Unsuccessful efforts to update the middle power concept for the contemporary international system have prompted calls for the concept to be “historicized”—to be retired from common use and treated as a purely historical term. The problem with this proposal is that “middle power” has become increasingly popular in the 2020s in analysis, commentary, and state practice. The purpose of this article is to offer an alternative to historicization. While we acknowledge that the traditional understanding of middle power was deeply rooted in the twentieth century, and particularly in that era of American hegemony during the Cold War and post–Cold War eras, the continued use of the term suggests that we need to embrace the flexibility that has always been associated with the concept. This paper calls for a return to a variant of the nineteenth-century idea that middle powers were located geographically “in the middle” between great powers. In the 2020s and 2030s, which we argue is marked by “fuzzy bifurcation,” we propose that middle powers are those located geostrategically “in the middle” between the two great powers of the contemporary international system, the United States and China.
Policy implications
- Middle powers in contemporary global politics—those nongreat powers caught “in the middle” between the United States and China—should recognize that, in an era marked by “fuzzy bifurcation,” achieving economic and national security will depend on maximizing geostrategic and economic autonomy and minimizing vulnerabilities to both great powers. In order to avoid having to “choose” between the two great powers, middle powers should therefore seek to reduce their security and economic dependencies on the two great powers as far as possible, by altering security arrangements and diversifying trade patterns.
- Middle powers should also seek to develop their strategic and economic linkages with each other as far as possible. Priority should be given to strengthening bilateral relations with other middle powers, both regionally and globally. Middle powers should work to strengthen regional international organizations, seeing such organizations as the key mechanisms for forging new economic and security partnerships.
- Middle powers should work with each other to ensure that those areas of global governance in which the United States is no longer involved continue to function. They should be willing to step in financially to assist those international organizations from which the United States has withdrawn. Middle powers should prioritize the negotiation of new multilateral agreements in different policy issue areas to create a new rules-based order.
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