For decades, the U.S. positioned itself as the guardian of global order, claiming to uphold sovereignty, fair trade, and multilateralism. But that illusion is gone. Today, the U.S. and China – the world’s two genuine superpowers – and Russia – an aspirant superpower bristling with ballistics and bravado – are all rogue actors, bending or breaking international norms to suit their imperial ambitions. Call them the giants.
How can other countries respond to this new reality?
There are three choices in front of them. They can align with one of the giants, seeking protection but at the expense of independence. They can try to club together to build regional blocs – but no region, not even Europe, has the power to fend off all the giants at once. Finally, they can work to build global alliance of the middle powers. This would involve a wide grouping of countries, acting as mutually supportive peers, collectively refusing to allow the depredations of the giants, and working instead to build a better rules-based order.
Middle powers should collaborate to build a better rules-based order
This last choice is not easy to implement, but it is by far the most preferable.
Who are the middle powers? They are all countries with the economic, diplomatic and military capabilities to meaningfully contribute to enforcing international order. We’re talking about every continent and income level, from the UK, France, Germany, Canada, and Australia, to Japan, Korea and Singapore, as well as Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Brazil. And no country need be excluded. While a credible alliance will require the strongest countries to be at the table, the smallest and poorest nations can be welcomed into the fold, adding legitimacy, representation, and scale.
Such a middle power alliance would require an agreement that all countries should be safe from bullying. Countries outside Europe would agree to put pressure on Russia over Ukraine, and Europe in turn would no longer tolerate the occupation of Palestine, which is recognised as a country by almost everyone else (including some European nations). There would be a united chorus warning China off Taiwan, and America off Greenland, Canada and Panama. Trade wars waged by the giants would be ameliorated by quickening economic integration and solidarity amongst the middle powers. Over time, the huge, but uncoordinated military power of the middle powers would be shorn of its dependence on the giants and would be brought into ever closer strategic and operational integration. For the first ever time, multilateralism could be built without the ambivalent oversight of an imperial hegemon. This would be a true multilateralism of interdependent peers.
A middle powers alliance can invigorate the United Nations
If this all sounds like a pipe dream, consider that today’s geopolitical crisis is forcing new thinking and opening the political window. And this middle power alliance does not need to be created fully formed. Many benefits would spring merely from the first steps towards it. For the UK to get close to the EU, and for European powers to decouple from the US, would be a powerful start. Korea and Japan can build on their tentative rapprochement with more meaningful strategic alignment and get closer to Europe. These high-income powers can work diplomatically with major nations of the Global South, luring them away from their hub-and-spoke relationships with the US, China, and Russia. All this could start to happen within the next year and would already raise the cost of rogue action by the giants, while building a platform for further steps over years and decades.
Institutionally, a middle power alliance can invigorate the United Nations rather than replacing it. The middle powers would outnumber the rogue giants in almost every agency and body. Only the Security Council stands as a challenge. If their peacekeeping work is disrupted, the middle powers should declare the Council illegitimate, building a new body of international law that produces a more representative process for deciding matters of war and peace.
Where is democracy in all this, considering previous calls for a club of democracies?
First and foremost, a middle power alliance would be a more democratic form of multilateralism than the hegemonic US-led order, given its more widely shared power. But lovers of democracy (of which I am one), should not see such an alliance as a tool to spread democracy, nor should it exclude countries with non-democratic political systems. International orders are effective where they are designed to solve collective action problems that countries cannot solve on their own. That requires them to be as broad as possible and focused on a tight set of issues – for example, interstate conflict, health security and climate change. Where they are designed to pressure countries to change their internal politics, they overstep and lose the legitimacy and inclusiveness they need to achieve their core aims. The post-war US-led order learned this to its cost.
What we need now, to protect us all from the dangerous path the world is going down, is an alliance of every country that believes in the principles of sovereignty, multilateralism and peaceful coexistence, whatever their political systems.
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