American and Chinese officials are making a costly mistake in their competition for digital influence. They are treating countries like India, Indonesia, and Brazil as “swing states” or “digital deciders” to be won over. These emerging powers are not looking to pick sides. They are pursuing their own path that could reshape global cyber governance.

This misunderstanding has real costs. When the United Nations recently established a permanent cybersecurity mechanism after five years of negotiations, these emerging powers did not line up behind either Washington or Beijing. Instead, they crafted positions that prioritized their own development needs over great power competition. The result: Both the United States and China found themselves with less influence than expected in shaping the rules that will govern cyberspace for the next decade.

Countries like India, Indonesia, Brazil, and South Africa are better understood as “emerging powers” focused on strategic autonomy rather than ideological alignment. They face a unique challenge: managing growing international influence while dealing with urgent domestic needs like poverty, healthcare, and digital infrastructure gaps. This dual pressure explains their seemingly contradictory behavior in international forums.

The implications for American policy are clear. Rather than viewing these countries as prizes to be won in a zero-sum competition with China, policymakers should engage them as partners with their own legitimate interests. This means focusing on practical cooperation in areas like supply chain resilience, capacity building, and technical standards rather than demanding ideological loyalty.

As the United States, China, and the European Union wrestle over cyberspace and its governance at the United Nations and other international forums, the points of departure often fall along ideological lines: Will global digital frameworks be multi-stakeholder-led or state-centric? Government-controlled, driven by markets and corporate imperatives, or rooted in universal human rights? Will data be closely controlled within national borders or flow freely across them? 

These ideological commitments do not align with the priorities of post-colonial powers and fail to explain their behavior effectively. Countries such as India, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa are representative but not constitutive of the developing world. While they have risen in this century to boast large economies and growing militaries, they are also “premature powers” who must balance their increasing global clout and expectations against pervasive developmental, educational, and health challenges at home.  

Their ostensibly paradoxical behavior often confounds external analysts and observers. For instance, their neutrality in the aftermath of Russian aggression in Ukraine did not square up with their entrenched support for the norms of equal sovereignty and non-interference in international relations. But from their perspective, the explanation is relatively simple: They want to maintain strategic autonomy and policy independence to deal with domestic challenges while avoiding becoming pawns in the “petty squabbles” of the great powers.

For the world’s leading powers, this trend signals a fundamental shift. Both American and Chinese strategies assume these countries will eventually align with one camp or the other. But emerging powers are building their own coalitions and frameworks, reducing the influence of both Washington and Beijing in shaping global cyber rules.

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