Geostrategic Reordering and the Limits of the “Collective West” and “Global South”

Federico Bordonaro obtained his Ph.D. in Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Paris-IV, La Sorbonne. He is a specialist of geopolitics and European security. He published two books and dozens of articles on these subjects and has lectured in Rome and Vienna (Webster University).

Abstract

The language of global politics increasingly relies on two sweeping labels: a “Collective West” that supposedly acts as a unified strategic actor, and a “Global South” that is presumed to share common interests and alignments. Both terms remain useful as political shorthand and as instruments of bargaining. But as analytical lenses, they now conceal more than they reveal. This essay argues that contemporary ordering is better explained as interaction among geostrategic realms—structurally coherent spatial systems shaped by geography, trade and energy corridors, technology standards, and modes of power projection—than as bloc competition between two camps. Drawing on Saul B. Cohen’s realm concept and the rational-choice logic of selectorate theory (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003; Cohen 2015), the essay shows how leaders’ incentives for political survival filter external choices, producing selective cooperation and transactional bargains rather than durable ideological cohesion. A realm-based map—Maritime, East Asian, Eurasian Continental, and South Asian—captures the main constraints and opportunities that organize alignment and contestation in 2025. The conclusion assesses Europe’s narrowing strategic corridor as U.S. leadership becomes more conditional and as intra-European preferences diverge.

The Trouble With Two Camps

Since the end of the Cold War, observers have reached for parsimonious ways to describe an increasingly complex world. The most popular pair of labels—the “Collective West” and the “Global South”—has acquired real political power. Leaders invoke these terms in speeches, communiques, summit branding, and negotiating tactics. Yet their very convenience encourages overreach: the labels compress heterogeneous actors, divergent risk tolerances, and distinct geographies into imagined strategic unities.

The analytical problem is not that either category is meaningless. The problem is that both terms too often function as substitutes for explanation. They imply cohesive blocs where, in practice, states operate through portfolio strategies: cooperating in one domain, competing in another, and hedging where costs are uncertain. Treating “the West” or “the South” as actors obscures the mechanisms that actually generate alignment—security dependence, market access, supply-chain leverage, energy exposure, and domestic political constraints.

A Revealing Document: The U.S. National Security Strategy 2025

The U.S. National Security Strategy released in November 2025 offers an unusually direct illustration of why “Collective West” is a brittle analytical construct. The document frames alliances as instruments to be renegotiated and re-priced, not as expressions of a shared strategic identity. It argues that past U.S. elites allowed allies to “offload the cost of their defense onto the American people,” and it rejects an open-ended role in underwriting global order (White House 2025, 1–2).

Most strikingly, under the heading “Burden-Sharing and Burden-Shifting,” the strategy declares that “the days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over” (White House 2025, 12). It sketches a “burden-sharing network” in which U.S. support becomes conditional and, at times, explicitly transactional—potentially involving favorable treatment on commercial matters, technology sharing, and defense procurement for partners that shoulder greater regional responsibility and align export controls (White House 2025, 12). In Europe, the same strategy questions whether demographic and political trends may leave some NATO members unable to remain “reliable allies” (White House 2025, 25).

None of this implies an imminent collapse of transatlantic cooperation. It does, however, underscore a central point: even within the institutional core of what is usually called “the West,” leaders’ commitments depend on domestic coalitions, cost perceptions, and bargaining leverage. A category that presumes strategic unity is therefore at risk of mistaking organizational overlap for coherent collective action.

The “Global South”: From Structural Location to Negotiating Identity

“Global South” emerged as a successor to “Third World,” itself a Cold War label for nonaligned and postcolonial states. Early political economy treatments used it to denote a structural position within an unequal world system (Frank 1967; Wallerstein 1974). Later scholarship emphasized the diversity and agency of Southern states, as well as forms of South–South cooperation (Acharya 2014; Nolte and Wehner 2021).

In contemporary practice, “Global South” often operates less as a strategic descriptor than as a political signifier. It is invoked to justify nonalignment, to demand reform of multilateral institutions, or to reframe distributive conflicts over finance, technology, and climate. Even U.S. strategy documents now use the label in a self-conscious way: the 2025 National Security Strategy notes that the United States and its allies have not yet formulated “a joint plan for the so-called ‘Global South’” (White House 2025, 22). The phrase captures the term’s paradox: it is powerful in diplomacy and discourse precisely because it is elastic, but that elasticity limits its value for explaining concrete alignment choices.

