic alliance route.

The last zone, lying beyond the Ch‘ang-pai mountains, was in special isolation and culturally as retarded as regions much farther north.

The tumultuous noise resolved itself now into the disorderly mingling of many voices, the gride of many wheels, the creaking of waggons, and the staccato of hoofs.

And America would benefit if our culture of argument elevated the opposite approach, steel-manning, “the art of addressing the best form of the other person’s argument, even if it’s not the one they presented.”