https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-s ... r-delusion
https://archive.is/3xAzZ
In January, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney warned leaders gathered at the World Economic Forum in Davos that states caught between Washington and Beijing needed to stop negotiating alone. “If we’re not at the table,” he said, “we’re on the menu.” The line captured the mood of the moment. Across capitals and conferences, middle powers are suddenly back in fashion. Think tank reports and newspaper columns describe India as a pivotal swing state; hold up Brazil, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey as models of successful hedging; and urge Australia, Canada, Europe, Japan, and South Korea to coordinate more and rely less on the United States. A new vocabulary has followed: strategic autonomy, multialignment, minilateralism, variable geometry.
But this reading mistakes anxiety for strength. Middle powers are not becoming more visible because they are more powerful. They are becoming more visible because they are more exposed. The conditions that allowed many of them to flourish in recent decades are eroding. For years, they could shelter under U.S. hegemony, exploit an expanding global economy, and trade with rival powers without choosing among them. They could reap the benefits of scale without possessing it themselves.
That world is disappearing. Growth has slowed, globalization has become a contest over chokepoints, and great powers have grown more predatory. The United States is increasingly willing to use its dominance to extract concessions. China is using subsidies and export gluts to deindustrialize other countries, debt and infrastructure to make them dependent, and military harassment and economic sanctions to narrow their choices. The result is not a flatter world of ascendant middle powers but a harsher one in which the two top powers have more ways to bend others to their will.
The danger is that middle powers will respond to this new reality with symbolism instead of strategy. Summits and partnerships can create the appearance of autonomy, but they cannot substitute for raw power, which increasingly depends on the ability to finance, build, and command large systems of technology, industry, intelligence, logistics, and force. Nor can most states simply float between the United States and China, buying security from one, goods from the other, and market access from both. As rivalry hardens, hedging will start to look like betrayal. Washington and Beijing will make states show where they stand by restricting technology, rerouting supply chains, withholding intelligence, blocking investment, raising tariffs, or threatening military reprisals. In an increasingly hierarchical world, the middle is not an open marketplace. It is a minefield.
I am in broad agreement with the article, the above underlined also strikes closer to the truth, case in point, the very important and indispensable Quad, with a capital Q.
Middle powers still have cards to play. Many control assets the United States and China need: resources, military bases, ports, factories, technologies, armies. But these niches do not guarantee autonomy. They generate security and prosperity only when plugged into larger systems of protection, technology, finance, and markets. The path forward, then, is not endless coalition shopping to route around Washington and Beijing. It is alignment: choosing the great-power system that offers the best shelter from a country’s gravest threat, building national strength, and using that strength to bargain for influence inside the coalition. This rules out the fantasy of free agency. But it preserves something more valuable: the ability to survive and thrive in a more dangerous world.
Appreciate the naked assertion, most articles go multiple paras before timorously hinting at subservience as the optimal mode of surviving and sometime thriving, cue the next para:
The Cold War turned decolonization into a sustained middle-power moment. Locked in a global ideological rivalry, both superpowers had incentives to recognize new states, protect weaker partners, and compete for influence among them. The United States extended a security and economic umbrella over North America, Western Europe, and the first island chain in East Asia, stretching from Japan through Taiwan to the Philippines. Washington stationed forces abroad, opened its market, and supplied allies with capital and technology. The U.S.-led order was hardly benign everywhere: Washington helped topple governments in Chile, Guatemala, and Iran, and turned Indochina into a battlefield during the Vietnam War. But for allies such as Australia, Canada, Japan, and West Germany, U.S. hegemony provided shelter. It gave them room to grow rich, secure, and influential without becoming great powers themselves.
Soviet hegemony was harsher and poorer. It smothered autonomy in Eastern Europe and fueled revolutionary violence across parts of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Yet it, too, helped create a world of middle powers. Moscow backed decolonization, armed and subsidized friendly regimes, and built industrial capacity in Eastern Europe. Rather than absorbing midsize states outright, the Soviet Union often ruled them indirectly, through satellite regimes in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, and Poland, and subsidized clients outside Europe, such as Cuba and Vietnam. Many Soviet partners had little real independence, but they retained borders, bureaucracies, armies, industrial bases, and seats in international institutions.
The U.S.-led order made that escalator easier to ride. With American protection, dozens of countries could prosper without seizing colonies, building blue-water navies, or fully defending their own supply chains. The United States kept sea-lanes open, anchored the dollar-based financial system, and underwrote a world in which capital, goods, energy, and technology moved with unusual ease, especially as the introduction of shipping containers and digital coordination allowed global production to expand.
Countries that might once have been trapped by small markets, dangerous neighborhoods, or limited resources could plug into a global economy they did not have to police themselves. Mexico, Poland, South Korea, Turkey, and Vietnam became manufacturing nodes. Australia, Brazil, Chile, Indonesia, the Gulf states, and South Africa rode the commodity boom. India and the Philippines gained weight by providing services, while Ireland, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) became commercial hubs. The routes varied, but the result was similar: states below the great-power tier could reap the gains of global scale without possessing global power.
