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.”

Chile, according to Heine, is not alone in charting a path between China and the United States (and to a lesser extent Russia) without necessarily picking sides. Yet it has been leading this rising trend internationally. The authors cast this concept as a new twist on the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), first developed in the 1950s and ’60s: “Faced with the reappearance of a confrontation between the Great Powers, an emerging Global South is picking up the traditions of the post-World War II, post-colonial movement and adapting it to the challenges of the new century.”