Middle-Power Multilateralism In A Hard Power World

There are two divergent takes on the lessons derived from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine four years ago, and America’s interventions in Venezuela and in Iran (along with Israel). One take is that only hard power matters. The other is that building a rules-based “middle power multilateralism” is the only imperfect alternative to a world order where might makes right.

Hard Power Realism

Hard-power realism is the mindset of the Great Power rulers. The actions of Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S President Donald Trump merely confirm Chinese President Xi Jinping’s like-minded inclination, long ago voiced by Mao: Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

In this perspective, only deluded soft-minded liberals don’t get that this is how the world works. As top Trump aide Stephen Miller recently put it: “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.”

When hard power matters most, the robust build-up of military and technological capacities takes on a symbiotic reciprocity vis-à-vis rivals driven by the fear of losing  advantage. Each is compelled to follow the Golden Rule in reverse: Be prepared to do unto others what you suspect they might do unto you.

The quest for AI dominance between China and the U.S. follows this logic.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp has castigated his Silicon Valley compatriots for wasting their talents on post-modern frivolities like video games when they should be working to achieve technological superiority over China to fend off the defeat of Western civilization. Conversely, Zheng Yongnian, a leading intellectual influential with the Chinese leadership, was recently asked whether AI development in his country was anything more than “modern-day fireworks,” a reference to the popular view that China used the gunpowder it invented to have fun while the West used it to arm its imperial adventures.

“For China, self-reliance and self-strengthening remain key — as we often say, ‘to forge iron, one must be strong oneself,’” Zheng responded. “Relations with the United States must be built on a foundation of strength to have any real meaning.”

Middle Power Multilateralism

The alternative take is that the defection of the Great Powers from a global rules-based order that protected the interests of smaller nations is a historic “rupture” that puts the security and prosperity of these smaller nations at risk. Only the self-construction of middle power multilateralism — which would include Europe, Canada, Japan and Australia as well as “global South” nations such as India and Brazil, among others — can provide a counterweight for those who must make their way between what Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney calls the “hyper-scalers and hegemons.”

This mindset has been more fully articulated in recent weeks by both Carney and Finnish President Alex Stubb, who has emerged as something of a geopolitical sage for Europe.

Post-Rupture World

Speaking to the Australian parliament in early March after visits to China and India, Carney added meat to the bones of his famous Davos speech. He used the occasion to illustrate how two middle powers can join with others of similar stature to reclaim control of their fate.

“The question today for middle powers like us is whether we establish the conventions and help write the new rules that will determine our security and prosperity — or let the hegemons dictate outcomes,” Carney declared.

“Canada is choosing to create a dense web of connections to build our resilience,” he continued. “We’ve adopted a new framework for engaging the world — variable geometry — creating different coalitions for different issues based on common values and interests for those issues.

“This is not a retreat from multilateralism. It is its evolution. And to be clear, Canada’s support for the United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions, the multilateral system is unwavering. But while we are committed to reforms of these institutions in order to better reflect today’s world, we need coalitions now to address immediate challenges. And as those coalitions work, they will help demonstrate the power of multilateralism and reinvigorate it.

“The fact is, right now, many countries are concluding that they must develop greater strategic autonomy. And this impulse is understandable. When the rules no longer protect you, you must defend yourself. A country that can’t feed itself, fuel itself or defend itself has few options.”

“Be prepared to do unto others what you suspect they might do unto you.”

Sovereignty in the 21st century, Carney observed, requires “reliable access to space-based communications and storage, vaccines, semiconductors, payment systems and capital.

“Because governments and businesses went for decades prioritizing efficiency over resilience, we’ve developed supply chains and trading relationships that create dependencies on the great powers, sometimes even individual corporations, all of these affecting essential elements of our sovereignty. And as that integration is weaponized, this creates fundamental vulnerabilities.

“In response, Canada’s strategic imperative is to build sovereign capabilities in these critical sectors — at home and in coalition with trusted, reliable partners — to ensure that integration is never again the source of our subordination.”

Carney went on to give concrete examples of what middle-power multilateralism might look like, using the Australian and Canadian relationship as a case in point.

He argued that the collaboration of Australia and Canada, both “mineral and mining superpowers,” would “boost investments, accelerate technological cooperation, enhance supply chain resilience, expand our domestic processing abilities, and [serve] to reinforce each of our strategic autonomy.” Together, these two nations, Carney noted, hold significant reserves of elements, like lithium, which are critical to the high-tech economy as well as iron ore and other vital resources.

On defense, both countries are building capabilities, “so the next generation of drones, surveillance aircraft, cyber and artificial intelligence are created in Adelaide and Alberta. Canada has just announced our first ever defense industrial strategy. It will catalyze half-a-trillion dollars of investment in our security and resilience over the course of the next decade.” Canada and Australia are already cooperating on “world-leading over-the-horizon radar, and we’re actively exploring new opportunities to protect our vast territories together,” Carney noted.

Both nations, he added, are “core members of the coalition of the willing,” steadfast in the defense of Ukraine against Russian aggression.

“As AI begins to transform our economies and our lives,” Carney continued, “strategic autonomy will require sovereign intelligence infrastructure, including secure clouds, data, LLM models, enterprise applications … We know we must work with others who share our values to build sovereign AI capabilities.” To do so, he said that Canada is working with the “like-minded nations in Europe” and launching a “trilateral AI initiative” with India and Australia.