But now the foundations of the middle-power moment are crumbling. Hegemonic shelter is weakening, hyperglobalization is unraveling, and rapid growth is slowing. This pattern holds whether middle powers are defined materially, as the 20 largest economies after the United States and China, or politically, as states trying to maneuver between Washington and Beijing. Either way, the old supports are giving way.
The first to go was easy growth. Middle powers are now growing roughly a quarter to a third more slowly than during the 1990 to 2008 boom, leaving the typical economy more than 20 percent smaller than it would have been had the old pace continued. They have also stopped catching up with the United States. Many doubled their economic weight relative to the United States in the early 2000s; since then, most have fallen back by a third. Debt burdens are about one-quarter higher than they were in 2005, and productivity growth has turned negative in roughly two-thirds of these countries since 2008.
This is not just a bad cycle. The escalator that lifted middle powers is stalling because many of the easiest gains have already been made. Countries can pave highways, electrify villages, build ports, and move workers from farms to factories only once. After that, growth depends more on innovation, which is harder to generate and slower to spread. New technologies, including artificial intelligence, have not yet delivered productivity gains on the scale of earlier industrial breakthroughs.
And the above is where india should naturally come in, as the pm also stated in netherlands, paraphrasing, dutch (euro) science and indian ability to adapt and reach the masses in recurring iterations for technology and adaptability is the way forward. From my pov, the indian system should be geared so that yield gap in duration be reduced to the minimum possible value for every iteration of sciences and r&d developed elsewhere, we are far too late in the game, and too poorly structured to start hacking our way to success from the start.
U.S. semiconductor controls on China illustrate this hierarchy. Allies produce indispensable parts of the chip supply chain, but the United States sits across the stack, in design, software, equipment, cloud platforms, finance, end markets, and export-control rules that reach foreign firms using U.S. technology. After Washington imposed major chip restrictions in 2022, allies protested and sought relief for their companies. But Japan and the Netherlands ultimately adopted parallel restrictions, and South Korean and Taiwanese firms still needed U.S. authorization to keep their China-based fabrication plants, known as fabs, operating.
Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, announced in April 2025, showed the same pattern. Middle powers were outraged by duties imposed on nearly every U.S. trading partner, including close allies. But few mounted a collective response, and fewer still forced Washington to back down. Most negotiated bilaterally for softer versions of the tariffs, seeking lower rates, sectoral exemptions, or partial relief in exchange for investment pledges, purchases of American goods, and policy concessions. They could bargain over the terms of U.S. pressure, but they could not escape the pressure itself.
China creates a different version of the same hierarchy. It lacks Washington’s financial and security reach, but its industrial scale lets it pull other countries into Chinese-centered supply chains. Its state banks can finance massive infrastructure and industrial projects, and its factories produce roughly a third of the world’s manufactured goods, with dominant shares in shipbuilding, batteries, electric vehicles, drones, solar panels, and rare-earth processing. That gives Beijing many ways to squeeze middle powers. It can buy up raw materials, flood markets with cheap exports, withhold financing or construction support from unfinished projects, and exploit foreign factories’ reliance on Chinese parts. Indonesia has nickel, but Chinese firms control much of its refining. Mexico and Vietnam benefit as supply chains move out of China, but many of their factories still depend on Chinese inputs. Middle powers may control valuable pieces of the system, but China often controls the industrial ecosystem around them.
If middle powers are back on the menu, the obvious response is to band together. That was Carney’s message at Davos, and the impulse is understandable. Coalitions can amplify middle powers’ voices and give them leverage on specific issues. But they cannot turn them into great powers, or guarantee them a permanent seat at the table.
The first problem is scale. The world is not multipolar. On the core measures of power, the United States towers over the field, China usually ranks second, and everyone else is crowded far below. The gap between the top two powers and the rest is much larger than the gaps between the middle powers themselves.
The EU embodies this paradox. Rich and deeply institutionalized, it looks like the world’s most promising middle-power coalition. But the EU is a product of U.S. hegemony, not an alternative to it. U.S. protection made European integration possible by suppressing the continent’s old security dilemmas. In doing so, however, it also smothered Europe’s will and capacity for hard power. Instead, in the post–Cold War era, Europe became a welfare superpower, spending less than two percent of GDP on defense but roughly 25 percent on social protection—more than half the world’s total, despite having just five percent of its population. The result is extreme dependence on the United States for intelligence, targeting, refueling, air defense, logistics, munitions, and long-range strike capabilities. Europe has repeatedly struggled to manage crises on its own continent, from the Balkans to Ukraine, let alone project power overseas.
That leaves the option Carney put forward in his Davos speech: “variable geometry,” a technical label for improvising coalitions issue by issue. But that is not a middle-power order. It is world politics as usual: states scrambling under pressure while stronger powers divide, bribe, threaten, and punish any coalition that tries to route around them. Some scholars imagine an à la carte order, in which middle powers shop freely for security here, technology there, and market access elsewhere. But the world is not a mall. It is a state of nature. After Europe built a mechanism called INSTEX in 2019 to bypass U.S. sanctions and continue trade with Iran, Washington threatened its users with exile from the dollar system. That same year, after Turkey bought Russian air defenses, Washington expelled it from the F-35 program. In 2025, as India continued buying Russian oil despite U.S. warnings not to, Washington hammered it with 50 percent tariffs.