BRICS expansion has amplified the symbolism while highlighting heterogeneity. BRICS+ now aggregates vastly different regime types, development models, and security priorities; cohesion is episodic and issue-specific rather than systemic (Stuenkel 2015). Recent discourse-analytic work shows how “Global South” functions as an ideational resource within BRICS narratives, rather than as a stable strategic platform (Novikova and Alekseeva 2025).

Why Realms Matter

If the West/South dichotomy underperforms as analysis, what replaces it? One alternative is to recover a spatial vocabulary that treats geography and infrastructure not as background conditions but as organizing structures of strategy. Saul B. Cohen’s concept of geostrategic realms is useful here. Realms are not alliances and not ideational communities; they are large-scale spatial systems anchored in transport corridors, resource flows, production networks, and characteristic modes of power projection (Cohen 2015). They shape incentives by structuring interdependence and by determining which forms of coercion and reassurance are credible.

A realm framework does not deny the importance of institutions or values. Rather, it treats them as mediated by material connectivity. Where trade corridors run, where energy can be rerouted, where digital standards lock in dependence, and where naval or land power can be deployed at scale—these factors often predict alignment constraints more reliably than rhetorical identifications with “the West” or “the South.”

Survival Incentives: A Domestic Logic for External Alignment

Structural geography explains constraints; it does not, by itself, explain choices. States facing similar positions often behave differently. To account for variation, this essay adds a domestic micro-foundation drawn from selectorate theory. In this model, leaders remain in office by maintaining the support of a winning coalition drawn from a larger selectorate. They allocate resources between public goods and private benefits depending on coalition size and on the cost of maintaining support (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003).

Applied to foreign policy, the implication is straightforward: external commitments are sustained when domestic coalitions reward them and when the costs of security provision, market openness, or sanctions remain politically manageable. When costs rise—or when domestic challengers can portray these costs as subsidizing others—leaders rationally shift toward selective engagement, transactional bargains, and narrower definitions of national interest. The result is not necessarily isolationism; it is conditionality.

This domestic logic also helps explain why broad categories fracture. A “Collective West” can coordinate on urgent threats and still disagree sharply on China policy, industrial strategy, migration, or fiscal burden sharing—because national coalitions differ in who pays and who benefits. Likewise, “Global South” states may converge rhetorically on reform demands while diverging on security alignment, technology governance, and energy strategy.

Four Realms in 2025

In 2025, four interacting realms capture much of the observable pattern of alignment and contestation: a Maritime Realm anchored by U.S. and allied sea power and by networked security commitments; an East Asian Realm structured around Chinese-centered production, infrastructure, and standards; a Eurasian Continental Realm driven by Russia’s land-power security strategy and by energy and logistics corridors; and an emergent South Asian Realm centered on India’s pursuit of strategic autonomy. These realms overlap, and many states sit at their edges. But the framework clarifies the main structural constraints under which leaders choose—and the reasons why many prefer hedging to bloc alignment.

The Maritime Realm: A Bargain, Not a Bloc

The Maritime Realm remains the most institutionally dense space in world politics, spanning NATO, the EU, the G7, and a web of U.S.-anchored partnerships. Its core strength is the ability to project power across oceanic distances and to police key chokepoints and sea lanes. Yet the realm is increasingly governed by bargaining over who pays for deterrence and who enjoys privileged market access.

The 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy makes this explicit by redefining alliance management as burden-sharing with enforceable expectations and by linking security cooperation to economic inducements (White House 2025, 12). From a selectorate perspective, this is what one would expect when domestic coalitions become less willing to subsidize international public goods. The Maritime Realm can still coordinate effectively in crisis, but its default mode is moving toward issue-by-issue coalitions—sanctions here, export controls there, maritime patrols elsewhere—rather than an all-encompassing strategic unity.

The East Asian Realm: Interdependence as Leverage

The East Asian Realm is organized around dense production networks, technology ecosystems, and infrastructure corridors in which China is a central node. Beijing’s influence does not rest only on military power. It also derives from asymmetric interdependence: market size, supply-chain position, and the ability to set or export standards. For many regional states, alignment choices are therefore framed as risk management under dependence rather than as ideological alignment for or against “the West.”

