Memo to middle powers:
Time for a reality check
Such states need to remember China offers stability but delivers coercion
In Ottawa, Canadian Prime Minister Mark
Carney’s Davos-style message lands as these speeches
are meant to land: optimistic, forward-looking
and reassuring.
In a world supposedly drifting toward multipolarity,
the claim is that countries like Canada, Japan,
Australia, South Korea and much of Europe can
diversify partnerships, keep trade flowing and
avoid being dragged into a great-power brawl.
It is a comforting idea. As strategy, it is incomplete.
Middle powers do not design the system they inhabit.
They can maneuver inside it, but they cannot wish
away the forces that set the boundaries of that
maneuvering. What matters now is less whether
the world is “multipolar” in an academic sense than
whether Washington and Beijing behave as if it is
— and whether Russia’s disruption, often
enabled by its partnership with China,
raises the costs of ambiguity.
On that score, the corridor for states that would prefer
to keep one foot in each camp is narrowing because
both major powers — meaning the U.S. and China
— increasingly test loyalties through technology
rules, export controls, sanctions regimes and security commitments.
Jennifer Lind, a professor of government at Dartmouth
and author of “Sorry States: Apologies in International
Politics,” claims that the system remains effectively
bipolar. She suggests only the U.S. and China cross
the historical threshold for great-power status; others
remain influential but structurally subordinate. If that
is right, “don’t make us choose” becomes less a principle than a plea.
Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center
and columnist at Foreign Policy, warns that Donald
Trump-era unilateralism — tariffs, coercive leverage
and weakened diplomacy — can leave allies unsure
whether the U.S. is friend or foe, and can make China look steadier by comparison.
That anxiety is real. It is also a trap. The more middle
powers read U.S. volatility as permanent decline,
the more they will underinvest in alliance capacity
and overinvest in hedging. That can become self-fulfilling: Washington sees free riding, doubts allied resolve and
becomes still more transactional; Beijing sees hesitation,
increases pressure and raises the price of resistance.
The temptation in Ottawa, Canberra, Tokyo, Seoul
and Brussels is to treat American unpredictability
as a reason to hedge away from U.S. reliance. But
deterrence is not a supply chain. You can diversify
semiconductor inputs; you cannot diversify a security
guarantee on demand. Middle powers can and should
reduce economic exposure to any single market,
including China's. They cannot “de-risk” their
defense architectures from the United States without
paying enormous costs and absorbing levels of
uncertainty their publics are not prepared to price.
Europe’s struggle to rebuild munitions stockpiles
after Ukraine is a reminder that strategic autonomy is a multidecade bill.
Ashley Tellis, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has put forth a critique of India’s grand strategy that is instructive. He argues Washington has
deliberately strengthened India’s capacity, largely because
the U.S. sees a stronger India as useful in balancing China.
Yet even India cannot contain China on its own, and India’s preference for strategic autonomy limits how tightly it will align. The implication for smaller middle powers is blunt: if India
cannot substitute for the U.S. in balancing China, then Canada, Japan, Australia and European states certainly cannot. They may dislike Washington’s volatility but they cannot replace its capabilities, networks and deterrent role.
The rational response is not to pretend the U.S. guarantee can be hedged away. It is to make themselves critical allies
— individually and collectively — so that even a
transactional U.S. administration sees alliance as indispensable. That means measurable defense investment, deployable capabilities, secure supply chains, tighter intelligence
posture and political seriousness about Indo-Pacific and Euro-Atlantic theaters as connected problems.
The counterargument deserves its due. The Trump
administration has practiced a harsh, improvisational
style: tariffs as a first resort; diplomacy that feels like leverage extraction; rhetoric that devalues multilateral institutions.
It is easy to see why Beijing’s pitch — “we are stable,
predictable, open for business” — sounds attractive to export-dependent economies fearing collateral damage in U.S.-China competition.
But the claim that China represents stability for middle powers collapses under scrutiny. Start with narrative control. A Strategic Resilience Group analysis of the Xinhua Institute report “Colonization of the Mind” shows how Beijing increasingly
frames ordinary U.S. public diplomacy as cognitive warfare, blurring scholarly work, broadcasting and NGOs into a single moralized spectrum. The goal is to delegitimize Western
messaging and provide partners a vocabulary to treat
independent media and civil society as hostile capabilities.
Most damning is the track record of Beijing’s coercive diplomacy. A report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute on China’s coercion catalogs 152 cases over a decade affecting 27
countries and the European Union, with a sharp rise since 2018. The methods range from trade restrictions and tourism bans to state-issued threats and arbitrary detention. Beijing often denies coercion while signaling it unmistakably; it uses ambiguity
to keep targets off-balance; and it selects sectors that maximize pain while limiting domestic cost.
Even Chinese analysis sometimes concedes the dilemma.
Yuan Sha of the China Institute of International Studies argues it is rational for Beijing to cultivate good relations with middle
powers to prevent balancing coalitions, yet China repeatedly
ends up in friction due to nationalism and sovereignty
sensitivities. That matters because it suggests that even when Beijing recognizes the logic of reassurance, domestic
incentives can pull it back toward punishment — especially when leaders fear looking weak on issues framed as national dignity.
The Persian parable of the scorpion and the frog comes to mind: The frog agrees to carry the scorpion across a river; halfway through, the scorpion stings; both begin to drown; and the
scorpion explains, “It’s my nature.”
The point is not to reduce China to caricature. It is to
recognize that political systems generate habits
— especially when regime security is fused with national security and criticism is treated as a threat to be neutralized. A state that routinely uses coercion to protect party primacy may present
itself as stable, but its stability is often conditional on others’ compliance. Middle powers that run to Beijing for refuge from Washington’s chaos risk discovering that commercial calm
can flip to punishment once politics intrudes.
None of this implies middle powers can disengage from
China. They cannot; their economies are intertwined.
The choice is between naive engagement and hardened engagement: trading where interests align while reducing single-point dependencies, building collective countercoercion mechanisms and inoculating open societies against influence operations.
Middle powers must stop treating the U.S. alliance as
something to balance against. Their ties with Washington run through technology ecosystems, finance, intelligence sharing and defense industrial cooperation. Even a difficult Washington remains the hub through which much of middle-power security flows. The durable answer to transactional U.S. politics is
to reduce the temptation for Washington to be transactional
— by making allied contributions so concrete and operationally essential that abandonment becomes costlier than commitment.
Yes, America has, at times, treated friends and allies carelessly.
Yet for most middle powers today, the more relevant danger
is not friendship but fantasy — the fantasy that they can outgrow the U.S. as their security underwriter or replace it with Beijing’s promises of “stability” while the Chinese Communist Party
actively reshapes the international order to suit its one-party priorities.
Middle powers thus confront a difficult task: engaging China realistically, strengthening defenses against coercion and positioning themselves as indispensable partners to the United States — while widening strategic cooperation with India
and other capable partners where interests align.
Davos speeches may soothe. Deterrence does not.
