Brazil's Lula and the Global South are flexing their muscles—and they may be able to bring peace to Eastern Europe

Brazil is engaging in what my colleagues Carlos Fortin and Carlos Ominami and I have called "Active nonalignment." By this we mean a foreign policy approach in which countries from the Global South - Africa, Asia and Latin America - refuse to take sides in conflicts between the great powers and focus strictly on their own interests. The growth of active nonalignment has been fueled by the increased competition and what I see as a budding second Cold War between the United States and China. At the same time, active nonalignment is not to be confused with neutrality - a legal position under international law that entails certain duties and obligations. As far as the war in Ukraine is concerned, it means not supporting either Russia or NATO. And Brazil isn't the only country in the Global South taking that position, although it was the first to attempt to broker a peace agreement. The position of India, the world's largest democracy, shows how the war in Ukraine, far from reflecting that the main geopolitical cleavage in the world today is between democracy and autocracy, as Biden has argued, reveals that the real divide is between the Global North and the Global South. Although many of these nations have voted to condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine in the United Nations General Assembly, where 140-plus member states have repeatedly done so, none wants to make what they consider to be a European war into a global one. Beyond the incipient U.S.-China Cold War and the war in Ukraine, the resurrection of nonalignment in its new "Active" incarnation reflects a widespread disenchantment in the Global South with what has been known as the "Liberal International Order" in existence since World War II. This order is seen as increasingly frayed and unresponsive to the needs of developing countries on issues ranging from international indebtedness and food security to migration and climate change.