https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21324/global-south
In Iran itself, even figures within the “southern” system are beginning to realize that their regime may be heading south.
In what is labeled “the Greater Middle East”, another shibboleth that is best avoided, there is an overwhelming desire for social reform, economic development and political participation, in other words for heading “north” rather than “south.”
A new generation of leaders has understood that unless they turn change into an ally, they risk turning it into a mortal foe.
Always anxious to portray the Islamic Republic of Iran in a world leadership position, the official media in Tehran have been trumpeting a three-day visit by President Masoud Pezeshkian to Dushanbe and Moscow as a “significant strengthening of the global south.”
You might wonder what the “global south” is all about.
This is a cliché invented in the 1970s to distinguish “Third World” countries from the two blocs of East and West, without abandoning its sister cliché of “non-aligned world.”
With globalism in decline if not actually moribund yet, the “global south” is gaining new adepts in circles seeking to divide humanity on ideological grounds, with Western democracies cast as villains as authoritarian regimes as choirboys.
Dividing the world on pseudo-geographical lines has a long history. The Roman Empire regarded the Persian Empire on its east as a cultural alternative, if not an existential threat. In medieval times, the concept of the Orient alternately depicted a seductive or a repulsive model for the Occident.
Karl Marx, who pretended to have discovered laws of human history, found it necessary to acknowledge that his analysis didn’t apply to “Asiatic societies,” by which he meant the whole world outside Europe and North America.
The English imperialist poet Rudyard Kipling, a literary giant but a political pygmy, played a similar chord: “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”