Is Latin America Caught Between Rebalancing and Hegemonic Erosion?

Andres Malamud and Luis Schenoni recently published an article about Latin America being caught between strategic rebalancing and hegemonic transition:

The current international landscape lends itself to two competing interpretations. One understands it as a process of strategic rebalancing: a temporary hardening of U.S. leadership aimed at managing the decoupling from China in a bipolar world. The other conceives it as a hegemonic transition, in which U.S. primacy is being structurally eroded by China’s rise.

I find this binary approach a bit frustrating. As I've argued, Latin America has increasingly played the field and does not have to choose between alignment or non-alignment. Javier Milei loves Trump and also works closely with China. I guess it depends on what we mean by "alignment." No matter how much Trump (or Marco Rubio) talk about China, we are not in another Cold War. It's not all or nothing. 

I don't think it's useful to view hemispheric relations in terms of a U.S.-China rivalry. Autonomy doesn't mean choosing sides--it means diversifying. As they write:

As one Latin American foreign minister confided to us, “active non-alignment or strategic autonomy sound very appealing and entertain academics, but the truth is that these concepts are beyond our grasp. We are vulnerable, and all we can do is try to play the game of political maneuvering”.

This nails it perfectly. There is no alignment or non-alignment. There is strategizing for your country's interests. Now more than ever, even with Trump, there is more room to do that.