'Active nonaligment' on the march in a multipolar world

AllAfrica

19-07-2025

In 2020, as Latin American countries were contending with the triple challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic, a global economic shock and US policy under the first Trump administration, Jorge Heine, research professor at Boston University and a former Chilean ambassador, in association with two colleagues, Carlos Fortin and Carlos Ominami, put forward the notion of 'active nonalignment.' Polity Books
Five years on, the foreign policy approach is more relevant than ever, with trends including the rise of the Global South and the fragmentation of the global order, encouraging countries around the world to reassess their relationships with both the United States and China.
It led Heine, along with Fortin and Ominami, to follow up on their original arguments in a new book, 'The Non-Aligned World,' published in June 2025.
We spoke with Heine on what is behind the push toward active nonalignment, and where it may lead.
Active nonalignment is a foreign policy approach in which countries put their own interests front and center and refuse to take sides in the great power rivalry between the US and China.
It takes its cue from the Non-Aligned Movement of the 1950s and 1960s but updates it to the realities of the 21st century. Today's rising Global South is very different from the 'Third World' that made up the Non-Aligned Movement. Countries like India, Turkey, Brazil and Indonesia have greater economic heft and wherewithal. They thus have more options than in the past.
They can pick and choose policies in accordance with what is in their national interests. And because there is competition between Washington and Beijing to win over such countries' hearts and minds, those looking to promote a nonaligned agenda have greater leverage.
Traditional international relations literature suggests that in relations between nations, you can either 'balance,' meaning take a strong position against another power, or 'bandwagon' – that is, go along with the wishes of that power.
The notion was that weaker states couldn't balance against the Great Powers because they don't have the military power to do so, so they had to bandwagon.
What we are saying is that there is an intermediate approach: hedging. Countries can hedge their bets or equivocate by playing one power off the other. So, on some issues you side with the US, and on others you side with China.
Thus, the grand strategy of active nonalignment is 'playing the field,' or in other words, searching for opportunities among what is available in the international environment. This means being constantly on the lookout for potential advantages and available resources – in short, being active, rather than passive or reactive.
So active nonalignment is not so much a movement as it is a doctrine. Tunisian President Habib Bourguiba, right, and Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser attend the first Conference of Non-Aligned countries in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in September 1961. Photo: Keystone / Hulton Archive / Getty Images via The Conversation
The notion of active nonalignment came up during the first Trump administration and in the context of a Latin America hit by the triple-whammy of US pressure, a pandemic and the ensuing recession – which in Latin America translated into the biggest economic downturn in 120 years, a 6.6% drop of regional gross domestic product in 2020.
ANA was intended as a guide for Latin American countries to navigate those difficult moments, and it led us to the publication of a symposium volume with contributions by six former Latin American foreign ministers in November 2021, in which we elaborated on the concept.
Three months later, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the reaction to it by many countries in Asia and Africa, nonalignment was back with a vengeance.
Countries like India, Pakistan, South Africa and Indonesia, among others, took positions that were at odds with the West on Ukraine. Many of them, though not all, condemned Russian aggression but also wanted no part in the West's sanctions on Moscow. These sanctions were seen as unwarranted and as an expression of Western double standards – no sanctions were applied on the US for invading Iraq, of course.
And then there were the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, and the resulting war in the Gaza Strip. Countries across the Global South strongly condemned the Hamas attacks, but the West's response to the subsequent deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians brought home the notion of double standards when it came to international human rights.
Why weren't Palestinians deserving of the same compassion as Ukrainians? For many in the Global South, that question hit very hard – the idea that 'human rights are limited to Europeans and people who looked like them did not go down well.'
Thus, South Africa brought a case against Israel in the International Court of Justice alleging genocide, and Brazil spearheaded ceasefire efforts at the United Nations.
