Pools containing lithium carbonate and mounds of salt by-product stretch through a lithium mine in the Atacama Desert in Salar de Atacama, Chile, on Aug. 24, 2022.John Moore/Getty Images


The original Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was born of the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955 and formally established in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1961. It was led by a legendary quintet: Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, Indonesia’s Sukarno, and Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito. These leaders sought a “middle course†for states that had just escaped the shackles of colonialism and refused to be drafted into the binary madness of the Cold War.




A principal aim of the NAM was to promote economic cooperation among postcolonial states as an alternative to economic dependency on either the Soviet Union or the United States. Their mission was as much psychological as it was political: a demand for dignity, self-determination, and what Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere called a “positive neutrality†that would prevent their territories from becoming a mere theater for superpower proxy wars.


Whereas the original NAM was about maintaining ideological and economic autonomy apart from the Cold War division between the Americans and the Soviets, the new grouping will be more about infrastructural nonalignment. Unlike the original NAM, which was led by impoverished postcolonial states, today’s middle powers possess significant diplomatic, military, and economic capacity. They have the resources to form plurilateral diplomatic arrangements that can bypass traditional, decaying institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, United Nations, or World Trade Organization. A green energy and trade agreement between Chile, New Zealand, and Singapore or a mineral producers’ compact between Brazil and India requires no great-power blessing and answers to no hegemonic arbiter.


The material specificity of the transition also provides some middle powers with forms of leverage that were unavailable during the first Cold War. Because the electrostate model requires vast quantities of critical minerals—lithium, cobalt, rare earths, and so on—countries rich in these resources have become a crucial strategic prize. States such as Brazil, Indonesia, and Kazakhstan, which are all well-endowed with both hydrocarbons and green tech-relevant minerals, are successfully pursuing multialignment policies to host investments from both blocs, playing Beijing and Washington against each other to maximize their own national autonomy.


The strategies that middle powers are adopting with respect to another domain of U.S.-China geostrategic rivalry, namely artificial intelligence and other forms of computation, provide a clue as to what infrastructural nonalignment may look like. Rather than accepting a prepackaged “stack†from either superpower, many middle powers are seeking a third way. Vietnam, for instance, is developing its own AI instances rather than committing exclusively to U.S. or Chinese hardware. In Africa, entrepreneurs are engaging in “algorithmic suturing,†melding Chinese hardware with Western software to create local solutions that neither superpower fully controls. India, too, is developing its own model of AI sovereignty.


Beyond the material specifics of infrastructure, what makes this new nonalignment structurally different from its predecessor isn’t just the greater capacity of its constituent members but their collective willingness to treat multilateral institutions instrumentally rather than reverently. Where the original NAM operated largely through the U.N. system—lobbying, petitioning, and passing resolutions in forums ultimately controlled by the great powers—today’s middle powers are constructing parallel architectures. The expansion of BRICS, the growing diplomatic weight of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and the proliferation of regional development banks all reflect a shared instinct: that the existing rules-based order was designed by and for a particular configuration of power that no longer exists.


These nations aren’t so much seeking to overthrow the system as to route around it, building bilateral currency swap agreements, regional supply chain compacts, and technology-sharing arrangements that reduce their exposure to any single superpower’s leverage. The new movement will likely lack a formal secretariat or founding charter; its coherence will emerge not from ideological solidarity but from the shared pragmatic interest in preserving optionality.


But, as with the original NAM, the middle powers also face deep internal divisions, split between oil producers that benefit from high prices and transitioners that are desperate for energy security. This fault line may prove the new movement’s biggest vulnerability. The original NAM fractured repeatedly along precisely these kinds of material interest lines—between commodity exporters and manufacturing economies, between nations seeking foreign investment and those pursuing import substitution—and today’s configuration carries analogous tensions.


An Angola or a Nigeria, whose state revenues remain overwhelmingly dependent on hydrocarbon exports, has fundamentally different incentives than a Bangladesh or Kenya, whose development trajectories depend on affordable, reliable electricity and whose populations are acutely exposed to climate disruption. The former has every incentive to align quietly with the petrostate bloc, prolonging the fossil fuel era that underwrites its fiscal survival. The latter needs the electrostate bloc’s technology and finance, even if it resents the dependency that comes with it.


These aren’t disagreements that can be papered over with diplomatic communiqués. They reflect genuinely incompatible material interests, and any new nonaligned coalition will be forced to manage them continuously or risk the kind of internal incoherence that eventually hollowed out its predecessor. The most likely outcome is a fragmented landscape of issue-specific coalitions: nations clustering around shared interests in mineral pricing, climate finance, or technology access without ever fully consolidating into a coherent third pole.






Ultimately, the choice for the middle powers comes down to what kind of modernity they want to inhabit. The petrostate bloc offers a backward-looking, carbon-intensive vision in which the weak and the small are firmly subordinated to the strong and the large—a world where energy abundance is weaponized as clientelism, where cheap oil buys loyalty, and where the infrastructural lock-in of a thousand procurement contracts slowly forecloses the future.




Joining a China-led Green Entente offers something formally more progressive: a forward-looking, post-carbon model that takes seriously the physical constraints of a warming planet. But it, too, carries a dark shadow—the potential subordination of national metabolic sovereignty to a Beijing-centered supply chain architecture that trades one form of dependency for another. This is a strategic abyss: to align with the aggressive, decaying past or the efficient, neo-totalitarian future.




What makes this moment historically distinctive is that the choice isn’t primarily ideological. The original Cold War was, at its core, a contest between competing theories of how human societies should organize themselves—democracy versus communism, markets versus planning, individual liberty versus collective mobilization. The new cold war cuts across all of those categories. Authoritarian petrostates and nominally democratic ones sit comfortably in the same bloc. China’s green authoritarianism and Europe’s climate liberalism compete within the same potential Entente. The organizing axis is not political philosophy but physical metabolism—who controls the energy, minerals, and technology on which modernity relies.


This is why the new nonaligned movement, if it coheres, will look so different from its predecessor. It won’t be animated by Bandung-era solidarity or Third Worldist ideology but instead by the icy pragmatism of plurilateral mineral-purchasing clubs and technological suturing. Its greatest asset is the very materiality of the transition: The lithium under Argentina’s salt flats, the Kalgoorlie nickel-cobalt project in Australia, and the rare earths distributed across Indonesia and Kazakhstan give the middle powers a form of leverage that the postcolonial NAM never possessed. Its greatest vulnerability, as the original grouping discovered to its cost, is internal fracture—the irreconcilable tension between oil producers whose fiscal survival depends on prolonging the fossil fuel era and transitioners whose development futures depend on ending it.


Carney’s eulogy for the old order at Davos was not a lament. It was a recognition that the rules-based liberal international order—that pleasant fiction of lawyerly norms and institutional deference—had already been torched and that the question was no longer how to restore it but how to survive its absence. The middle powers are the crucible where the answer will be forged. Their success depends on whether they can convert their mineral wealth, demographic weight, and hard-won diplomatic capacity into a genuine third path—one that refuses both the planetary ecological suicide of the Axis of Petrostates’ clientelism and the infrastructural dependency of the Green Entente.