Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has embarked on a weeklong diplomatic mission to India, Australia, and Japan. The sight of a North American country working with three of the Indo-Pacific’s largest economies to negotiate trade deals and speed diversification away from the United States—unthinkable just a year ago—underscores the new salience of middle powers. But while middle-power diplomacy has suddenly become ubiquitous, there is a widespread misunderstanding of not only the nature of these countries but also the risks of their collective rise.
The idea of middle powers banding together was first put forth by Carney at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. It marked a watershed moment in contemporary international relations. A key U.S. ally and neighbor stood up and announced that the liberal international order had ruptured because its primary architect, the United States, was actively endangering it. In response, Carney called on middle powers to work together to navigate this new world.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has embarked on a weeklong diplomatic mission to India, Australia, and Japan. The sight of a North American country working with three of the Indo-Pacific’s largest economies to negotiate trade deals and speed diversification away from the United States—unthinkable just a year ago—underscores the new salience of middle powers. But while middle-power diplomacy has suddenly become ubiquitous, there is a widespread misunderstanding of not only the nature of these countries but also the risks of their collective rise.
The idea of middle powers banding together was first put forth by Carney at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. It marked a watershed moment in contemporary international relations. A key U.S. ally and neighbor stood up and announced that the liberal international order had ruptured because its primary architect, the United States, was actively endangering it. In response, Carney called on middle powers to work together to navigate this new world.
Whether one agreed or disagreed with Carney’s speech, it was undeniably remarkable. Brutally candid and steering clear of the typical diplomatic euphemisms, it was a firm rejoinder to escalating U.S.-Canada trade tensions and American threats to make Canada its 51st state. But Carney’s call for middle powers to cooperate in the face of great-power machinations heralds a risky new way of doing business. While Carney framed it as coalition-building and fellowship—or, as he put it, “if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu”—in effect, his speech was a call to arms. If answered, it portends the fragmentation of the international order, the possibility of multiple new competing orders, and the emergence of a more dangerous world.
To make sense of what the fulfillment of Carney’s words could mean for the future of the international system, we need to understand what middle powers are and why they matter.
In the policy world, middle powers are often self-defined. Australia and Canada are two such countries that have referred to themselves as middle powers for years. This characterization has tended to produce a soothing effect on the rest of the world. Canada and Australia are mid-sized powers with mid-sized military capabilities and economies. They are self-proclaimed do-gooders—nations committed to liberal values and human rights around the world (in rhetoric, if not always in practice). Who could quibble if countries like these band together and attempt to save the liberal international order from the menacing vagaries of the United States and China?
But academics see middle powers differently. While they disagree on a watertight definition, most agree that, as a group of countries, middle powers have little to do with size, somewhat to do with capabilities and economies, and nothing whatsoever to do with moral values. What academics agree on is that these countries are internationalist. In other words, they take an active role on specific issues in the international order that align with their national interests, but they are either unable or unwilling to step up regionally or globally to define a more general agenda for international order.
Carney’s call to middle powers should therefore not be read as a benign request for only liberal Western nations to fill the leadership vacuum in the rules-based order created by the United States. Rather, it is an urgent call to both democratic and nondemocratic middle powers around the world to cooperate in the face of aggressive great power.
This call encompasses internationalist Western countries such as Canada, a territorially large country that sees democracy and human rights as its core national interests and commits itself to promoting them around the world. But it also captures Turkey, a medium-sized economy that has long promoted its influence in global economic governance as well as its role as a broker between the West and other Muslim nations. It further includes Singapore, a small country that punches well above its territorial weight. It even constitutes India, a country that has consistently campaigned to alter the Western-imposed governance structures of the international economic order that it believes are weighted against the global south. Such a diverse coalition would be less concerned with either liberal or any other unifying ideologies for a future order and more so with its own strategic interests. This would weaken, in the absence of U.S. leadership, any liberal norms that remain in the current order even further.