To work around American tariffs, Canada and Australia are championing efforts to build a bridge between the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the European Union. Canada is already a member of both. “The value of this is a global public good because this is a bloc of one-and-a-half billion people grounded in common standards, shared values, and is capable of anchoring a new rules-based trading system even as the old one falters.

“This is an ad hoc coalition, variable geometry, of middle powers that has a larger GDP than the United States, three times the trade flow of China, the largest combined financial balance sheets in the world, over 60 of the world’s top universities, and the largest source of cultural exports globally.”

Finally, Carney, a former central banker, worries that “over the past two decades access to capital has been weaponized” as a new era of global financial volatility is on the horizon. Their sound banking systems and “reliable financial infrastructure” give Australia and Canada “the ability to sustain openness and cross-border capital flows. Our pension funds and [Australia’s] superannuation funds constitute one of the largest, soon to be the largest, pools of capital in the world at present, nearly $7 trillion under management.”

A Reinvigorated Rules-Based Order Runs Through The Global South

At the Raisina Dialogue in New Delhi earlier this month, Stubb laid out a complementary vision to Carney’s for an audience that included Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

“We hear assessments that the rules-based world order is dead, that a wrecking ball is destroying all of the international institutions and rules that have been built since World War II, and that the rupture of the old system is inevitable,” Stubb began his remarks. “But I would argue against a binary ‘everything is lost’ kind of a view. I think the reality is actually much more complex.

“The fact that the rules are broken does not make the whole system null and void, any more than someone getting caught for speeding makes speed limits irrelevant. If we give up on international rules, the current world order would collapse, but we are far from that.”

As the conflicts from Ukraine to the Middle East are “incrementally becoming global,” the urgent aim, he argued, “is to try to find a pathway back to an international order in which institutions, norms and rules are respected. Without a functioning world order, power vacuums will be filled by raw power, rogue behavior and predatory hegemons.”

“Without a functioning world order, power vacuums will be filled by raw power, rogue behavior and predatory hegemons.”

For this visionary statesman from a tiny Nordic state at the tip of Europe, the “pathway back to an international order” runs through India. That pathway doesn’t abandon the damaged system of global governance but reinvigorates it by updating it to reflect the world as it is today, not as it was in 1945, while upholding the principles of the UN charter that prohibit the use of force and respect sovereignty and the rule of law.

For Stubb, the present breakdown is due not only to the unilateral adventures of the Great Powers but also to the failure of legacy multilateral institutions to incorporate the interests of the global South.

“I believe that the Global South will decide what the next world order will look like,” he declared flat out. “And India, as a major power, will be a major — if not the — force in deciding whether the world will tilt toward conflictual multipolarity characterized by deals, transactions and spheres of interests, or whether the world will tilt toward a new cooperative, fair and representative multilateral world order based on international institutions, rules and norms. The policy choices that India and other key powers make truly matter in this time of transition. They will set the direction of the future.

“The global power balance has shifted. The Global South has both demography and economy on its side.” India has “growth rates of 7%, probably projecting all the way to 2047,” Stubb noted, “and at the same time, it’s the biggest democracy in the world. The era of a Western-dominated world is over. That’s the disruption.”

For Stubb, India has lessons for the other middle powers that echo Carney’s prescriptions. “For your entire independence,” he pronounced to Modi and the other gathered dignitaries, “you have based your foreign policy on a pragmatic and realistic worldview. You’ve showed the rest of the world what strategic caution and safeguarding autonomy means, all the while championing multilateralism and global cooperation. It is time that we all became a little bit more Indian.

“Whether you call it non-alignment or multi-alignment, you’ve been careful not to rely solely on the goodwill of one partner or bloc. You have invested in your own security and actively developed partnerships in many directions. Your approach makes sense.” 

Stubb’s practical proposals include creating two permanent seats for Asia, one of which would be held by India, plus two for Africa and one for Latin America on the UN Security Council. Equally, he says, the Bretton Woods institutions should be reformed. The countries that shape the future of the world economy should have a greater say.

In his vision, the World Trade Organization should also be reformed since “the current rules-based trade system is not delivering as it should, and trade is being wielded as a geopolitical tool, an instrument of power. In this area, India’s leadership is needed.”

Stubb further argues for creating rules and norms that address new realities that “bring stability but allow for diversity,” especially with respect to AI regulation.

For that, common basic rules and guardrails are needed so new technologies don’t deepen the digital divide between the developed and the developing world but bridge it. India, says Stubb, is both a driver and a bridge of AI and technology. “AI will only benefit the world when it is shared,” as Modi posited at the recent AI summit in Delhi.

Finally, Stubb calls for a kind of subsidiarity that relies on regional solutions where possible while developing joint international institutions.

“These two layers, local and global, can live side by side. For international institutions to survive, we need to strengthen regional integration globally. Mercosur, ASEAN, the African Union, the Gulf Cooperation Council, and the EU, and many others are examples of organizations which are good at dealing with regional challenges. Regional organizations are at their best when they support the multilateral system and amplify the voices of their members in the international arena.”

The way to jumpstart this reinvigorated pathway, argues Stubb, would be a “new San Francisco moment,” as in 1945, to refound the United Nations and “get things back on track and rebalance the world order.”

For the moment, the best that can be hoped for is that hard-power realism and middle-power multilateralism will live side by side, more in coexistence than in competition or confrontation.

The great concern is that the insecurities, miscalculations or purposeful aggressions of the hard-power jungle could well stumble into a world war that, despite all the rules-based multilateralism among the middle powers, they would not be able to stop or resist being drawn into.

The present war in Iran is a perfect example of just how easily this can happen.