How Trump Brought Non-Alignment Back From the Dead
The U.S. president is single-handedly reviving a doctrine of the postcolonial left.
This op-ed was originally published in the Financial Times.
Seventy-one years ago, Chinese premier Zhou Enlai stood before an audience of rapt African and Asian nations in Bandung, Indonesia, and made a Trumpian statement: alliances, he declared, should be “abandoned” because they were “to nobody’s good”. The U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles denounced this nascent doctrine of non-alignment as an “immoral and shortsighted conception.”
Non-aligned countries were, according to the U.S. and its allies, naive at best and hypocritical at worst. But today, America—which once derided the non-aligned movement and worked to undermine it—is increasingly, if unwittingly, adopting the core tenets of an ideology born in the capitals of Asia and Africa.
Non-alignment, or “strategic autonomy” in today’s parlance, calls for countries to put their own interests above great-power politics and refuse to take sides. Although Washington would never dream of using either term, a U.S. administration that has threatened to pull out of NATO, made clear that all alliances are transactional and shown sympathy for Russia’s territorial ambitions is embracing the substance of the non-alignment doctrine.
At first glance, the idea of non-alignment could not be further from President Donald Trump’s MAGA worldview. It took shape at the April 1955 Afro-Asian Bandung Conference where newly decolonized nations convened to condemn imperialism and great-power rivalry.
It seemed a largely moral doctrine. Countries such as Egypt, India and Josip Broz Tito’s Yugoslavia claimed they were for peace, disarmament and the right to forge their own third way. But in fact, non-alignment was cold, hard realpolitik. It allowed nations to steer clear of binding alliances at the peak of the cold war while still extracting benefits from both superpowers. India, for example, received decades of development and military aid from both the United States and the Soviet Union—with scant obligations in return.
Non-aligned nations sometimes behaved hypocritically, damaging their reputations and future relationships. Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, an ardent admirer of the Soviet Union, refused to condemn Moscow in moments of crisis, such as when the Soviets invaded Hungary in 1956. India’s tilt towards the Kremlin became so pronounced that its bilateral relationship with Russia is, to this day, a liability in the U.S.-India partnership.
But the long history of non-alignment also reveals its costs. The movement was largely unsuccessful; it was the tool of the weak, not the strong. More importantly, non-alignment had limited utility. For poor countries, the ideology made sense—development without entanglement in great-power conflict. But as countries grew richer, the idea of benefits without obligations became harder to maintain. And since alliances take years to develop based on shared trust and beliefs, many were left without friends in the post-cold war era.
China, which has not entered a formal alliance since the founding of non-alignment, offers one example. Its current relationships with larger powers such as Russia are highly transactional, with little of the deep trust or shared beliefs that once characterized U.S.-led alliances such as NATO. And although Iran is a major partner of China and one of its biggest oil suppliers, China has distanced itself from the country during the U.S.-led war. Instead, Beijing asked Tehran to be mindful of the concerns of its Gulf neighbors.
Non-alignment has even been problematic for India—despite trying to pivot towards western defense suppliers, it has struggled to modernize its military, which remains heavily dependent on Russian hardware. And hostile relationships with neighbors have made its own backyard one of the most dangerous in the world.
The costs of non-alignment are already appearing for the U.S. Trump’s musings about withdrawing from NATO, calling the Ukraine war Europe’s problem, empathizing with Putin’s historical and territorial claims, and repeated statements about the annexation of Greenland have led to allies openly looking for alternatives. Canada is investing in Arctic military capabilities. Poland and Finland are exploring bilateral defense pacts. Most worryingly, no ally expressed, let alone provided, any support or sympathy for US security interests in the Iran war.
Non-aligned countries never managed to build, even among themselves, the deep network of trust, friendships and shared obligations that Washington assembled after 1945. That network could be the single greatest strategic asset the US possesses. To dismantle it in the name of convenient flexibility is to miss the core lesson of the non-aligned movement’s failures.