What underscores the enormity of Carney’s call is the fact that middle powers are typically not revisionist. They fundamentally buy into the international order. The United States is widely acknowledged to have built the liberal international order, or what is called the rules-based order, after World War II. But even a country as powerful as the United States could not—and did not—do this alone. The acquiescence and buy-in of middle powers were crucial to that endeavor. Even a middle power such as India, which expresses skepticism about the rules-based order, has never supported alternatives to it. New Delhi withheld support for a Soviet-led order, even though the Soviet Union was its close partner and the United States was not, just as it does so today for a China-led order. If middle powers that have historically supported the current order turn away from it to build coalitions among themselves, the implications are frightening.
The reality is that middle powers helped build the current international order, and if they stop buying into it, that order will erode. Middle powers that set aside bilateral and trilateral differences to cooperate could together constitute a powerful force and lead to order fragmentation. But by setting up small-group coalitions, they are liable to create competing orders. And those orders could fragment along many different lines, from trade to security to the environment.
India’s recent “mother of all deals” with the European Union provides an illustrative example of how trade between countries could fundamentally shift, leading to competing norms and fragmentation. India had spent the past two decades developing a close strategic partnership with the United States in response to its bipartisan overtures. To India’s severe shock, when U.S. President Donald Trump came into office for a second time in 2025, he slapped 50 percent tariffs on New Delhi for a variety of reported reasons, including India’s oil imports from Russia, which had skyrocketed since the Ukraine war began in 2022. Less than a year later, India, historically one of the most protectionist countries in the world, concluded a free trade agreement with the EU on Jan. 27. But EU regulations on practically everything—from products, health, and safety to digital technology regulation—are vastly different from U.S. regulations. If India gears its exports for the EU market and follows the breadth of EU rules and regulations, then the EU will eventually become its primary market. The EU-India trade deal not only indicates that one of the largest middle powers in the world is diversifying away from the United States, but that it is hedging its future trade relationships to elevate EU rules, and not American ones, as the standard.
It’s a similar story with security norms. Trump’s threats to annex Greenland dominated conversations at this year’s Munich Security Conference. Canada, in response, has opened a consulate in Greenland and signed a defense cooperation agreement with Denmark to work closely on Arctic security. The foundation for those actions was laid before Trump’s annexation threats—which would effectively destroy NATO if they came to pass—but now they have taken on added significance. Close security cooperation is rooted in mutual trust. Mutual trust among liberal countries, including the United States, was the bedrock of the liberal international order. Even slight turns away from that to resist U.S. encroachment are cracks in the security order that will be almost impossible to repair, even if a post-Trump administration should try.
To be sure, neither of the two main great powers today—the United States and China—have left this group of countries much choice. Washington and Beijing have not offered these countries the option to buy into and help build a beneficial new order. The United States seems bent on destroying the international order it created. But the only vision of a new international order it has offered thus far is a harkening back to the days of empire—a vision that is completely anathema to most countries but especially those middle powers in the global south who have vivid memories of imperial colonization. And the United States’ unilateral strikes on Iran are only adding to the perception of a great power untethered to old norms. China has yet to offer any concrete conception of what a China-led international order will look like other than that it will be girded by authoritarian norms. Moreover, many of these countries have uneasy relationships with China and do not trust it.
The path that middle powers have been forced onto by great power-rivalry, and particularly by the United States, is a fraught one. At Davos, Carney had the courage to say out loud what the leaders of other middle powers were already thinking—and even beginning to act on. But the consequences of the Carney doctrine of coalitional strength, should it to come to full fruition, will be far-reaching. Middle powers do not have the capacity to create an international order that encompasses the world. They are not likely to work with China to create a new stable order. They also cannot shore up the current order without the support of the United States—nor may some of them even want to anymore. But they have the capacity to create smaller competing orders. And in doing so, they will write the final epitaph of the liberal international order and the U.S. leadership that underpins it.