This structural setting encourages differentiated strategies. Some governments accept deeper economic integration while seeking security insurance elsewhere; others limit technology exposure while keeping trade open; still others pursue tight political alignment with China to stabilize domestic coalitions or to secure investment. The realm is thus characterized less by two camps than by a spectrum of dependency management.

The Eurasian Continental Realm: Constraint, Energy, and Regime Security

The Eurasian Continental Realm is shaped by land-power logics: territorial buffers, continental logistics, and the strategic use of energy and raw materials. Russia’s behavior since 2022 illustrates how a sanctioned great power can use selective partnerships, energy routing, and influence operations to sustain regime security and international leverage even under constraint.

Selectorate incentives sharpen the picture. In a coalition structure that prioritizes regime stability, the leadership is likely to accept long-term economic costs if doing so preserves political control and deters domestic challengers. External ties are therefore cultivated not primarily for broad integration but for their capacity to generate revenue streams, sanctions evasion pathways, or security cooperation that is insulated from Western pressure. The realm’s dynamics also spill outward: states at its margins must manage energy exposure, border security, and the risk of secondary sanctions.

The South Asian Realm: Autonomy as Portfolio Strategy

India sits at the heart of an emergent South Asian Realm, but its defining feature is not a closed regional bloc. It is strategic autonomy pursued through diversified partnerships. India’s leaders maximize flexibility by cooperating with the United States and its partners in selected security and technology domains, while maintaining ties with Russia, engaging Gulf states, and preserving room for maneuver with China.

This is often described as tradition or identity. It is also a rational survival strategy. Autonomy limits domestic political exposure to accusations of subordination, preserves access to defense supplies and energy, and allows the leadership to claim diplomatic agency. For many middle powers, India’s approach signals a more general pattern: in a world of overlapping realms, portfolio management becomes the default.

Europe’s Narrowing Corridor

Europe illustrates both the resilience and the limits of realm-based cohesion. Since 2022, European states have increased defense spending, diversified energy supplies, and strengthened military planning within NATO. Yet Europe’s strategic adaptation remains uneven, and its political unity is conditional. Even a U.S. strategy sympathetic to Europe frames the relationship in terms of conditional support and reform expectations. The 2025 National Security Strategy argues that Europe’s trajectory could erode its capacity to remain a reliable ally, while simultaneously stressing that the United States cannot afford to “write Europe off” (White House 2025, 25–26).

For European governments, this creates a narrow corridor. On one side lies continued dependence on U.S. capabilities amid growing U.S. insistence on burden shifting. On the other lies a risky quest for strategic autonomy in a context of intra-European divergences over fiscal policy, defense industrial coordination, and the balance between deterrence and diplomacy. The most plausible outcome is neither sudden European superpower status nor transatlantic rupture, but managed fragmentation within the Maritime Realm: differentiated national strategies nested inside shared institutions.

What a Realm Lens Clarifies

A realm-based framework does not eliminate ambiguity; it disciplines it. It highlights why “Collective West” and “Global South” persist as political categories—they are useful for mobilization and bargaining—while explaining why they fail as analytic proxies for strategic behavior. Realms foreground the infrastructure of interdependence and the geography of coercion. Selectorate theory foregrounds the domestic politics of sustaining commitments. Together, they predict a world in which states cooperate when interests overlap, defect when costs rise, and hedge when uncertainty dominates.

In practical terms, analysts should expect three patterns to intensify. First, coalition-building will become more modular: export controls, sanctions, naval patrols, and technology governance will be assembled in varying combinations rather than through permanent bloc discipline. Second, bargaining over contributions will move to the center of alliance politics, with economic and security domains explicitly linked. Third, hinge states at realm intersections—from the Gulf to Southeast Asia to parts of Africa—will continue to exploit their positional value by trading access, basing rights, and market opportunities for security and investment.

Methods Note

This essay employs qualitative, theory-driven analysis. It combines conceptual clarification with structured interpretation of secondary scholarship and publicly available strategy documents, including the 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy. The aim is analytical explanation rather than narrow causal testing: identifying the mechanisms linking spatial structure and domestic political incentives to observable patterns of alignment, hedging, and fragmentation across regions.

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