As great-power rivalry weakens old institutions and disrupts globalisation, middle powers have new leverage to build coalitions, stabilise trade and provide public goods across the North–South divide.
The age of disruption and great power geopolitics has arrived. Singapore’s Foreign Minister has called the traditional underwriter of rules-based globalisation a ‘revisionist power’ – a term once reserved for Russia and China. Wars have broken out in Ukraine, the Middle East and Iran. Securitisation of trade and technology is threatening economic integration. Artificial intelligence (AI) and the green-tech revolutions are upending economic relations.
In principle, this is bad news for middle powers. Yet the power transition and erosion of institutions and norms also signal opportunity. Unipolarity, hierarchy and strict bipolarity are behind us. The combination of uncertainty and multipolarity opens up an exceptional arbitrage gap for smart middle powers.
The two great powers – plus Russia – often neutralise each other and follow competitive scripts that limit their ability to provide public goods during the transition.
Old patterns from the mid-1990s and early 2000s where middle powers in the Global North – the European Union, Japan, Canada and Australia – could fill that gap are insufficient. These countries are now greatly constrained by security dependence on the United States. Rising middle powers in the Global South, including India, Indonesia, Vietnam, ASEAN as a whole, the Gulf countries and Brazil, are crucial actors in new forms of middle power-led public goods provision.
North–south middle power coalitions have the ability and motivation to offer solutions to the systemic problems that the world now faces and to heavily influence the churn in the global order. They can act as idea entrepreneurs, coalition builders and change catalysts.
Global North middle powers represent 34 per cent of global GDP, against 27 per cent for the United States and 17 per cent for China measured at current exchange rates. Global South middle powers, those ranked in the top 50 in terms of global GDP, represented 18 per cent of global GDP in 2024. Middle powers are the global majority in the economy and world population.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney captured this middle power zeitgeist in a dramatic speech at the normally dull Davos Global Forum on 20 January 2026. Carney called the disruption a ‘rupture’ in the global order and announced that the old order was partly hypocritical and ‘is not coming back’. He urged the world to take the measure of current danger and to react. The world took notice.
Carney called for middle power leadership. “The middle powers must act together, because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu”. Middle power leadership, he argued, “means building what we claim to believe in, rather than waiting for the old order to be restored. It means creating institutions and agreements that function as described. And it means reducing the leverage that enables coercion.”
Despite formidable obstacles, Carney may be right. Superpowers cannot function as superpowers in a fast changing and increasingly multipolar system without five things from middle powers – followers, legitimacy at home, mediators, fresh thinking and routinised access. Unlike the strict bipolarity of the old Cold War, power is now diffuse and large middle players have significant autonomy.
Superpowers need followers as audience and rule-takers. They need to be feared or loved but cannot live with indifference.
They also need legitimacy at home, whether elected or not, and that legitimacy often comes from rituals of respect and allegiance by middle powers.
They get caught in structural impasses – like the US belief that only US supremacy can deliver trade and peace or China’s belief in regional pre-eminence. Middle powers can broker compromises that ease them out.
They need novel ideas to solve global coordination problems. But the vortex of domestic politics often prevents them from global creativity.
And they need routinised access to resources, critical minerals, finance and trade since they cannot always throw their weight around.
These dependencies give middle powers leverage they have not enjoyed since the Cold War. Three realistic pathways for middle powers to shape the provision of public goods and stabilise the disrupted order are already clear – initiating new multilateralism, hedging the great power rivalry and scaling solutions to the global level.
Middle powers are uniquely endowed to be initiators, agenda-setters and pathfinders in urgent forms of multilateralism. Canada and the European Union led the Ottawa group process during the Trump 1.0 administration that produced a bypass fix to the blocked WTO Dispute Settlement Mechanism. The Multi-Party Interim Appeal Arbitration Arrangement brings together most global trading countries outside the United States. Singapore, Chile, New Zealand and South Korea lead the Digital Economic Partnership Agreement, which sits at the frontier of digital governance.
Global South middle powers have acted as hedgers in the global system, collectively keeping channels open to all great powers, standing for multilateralism and slowing the slide to bipolarity. Their diverse hedging strategies have stabilised economic interdependence and diluted unilateral actions by great powers. This is because they have increasingly acted as connector countries, welcoming China+1 strategies by large global firms and supporting regional trade agreements such as the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP).
Global South hedgers, free from US security guarantees and immediate threats, have acted more proactively than Global North middle powers. But Global North middle powers have enormous resilient power if they can muster it and coordinate among themselves and with others.
Middle powers have also scaled up key initiatives to the global level and acted as ballasts for global public goods. The most visible example is the voluntary global agreement on digital trade and e-commerce reached at the WTO Ministerial in Cameroon on 28 March 2026, led by Digital Economic Partnership Agreement countries together with Australia and Japan. A stalemate between the United States and Brazil, supported by Turkiye, led to the expiration of the global moratorium on e-commerce duties. But 66 WTO economies representing 70 per cent of global trade, led by middle powers and including China and Taiwan, provided stabilisation.
These initiatives are real and multiplying. This may be a key moment for innovative thinking and institutional entrepreneurialism, as long as middle powers can build cross-cutting coalitions across the North–South divide. The result will be a more decentralised, fluid, multiform and competitive global governance – and one that carries significant promise.
Republished from East Asia Forum
Yves Tiberghien
Yves Tiberghien is Distinguished Professor and Dean at the Taipei School of Economics and Political Science, Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia and Adjunct Chair Professor in the IDAS Program at National Chengchi University.