Red, white and blue is the most common colour combination in national flags. From the United States to France, the United Kingdom to Thailand, this palette spans every continent, often standing for liberty, unity and sacrifice.
United States
United Kingdom
France
Russia
Netherlands
Norway
Iceland
Czech Republic
Chile
Cuba
Thailand
Australia
Most red-white-blue flags trace back, directly or indirectly, to one flag: the Dutch one. And the Dutch flag itself started as a completely different colour.
In the 1570s, Dutch rebels fighting Spanish rule flew an orange, white and blue flag, the Prinsenvlag, named for William of Orange, who led the revolt. Orange was his family's colour, so it made sense as a rallying banner. Somewhere over the next century, without a single decree or announcement anyone can point to, the orange stripe became red. Historians still argue about why. Orange dye faded fast and looked washed-out at sea, while red held its colour, so that's one theory. Another is more political: after William's line died out in 1650, republicans running the country weren't especially attached to a flag built around one family's colour, and by 1652 they'd banned the orange version outright, partly to distance themselves from the House of Orange, whose colour was awkwardly close to that of the English House of Stuart the Dutch republic was trying not to look too friendly with.
By the 18th century, red-white-blue was just what the Dutch flag was, no explanation needed. It's genuinely the oldest tricolour flag still in continuous use anywhere in the world.
That flag then went on to do something most flags never do: it shaped the colours of a national identity thousands of kilometres away. When Peter the Great of Russia was in the Netherlands in the 1690s studying Dutch shipbuilding, he took the Dutch flag home with him as a template, swapped the stripe order around, and that became Russia's flag. A century and a half later, in 1848, a Slavic Congress in Prague looked at Russia's flag and formally adopted blue, white and red as shared colours for Slavic peoples everywhere, which is the reason Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia and Croatia all still carry some version of that same palette today. One country's dye problem in the 1600s is, genuinely, why half of Eastern Europe's flags look like they belong to the same family.
The second major reason red, white and blue shows up everywhere has nothing to do with the Dutch story and everything to do with France. The French tricolour, adopted during the Revolution, became the single most imitated flag design in modern history. New republics forming in the 19th and 20th centuries, especially ones that had just thrown out a monarchy, reached for a vertical or horizontal tricolour almost as a shorthand: "we are a republic now, not a kingdom." It's a big part of why so many flags across the Americas and Europe settled into some version of red, white and blue, often for completely unrelated local reasons layered on top of a shared visual language.
The United States is its own case. The stars and stripes predate the Dutch influence chain almost entirely, the design draws more directly from British flag tradition (the Union Jack's own red-white-blue) than from the Netherlands, but it still ends up in the same colour family purely by coincidence of shared European heraldic roots.
In the daily pie chart these flags usually show three roughly balanced slices. A dominant blue with smaller red and white slices often points toward Oceania or the Americas. A dominant red, with blue and white as smaller slices, often points toward Europe, especially if the split looks close to an even three-way thirds, that's often a European vertical tricolour like France, Luxembourg, or Czechia.
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