China enforces its hierarchy just as aggressively. It pressed Cambodia to block ASEAN from criticizing Beijing’s military expansion in the South China Sea, punished Lithuania’s outreach to Taiwan by restricting trade and targeting Lithuanian inputs in global supply chains, and hit Australia with tariffs and informal bans on barley, wine, beef, coal, cotton, and lobsters after Canberra sought an inquiry into the origins of COVID. It also forced Vietnam to halt offshore gas projects with Spanish-, Emirati-, Russian-, and Japanese-linked firms by threatening confrontation and swarming drilling sites with maritime militia vessels. In a world riven by great-power conflict, variable geometry does not protect middle powers. It exposes them, because any coalition strong enough to matter is visible enough to punish.
If middle powers cannot stand alone, form a pole, or hide among ad hoc coalitions, they must choose a larger system to lean into. This does not require blind obedience. They can still trade widely and talk to everyone. But on the core issues of power—whose weapons to buy, whose intelligence to share, whose banks to rely on, whose chips and cloud platforms to build on, whose energy networks to join, and whose sanctions to enforce—they increasingly will have to pick a side. Hedging works when threats are distant and great powers tolerate ambiguity. It falters when rivalry hardens and both sides start asking the same question: are you with us or against us? For middle powers, the challenge is no longer how to avoid choosing. It is how to choose a patron without becoming a pawn.
Alignment is not submission. It is a strategy for turning niches into leverage. Alone, middle powers’ assets—ports, bases, chipmaking tools, mineral deposits, drone industries, shipyards—may not be enough to keep a country safe. But within a larger alliance, those niches can become bargaining chips for what middle powers lack: protection, intelligence, technology, capital, market access, and influence over strategy. The point is not to escape dependence, which is usually impossible, but to make dependence reciprocal. A country that proves itself useful to a superpower can become a partner the superpower consults, arms, funds, and defends.
the one that follows is popularly known as the cuck strategy
Japan shows how this works. As Michael Green recently explained in Foreign Affairs, Tokyo is not trying to replace American power in Asia; it is making itself indispensable to it. Japan gives Washington what it needs to compete in the region: local bases, technology, industrial capacity, ship repair, missile production, help organizing coalitions, and regional legitimacy, by making U.S. strategy look less like outside intervention and more like a coalition led in part by a major Asian democracy. In return, Japan gets access to the only power large enough to balance China, plus a stronger voice in how that power is used.
Finland and Sweden made a similar choice in Europe. They joined NATO not because they had forgotten how to defend themselves but because national resilience works better when backed by American power. NATO gained highly capable northern militaries, and Finland and Sweden got Article 5 protection. Australia, Poland, the Philippines, and South Korea are variations on the same theme: each is building national strength while making itself more valuable within a U.S.-led network.
For most middle powers, this is a choice among lesser evils, but it should be an easy one. The United States is an increasingly difficult patron. It bullies allies with tariffs, sanctions, export controls, demands for military access to their territories, and sudden policy swings. But it still offers what no other power can match: protection by the only military that can fight major faraway wars; access to the world’s deepest capital markets, largest consumer base, and leading innovation hubs; and entry into a large club of wealthy, capable allies. Just as important, American power runs through democratic institutions that outsiders can sometimes influence. Allies can lobby Congress, mobilize firms, shape media debates, and logroll with other U.S. partners. They may not win, but they can play.
China offers a thinner bargain. Beijing can build roads, finance ports, buy commodities, and supply cheap goods and industrial parts. For some states, that is useful. But beyond loans, infrastructure, and leverage against the West, Beijing offers little: no security umbrella, reserve currency, or open political channels through which weaker partners can bargain. Its power works by enclosure. It finances the port, supplies the construction companies, builds the network, processes the mineral, floods the market with exports, and seeks to buy less over time. What begins as development can become vassalage.
Ultimately, middle powers cannot choose whether or not to live in a hierarchical world. They must choose which hierarchy gives them the most room to maneuver. The danger is mistaking the performance of autonomy for the substance of power—celebrating summits, forums, and rousing speeches while the real levers of money, technology, energy, and force accumulate in stronger hands. Security will not come from standing alone or stitching together ad hoc coalitions but from bargaining effectively inside a larger system. Middle powers are not free agents in a flat world. But they can still prosper by partnering with a great power in an increasingly unequal one.
Again, broad agreement, but world politics usually operates in a troika, the leader, the challenger and the (helpless) watcher. The names and acronyms of organisations for the above may change but the configuration remains the same. As has been increasingly evident, the plays for the entire world including india are becoming limited, and will continue being so. The way out for india is to align with europe, the east and west, some in the middle east, asean and africa and create an interconnected system that has the guarantee of food, water, crude, chips and defense as a bare minimum.
The others will become america+ or china+
