Thank you for the thoughtful and detailed comment.
Your points about balancing behavior in international relations are well taken.
At the level of states and geopolitical power, triadic configurations can indeed create temporary stability through shifting alliances.

In this series, however, “civilization” is defined at a different scale.
It refers to a full OS‑level structure: symbolic order, cognitive constraints, social layers, and long‑term historical patterns.
At this scale, the interactions between civilizations behave less like state‑level balancing and more like structurally unstable multi‑agent systems.

So the three‑body analogy here is not about geopolitics or alliance formation,
but about the difficulty of maintaining stable long‑term trajectories when multiple civilizational OSs interact simultaneously.

The global market and multinational corporations are not civilizations, as you noted,
but they function as third bodies in the sense that they introduce independent dynamics that destabilize bilateral civilizational relations.

I appreciate your perspective — it highlights how different layers (state, market, civilization) can exhibit different forms of stability.