"Non–alignment returns."

The 21st century starts to define itself.

I and thou. Zhou, center, at the Bandung Conference, 1955. (Government of Indonesia/ Wikimedia Commons.)

26 FEBRUARY—The Ukraine conflict as catalyst: I wonder how many people who pay attention understood a year ago that Russia’s intervention and the West’s extravagant support for the Kiev regime would prompt fundamental shifts in the global order such that the world is now a very different place and the 21^st century has a very new look. It escaped me, I have to say. I didn’t see, last February, that the community of nations would lean so swiftly into a new era, or that the principles of this new era would be so clearly defined. 

I certainly did not see that the good old, much-missed Non–Aligned Movement would re-emerge after the many years it has spent languishing in the wilderness of post–Cold War geopolitics. No, not with a declaration such as that the NAM promulgated first in Bandung, the mountain resort in Indonesia where Sukarno hosted its members in 1955, or in Tito’s Belgrade six years later, when it formalized as an organization. But in spirit, in the ethos non–Western nations now stand up to declare as theirs.   

There are lots of way we can measure the wider consequences of the Ukraine conflict. There is Europe’s astonishing surrender of its interests to a voraciously coercive administration as it leads America into its late-imperial phase. Related to this, there are the regrettable pledges of allegiance sworn by Finland, Sweden, and Germany—three nations whose honorable, now-abandoned role was to serve as bridges between West and East. 

These are realignments, each in response to the Biden regime’s decision to make Ukraine the crucible of its defense of a fading hegemony.

This radical new subservience to Washington is freighted with consequence in its own right. Born of insecurity and a profound lack of vision and imagination, it is a very bad call on the part of America’s “allies and partners” and will leave them at a considerable  disadvantage as our new century progresses. Can they not hear history’s wheel turning?

But the common cause non–Western nations have discovered among themselves this past year is vastly more significant. For them, Ukraine has proven a catalyst in the chemical-lab meaning of this term: It has clarified the solution, let’s say. The Russians, the Chinese, the Indians, the Iranians, the Turks, the Mexicans, the Argentines, many others: They are thinking differently and more clearly now.  

This is a realignment, too.