The Global South Holds the Keys to the New Eco-Ideological Cold War

As with the last Cold War, the new eco-industrial arms race between Beijing and Washington turns fundamentally on winning hearts and minds (and pocketbooks) in Africa, Asia, and Latin America

The industrial policy turn that is reshaping the global economy is often framed as a competition among the wealthy powers of the North — the United States, the European Union, and China. The American Inflation Reduction Act, the European Green Deal Industrial Plan, and Beijing’s “Made in China 2025” strategy have each been cast as attempts to corner the commanding heights of the twenty-first century’s clean-energy economy. A close reading of Isabel Estevez and Thea Riofrancos’s new “Global Green Industrial Policy” report, from the Climate & Community Institute, makes clear that the true drama will play out in the Global South. For these countries, the green industrial surge is not just about solar panels and wind turbines. It is about sovereignty, modernization, and survival in a world where decarbonization is becoming the central axis of geopolitical alignment.

The GGIP report shows that industrial policy is back in vogue, but with a distinctly green hue. From India to Brazil, from South Africa to Indonesia, governments are no longer content to be passive importers of low-carbon technologies. They want to cultivate domestic manufacturing capacity, build local supply chains, and capture more value from the energy transition. For decades, the prevailing “Washington Consensus” orthodoxy discouraged such ambitions. Structural adjustment programs in the 1980s and 1990s pushed developing economies toward liberalization, discouraging subsidies, local-content rules, or state-led investment in heavy industry. Now those same tools are being dusted off, not as heresies but as necessities. The GGIP report catalogues dozens of new measures — tariff adjustments, export restrictions, public banks providing concessional financing — all aimed at nurturing green industries at home rather than ceding them to foreign suppliers. The Global South is not waiting for technology transfer; it is demanding a share of the action.

Yet this renewed embrace of industrial policy cannot be understood in isolation from the geopolitical tectonics it is unleashing. The drive to decarbonize is no longer a matter of technocratic optimization; it is the crucible of a new global order, as I argued in Foreign Policy earlier this month. On one side on this new order stands a potential Sino-European “green entente,” leveraging China’s green manufacturing dominance and Europe’s affluent markets and regulatory zeal. On the other lies the “axis of petrostates” — the United States under Trump, Russia under Putin, and Saudi Arabia under Mohammed bin Salman — committed to defending hydrocarbon primacy, both as an economic cornerstone and as a symbol of sovereignty and way of life. As during the original Cold War, the Global South is the prize over which these blocs will compete, for it is in Africa, Asia, and Latin America that the bulk of future energy demand will arise, where the minerals essential to clean technologies are concentrated, and where the legitimacy of any global regime will ultimately be decided.

For the states of the Global South, the appeal of the green entente is obvious. China already provides cheap solar panels, batteries, and electric buses; Europe offers concessional finance, development aid, and promises of carbon-border leniency if local industries comply with its standards. India, which has long sought to reduce its dependence on imported oil, is investing heavily in solar capacity and sees in Chinese supply chains both an opportunity and a threat. Brazil, with its vast lithium deposits and hydropower potential, aspires to be a green manufacturing hub, even as it worries about becoming merely another quarry for Chinese firms. South Africa has tied its Just Energy Transition Partnerships to European financing, but its coal unions fret about sovereignty being traded for loans. These dilemmas illustrate the double-edged nature of the green entente: it offers pathways to industrialization, but risks replicating the dependency patterns of the fossil era, only this time with solar ingots and battery cathodes rather than barrels of oil.

The petro bloc’s pitch to the South is more visceral. By casting decarbonization as a form of neocolonial imposition, it appeals to deeply held resentments. For decades, Western states that grew rich on coal and oil now demand that developing economies “leave it in the ground.” For leaders in Lagos or Jakarta, this sounds like hypocrisy at best, imperialism at worst. Trump’s America, Putin’s Russia, and the Saudi monarchy frame their fossil boosterism as solidarity with the South’s right to exploit its resources and chart its own developmental path. This narrative has traction. Uganda and Tanzania defend their new oil pipelines as engines of modernization. Nigeria resists pressure to abandon hydrocarbons, citing Africa’s energy poverty. Indonesia is proudly leveraging its nickel to bargain for domestic processing rather than exporting raw ore. In each case, the language of sovereignty converges with the interests of the petrostates.