A third development is the expansion of the BRICS bloc of economies from its original five members – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – to 10 members. Although China and Russia are not members of the Global South, those other founding members are, and the BRICS group has promoted key issues on the Global South's agenda.
The addition of countries such as Egypt and Ethiopia has meant that BRICS has increasingly taken on the guise of the Global South forum. Brazil President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a leading proponent of BRICS, is keen on advancing this Global South agenda.
All three of these developments have made active nonalignment more relevant than ever before.
I'll give you two examples: Angola and Argentina.
In Angola, the African country that has received most Chinese cooperation to the tune of US$45 billion, you now have the US financing what is known as the Lobito Corridor – a railway line that stretches from the eastern border of the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Angola's Atlantic coast.
Ten years ago, the notion that the US would be financing railway projects in southern Africa would have been considered unfathomable. Yet it has happened. Why? Because China has built significant railway lines in countries such as Kenya and Ethiopia, and the US realized that it was being left behind.
For the longest time, the US would condemn such Chinese-financed infrastructure projects via the 'Belt and Road Initiative' as nothing but 'debt-trap diplomacy' designed to saddle developing nations with 'white elephants' nobody needed.
But a couple of years ago, that tune changed: The US and Europe realized that there is a big infrastructure deficit in Asia, Africa and Latin America that China was stepping in to reduce – and the West was nowhere to be seen in this critical area.
In short, the West changed it approach – and countries like Angola are now able to play the US off against China for its own national interests.
Then take Argentina. In 2023, Javier Milei was elected president on a strong anti-China platform. He said his government would have nothing to do with Beijing. But just two years later, Milei announced in an Economist interview that he is a great admirer of Beijing.
Why? Because Argentina has a very significant foreign debt, and Milei knew that a continued anti-China stance would mean a credit line from Beijing would likely not be renewed.
The Argentinian president was under pressure from the International Monetary Fund and Washington to let the credit line with China lapse, but Milei refused to do so and managed to hold his own, playing both sides against the middle.
Absolutely. When people ask me what the difference is between traditional nonalignment and active nonalignment, one of the most obvious things is that the latter is nonideological – it can be used by people of the right, left and center.
It is a guide to action, a compass to navigate the waters of a highly troubled world, and can be used by governments of very different ideological hues. Brazil President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Argentina President Javier Milei at the 66th Summit of leaders of the Mercosur trading bloc in Buenos Aires on July 3, 2025. Photo: Luis Robayo / AFP via Getty Images / The Conversation
There is little doubt that the liberal international order that framed world politics from 1945 to 2016 has come to an end. Some of its bedrock principles, like multilateralism, free trade and respect for international law and existing international treaties, have been severely undermined.
We are now in a transitional stage. The notion of the West as a geopolitical entity, as we knew it, has ceased to exist. We now have the extraordinary situation where illiberal forces in Hungary, Germany and Poland, among other places, are being supported by those in power in both Washington and Moscow.
And this decline of the West has not come about because of any economic issue – the US still represents around 25% of global GDP, much as it did in 1970 – but because of the breakdown of the trans-Atlantic alliance.
So we are moving toward a very different type of world order – and one in which the Global South has the opportunity to have much more of a role, especially if it deploys active nonalignment.
The notion of active nonalignment was triggered by the first Trump administration's pressure on Latin American countries.
I would argue that the measures undertaken in Trump's second administration – the tariffs imposed on 90 countries around the world; the US leaving the Paris climate agreement, the World Health Organization and the UN Human Rights Council; and other 'America First' policies – have only underscored the validity of active nonalignment as a foreign policy approach.
The pressures on countries across the Global South are very strong, and there is a temptation to give in to Trump and align with US. Yet, all indications are that simply giving in to Trump's demands isn't a recipe for success.
Those countries that have gone down the route of giving in to Trump's demands only see more demands after that. Countries need a different approach – and that can be found in active nonalignment.
Jorge Heine is outgoing interim director of the Frederick S Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, Boston University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.