A Monday morning thought:

When civilization began in the areas around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, they rose and fell in a "conquer or die" environment. The further you get from this region, the more we see experimentation with other philosophies by other cultures. Alliance becomes a theme in the East, with the Mongols a significant exception, although they were an alliance of disparate tribes themselves.

Europe revered the classical philosophies, and so continued the tradition, culminating in the various Empires that ultimately collapsed in the 1900s, following two world wars, won by an Alliance.