In October 2023, Chile’s President Gabriel Boric made his first visit to China. During his three days in Beijing, he attended the third Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, met with Chinese president Xi Jinping, and signed bilateral trade deals. Two weeks later, Boric was at the White House. There, he participated in the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity (APEP) conference and met with then-president Joe Biden. By the end of his term, Chile has refused to fully follow either of the great powers in what’s seen as a twenty-first-century Cold War. It is today doing about 40 percent of its trade with China and 15 percent with the United States.

“Not very many leaders from developing countries can say that they have visited the Great Hall of the People and have been received by President Xi, and ten days later visited the White House and been received by the US president,” Jorge Heine, a former Chilean ambassador, tells me from the capital, Santiago. “In many ways, the way we see it, this is what active nonalignment looks like in practice.”

Heine is author, together with former minister of state Carlos Ominami and political scientist Carlos Fortin, of The Non-Aligned World: Striking Out in an Era of Great Power Competition. In it, they define active nonalignment as “a foreign policy that is in constant search of new opportunities, evaluating each of them on their own terms.” The stance is nonpartisan, Heine cautions: “Active nonalignment is not a foreign policy of the Left or the center or the Right. It is nonideological. It provides a guide to action.”