Middle powers face a new age of uncertainty
Rather than unleashing a new multi-polar era, US retreat has left states scrapping for advantage in an ill-defined order
Alec Russell
© Ann KiernanWhen imperial rulers sound a strategic retreat, their authority tends to crumble faster than they could have imagined — or feared.
The lot of the Soviet Union and apartheid South Africa springs to mind.
Their last leaders Mikhail Gorbachev and FW de Klerk championed reform of their ossified systems confident they would stay in control of the process — only to be swept aside by the forces they had unleashed.
Something similarly convulsive is happening now as America abandons its supervisory role of recent decades.
This is of course a deliberate rather than enforced withdrawal; Donald Trump is not facing Gorbachev’s or de Klerk’s fate of being overtaken by events and bundled from office.
But there is nonetheless a parallel in the breakneck collapse of a long-standing hegemon, in this case over the swaths of the world where the US has long been the dominant superpower.
On paper this is the coming of age moment for the “middle powers”, in particular the powerhouses of the global south who have long been willing on America’s fall from its preachy pedestal.
There are indeed new opportunities, particularly for the unscrupulous.
But the speed with which America has folded its tents has stunned and discombobulated many of its partners, especially in Asia, where the shadow of its rival China looms so large.
For many of the middle powers, the old proverb, “be careful what you wish for”, comes to mind.
As one former south-east Asian official reflected to me recently: “While we wanted this transition to happen, we thought it would be gradually and naturally.
We didn’t appreciate it would be America which would set this in motion.”
American authority and appetite for global leadership were waning before Trump won even his first term in office; it dates back to the financial crisis of 2008, and before that to the calamitous invasion of Iraq.
But Trump’s second inauguration has supercharged this process.
With China not racing to fill the vacuum, this is a prime time for the more entrepreneurial middle powers to pursue their interests.
S Jaishankar, India’s silver-tongued foreign minister, articulated this vision and opportunity in a Lunch with the FT interview this spring.
The shift to a more representative global system had been “a long time coming”, he said, adding that “the virtues of the old order are exaggerated”.
The “rules-based order” was certainly often hypocritical.
Jaishankar’s view resonates in many states in the global south after decades of their having to swallow doses of Washington’s often self-interested geoeconomic medicine.
The theory was that America’s diminishing desire to be the global policeman and the rise of China would liberate middle powers and allow them to pivot between Beijing and Washington.
That may be coming true for some, but others are finding an unhappy parallel with Brexit: freedom from an overarching system is not as straightforward as those encouraging it had hoped.
In south-east Asia, several US allies and partners, including Singapore and Malaysia, have long had to be experts at this balancing act.
In response to Trump’s tariffs, they are among a number of middle powers refashioning their commercial ties; Singapore, for example, says it is opening two new embassies in Africa.
But the accelerated demise of the US-led multilateral system is immensely hard for states whose economies surged off the back of globalisation.
Asked how difficult it is to balance China against America, Malaysia’s former trade minister Tengku Zafrul Aziz says: “It’s more than hard . . . Multilateralism in a multi-polar world is not going to be easy.”
Jaishankar himself warned of the perils of an interim era in his interview, saying there would have to be a successor order which needed to be “more than evolutionary” yet “comfortable and steady”.
If not, he said, “you are looking at a very anarchic world . . . very Hobbesian”.
So is this what is emerging in Trump’s second term?
It is certainly a world ripe with opportunity for the rulers of states with wavering or performative democracies who can merrily do business with America without facing lectures first on the virtues of freedom and transparency.
First prize for adjusting to the tempo of Trump’s casual approach to the world has to go to Pakistan’s military strongman, Field Marshal Asim Munir.
He is the very model of a middle power multi-aligner, skipping from Washington to Beijing, Riyadh to Tehran.
He appreciated early that with Trump, flattery gets you just about anywhere.
All this is much to the frustration of India, which has not indulged Trump and is finding the middle power game is not as easy as it had hoped.
Japan’s erudite former foreign minister, Taro Kono, reflected to the FT recently that this could be a moment for Tokyo to help to build a “bridge” between the global south and America, in a refashioned system.
It’s an admirable initiative not least because after years of orbiting America many middle powers fear they are spinning off in an uncertain trajectory without a guiding force.
But unfortunately for now, outside Europe, an era of the middle powers looks like being largely one of individual states scrapping for advantage in a precarious and ill-defined order.
As Danny Quah, the prominent Singaporean economics professor, says: “If great powers have given us both hope and disappointment, then so too will middle powers first attract but then ultimately fail us.”
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