Yet sovereignty cuts both ways. The GGIP report shows that Global South leaders are not naïve. They know that remaining mere raw-material exporters — whether of oil or of lithium — will entrench dependency. The green transition offers a narrow window to leapfrog, to capture value before supply chains harden. That is why countries from Chile to the Democratic Republic of Congo are experimenting with resource nationalism in a greener key: mandating local beneficiation, restricting exports of unprocessed minerals, and seeking to form “green OPECs” around critical materials. These policies may deter investment or provoke retaliation, but they reflect a keen awareness that the future of sovereignty lies not in hydrocarbons per se, but in industrial capability.

The emergent eco-ideological Cold War thus confronts the Global South with a conundrum. Align too closely with Beijing and Brussels, and risk being drawn into a dependency relationship that stifles genuine autonomy. Align with Washington, Moscow, and Riyadh, and risk locking into a carbon-intensive development path that may yield short-term rents but long-term marginalization. The likeliest outcome is not wholehearted alignment with either bloc, but “strategic hedging.” We should expect many Global South states to practice a form of “planetary non-alignment,” extracting preferential deals from both sides while pursuing homegrown industrial policies. India has already mastered this balancing act, buying Russian oil at a discount while deepening solar and wind capacity through Chinese imports, all while negotiating with Europe for carbon-border adjustments. Brazil courts both China and the EU for green investment even as it develops offshore oil fields and its agribusiness lobbies maintain fossil loyalties. South Africa oscillates between coal nationalism and green financing packages. Such oscillation is not indecision; it is strategy.

This balancing is sharpened by the recognition that the green transition is not purely about energy. It is also about computing infrastructure, AI models, and digital sovereignty as well. Choosing the Sino-European stack may entail adopting Chinese technological standards across data and communications. Conversely, Washington may strong-arm fossil fuel dependent states to adopt its computational stack. For countries already wary of Western surveillance and Chinese digital authoritarianism alike, this linkage makes alignment even more fraught. It is not simply a question of whose solar panels to buy, but of which political-economic operating system to install — or whether they can build a hybrid/open-source stack of their own.

For the Global South, then, the central task is to translate the green industrial moment into durable developmental gains. That requires deft navigation between competing patrons, assertive use of resource endowments, and creative coalition-building. “Plurilateral” clubs — of battery producers, critical-mineral exporters, or green hydrogen hubs — are proliferating. These groupings may become the institutional expression of a new Southern agency in the ecological Cold War, a bid to shape the terms of the transition rather than merely accept them. The precedent of OPEC looms large, but the challenge will be to avoid the pitfalls of cartelization while leveraging collective power. There are good reasons why efforts to replicate OPEC’s successes in the 1970s have been (un)failing for half a century.

History suggests that such agency is possible. In the original Cold War, the Non-Aligned Movement emerged as a third force, refusing to be conscripted into either superpower camp. Its effectiveness was uneven, but it carved out space for developmental experimentation. A twenty-first-century New International Economic Order, grounded in ecological modernization, may yet emerge. It would not be united by ideology but by pragmatism: a shared insistence that the Global South’s pathway to prosperity cannot be dictated solely by the needs of Beijing, Brussels, Washington, Moscow, or Riyadh. Instead, it must reflect local aspirations for jobs, industrial capacity, and resilience in the face of climate impacts.

Let’s be clear on the stakes. If Axis of Ecological Evil corrals the Global South into a fossil future, the planetary climate targets will be unattainable, and the promise of green industrialization will wither. If, on the other hand, the Global South can seize the industrial opportunities of decarbonization, as Estevez and Riofrancos hope, it may inaugurate not just a more balanced global economy but a more pluralistic ecological order. The planterary metabolic future will be decided not only in Washington, Brussels, or Beijing — it will be shaped in São Paulo, Johannesburg, New Delhi, and Jakarta.

The eco-ideological Cold War is upon us, but the Global South is not a passive battleground. It is the decisive front. Whether it becomes the quarry of rival empires or the architect of its own green destiny depends on how skillfully it navigates the new industrial terrain. For the moment, the signs are mixed: bold resource nationalism alongside deep dependence on Chinese supply chains; ambitious industrial policies alongside fragile state capacity; rhetorical sovereignty alongside fiscal constraints. But this much is clear: the future of the planet’s political economy will be forged not only by the great powers but by the choices of those countries long relegated to the periphery. In that sense, the Global South is not just positioning itself in a new Cold War. It is positioning itself at the very heart of metabolic modernity’s reinvention.