Permit to indulge myself for a while and at the end of post you might see my point.
Imagine a country is like a amorphous entity having thousands of tentacles (interests) .
Now Imagine that entity in a dimly lit room with 100 other such entities. The room has some areas where the visibility is great and some areas where you can hardly see what's infront of you.
Now Imagine each of the tentacles have a limited capacity of independent thought but operate largely within the directives of the amorphous entity.
This is the world of Global Politics. At any given time you might see few tentacles of an entity interacting with few tentacles of a 1 entity in light while in some dark corner few other tentacles would be interacting with tentacles of 2nd entity and so on and so forth.
The point is everything is multi-dimensional, lot of things are happening simultaneously and it might appear there are certain contradictions. This is because tentacles have some capacity of independent thought would act on their interest. But the brain of the amorphous entity is the guiding hand, it doesn't mind low key interactions for mutual benefit but there is over-all guiding principle which it enforces and all tentacles have to follow.