NAM from Bandung in 1955 to Tehran 2012, a 120 Members Body Today

India and China, the earliest embodiments of the Bandung spirit of friendship and cooperation, went to war in 1962. NAM continued to reveal its inability to mediate effectively in any major wars involving its members, such as a destructive eight-year-long war between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s.

NAM provided a broad cover for pragmatic forms of strategic alignment to newly independent nations.

In a multipolar world where regional powers such as China, Egypt, Iran, South Africa and Turkey pursue their interests through nonexclusive alliances. NAM provides a voice to the smaller countries even though the world is unipolar following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Last week, Manmohan Singh, the most pro-American Indian prime minister in history, led the biggest foreign delegation to Tehran. Bypassing U.S. sanctions, India continues to trade with Iran. It remains dependent on Iran’s crude oil; the two countries also work together in Afghanistan - a role likely to increase as U.S. troops withdraw and Pakistan’s proxies advance.

Singh signed a momentous nuclear deal with the U.S. in 2005, but India has favored France in its recent big arms purchases. Early this year, some of India’s most respected public intellectuals and commentators on foreign affairs co-wrote a document provocatively titled Nonalignment 2.0. One of its numbered points states, “We must seek to achieve a situation where no other state is in a position to exercise undue influence on us- or make us act against our better judgement and will.”

This also seems to be the motto of many Asian leaders who attended the NAM summit in Tehran. In practice, it means improvising unlikely new partnerships and alliances. The”contact group” for Syria proposed by the Egyptian president Mursi includes Saudi Arabia and Turkey as well as Iran; it offers a middle path between Western interventionism and Chinese and Russian obstructionism at the UN.

Nonalignment as an ideal never had much of a chance. The movement was never - and couldn’t be - a cohesive entity. But it did allow new and small countries a respite from the rivalries of big powers, and, sometimes, a way to play them off against each other. Its absurd rituals, particularly the increasingly hollow invocations of anti-imperial solidarity, were always easy to mock. But they concealed larger shifts in the balance of power and the steady process of decolonization - the emergence from a West-dominated world that has been speeded up in our own time by the Arab Spring.