  We determine the large-distance behaviour of the static dipole-dipole
potential for a wide class of gauge theories on nonperturbative grounds,
exploiting only general properties of the theory. In the case of QCD, we
recover the known results in the regime of small dipole sizes, and discuss
recent nonperturbative calculations. Moreover, we discuss the case of
pure-gauge theories, and compare our prediction with the available lattice
results.
