The Middle Power Fantasy
The stable international paradigm has shifted, and ambitions of middle powers need to pragmatically shift with it...
Mark Carney’s speech at Davos posed a question worth asking: how much of Carney’s assessment—and proposed solution—do Australian policymakers accept?
Not since the Hawke-Keating era has this country produced a leader so attached to a middle-power model of the world. Carney made an eloquent case that the post-Second World War, American-guaranteed, rules-based order was finished. He then argued that middle powers should chart their own course in a more chaotic, power-driven world. One could easily imagine Hawke, Keating or Gareth Evans making a similar speech.
Yet while Carney’s admission on the end of the rules-based order was solid, his solution was less so.
The notion that middle powers control their own destinies, can shape the world, and be consequential actors through their own, specific ‘middle power approach’ was particularly popular during the Cold War among Western countries that identified as such. This idea found special favour on the centre-left—Hawke and Carney’s natural territory—not least as a means of safely gaining distance from the United States while presenting a friendlier face to the non-aligned.
Both Canada and Australia worked to establish not only a place at the table representing middle powers during those decades, but a theory of middle power activism. They argued that diplomacy, not force, should resolve disputes. They supported the rules-based order that favoured them. Both were active in multilateral forums, from the United Nations to arms control treaties like the Ottawa Convention on landmines and the Australia Group on chemical weapons. They contributed to peacekeeping operations and negotiated peaceable outcomes as trusted third parties in conflicts such as Cambodia.
But these activities, which define the modern understanding of a middle power, were enabled by American hegemony. Modern middle powers follow power; they do not lead it. Under a benevolent hegemon they enjoyed considerable scope, provided their activities assisted or at least did not harm the power basis of that hegemon. Until they did: ask New Zealand. In contrast, consider the scope granted by less benevolent hegemons: see Czechoslovakia and Hungary during the Cold War, or Hong Kong and Ukraine more recently.
History offers three key insights for middle powers.
First, territorial adjacency matters. Countries sharing borders face common threats, especially when geography enables easy conquest. For territorially isolated nations like Canada and Australia, this makes building alliances with like-minded states considerably harder.
Second, hegemony has value for middle powers. It provides the environment to allow countries and their people to build ties, conduct commerce, and share knowledge and innovations. Australia and Canada both have benefitted from the best of that world, first under the British, subsequently, under the United States. Middle powers slip-stream comfortably behind a benevolent hegemony. True, Trump’s America looks less benevolent than its predecessors, but Australians are pragmatic enough to stay the course.
Third, statecraft matters. Neither Canada nor Australia has experience practising the realpolitik statecraft needed to navigate a tumultuous world independently, or even collectively with like-minded countries—except in the manner enabled over the past 80 years, which is to say, with American goodwill.
Australia’s efforts to build relations with regional nations highlight the scale of the challenge. Asia has no tradition of Western-style collective security mechanisms. Regional nations are more accustomed to negotiating Chinese-dominated tributary systems, city-based maritime trading networks, and fluid, opportunistic relations defined by power and convenience rather than rules.
Australia has struggled to build meaningful formal relationships with its nearest neighbour, Indonesia. While the political elite have become more comfortable with each other, formal agreements have not translated into close ties between populations and easy understanding of language, culture and exchange.
Australian leaders and diplomats have worked patiently to build slow, careful, non-aggressive arrangements in Asia at the speed of regional comfort with an explicitly Western liberal democracy. But the world isn’t waiting. Geostrategy is defined foremost by power balances, and those are shifting rapidly both in Asia and beyond. These shifts are best seen in economic coercion through tariffs and supply chain pressure from both China and the United States; technological competition in quantum computing, AI, and other frontier domains; military buildups from Beijing and Moscow; and grey-zone activities spanning cyber operations to disinformation.
In this environment, Australia has few chips to play. Being ‘nice’ and seeking to go unnoticed by adversaries is a hope, not a strategy.
And that is the core problem. A middle power as understood in the modern West is not a viable proposition in a world driven by the active, naked, antagonistic exercise of power. The concept also ignores how deeply dependent middle and smaller powers remain on both the United States and China. The Australian Defence Force cannot operate meaningfully, even in its own immediate region under a ‘porcupine’ strategy, without the United States. The current Australian economy cannot survive without China. Australia is a technology taker, not maker or shaper. And Australia is geographically isolated from its other friendly middle powers.
That’s a hard admission for one of the many nations that have benefited from the American-led order, enjoying prosperity, stability, and security for decades. Because it tells the public: we must change, and that change will put at risk the stability, security, and prosperity you have enjoyed, even as all three are already under pressure. No politician relishes the hard, uncertain work of coherent transformation; after all, it highlights their own shortcomings.
So where does that leave Australia? Regardless of how the Trump Administration is perceived, Australia has little option but to maintain its alliance with the United States. Australia is being presented with the bill for a highly beneficial alliance. But pretending we have other options only delays the reckoning.