Rise of the Middle Powers
Who are the adults in the room, in modern politics? And what if those adults want neither a return to American hegemony, nor a multipolar world order?
At the United Nations last week, Finland’s President Stubb gave an inspiring speech that may represent a turning point in the development of a stable world order. I highly encourage you to watch it before reading any further.
A lot of people today are anxious about whether, and how, the world is becoming “multipolar” in its balance of geopolitical power. To me, this signals one of those blind spots I talk about; in this case, it’s the idea that the world has to have “poles” of power at all. If we reframe our idea of “spheres of influence” in the near future to exclude the usual suspects of America, Russia, and China, then a very different set of possibilities emerge, based upon the already-existing framework of multilateralism. For a variety of reasons, I think the imperial projects of the superpowers have had their day. The future belongs to a very different set of players—and we should be happy about that.
The Middle Powers
At the end of the second world war, Britain, the United States, and Russia had the largest armies. These powers agreed with and promoted the creation of a United Nations, conceived of as a multilateral coalition of civilized nations. Unfortunately, these same founding nations used that same institution to continue the project of colonialism under a new name. Four hundred years before, the great powers had carved the world into separate spheres of influence—South America into Spanish and Portuguese sectors, and Africa into French, British, and German zones. The 20th century great power tool for this new partition was the United Nations Security Council. It gave these powers a veto over proposals put forward by any other nation.
The rest of the world was not helpless, nor did we just roll over and accept this new regime. At the end of World War II, Canada had the fourth largest air force in the world, and the 3rd largest navy. Canada is where the term “middle power” originated. The concept was first publicly discussed by Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent when he was pitching Canada’s inclusion in the Security Council. This Canadian term designated a world order not oriented around the superpowers. Middle powers would work together to stabilize trade and diplomatic relations not for hegemony but because of mutual self-interest. Our theory was that a regime of mutual support would benefit the world more than a Leviathan, and this has largely been borne out. Middle powers, while not possessing the biggest armies or economies, are able to act independently and hold considerable sway over regional and even global affairs. Having articulated the idea, Canada led by example to demonstrate how to do this through the remainder of the 20th century. It provided a template other nations could follow; and they are following it. Today countries like Australia and Indonesia publicly adopt the role of middle power.
Just look at the rise of the ASEAN countries. In 2025, Indonesia has a GDP of $3 trillion and an annual growth rate of 5%. The ASEAN group of nations account for around 7.5% of global GDP right now, but that number is only going to go up. These nations are not going to be the helpless victims of climate change creating waves of global migration that are predicted by climate modelers; neither will Africa or, say, Pakistan, which is adopting solar power at a head-spinning rate. The ASEAN are also not going to be satellites of China. They have adopted multilateralism as their diplomatic policy. By 2040, the ASEAN bloc could account for 9% of global GDP, and they will have achieved this by participating in trade and supporting nation-building around the world. Add other middle powers to ASEAN and the future looks bright for multilateralism. Canada, for example, is currently doing more than just shrugging off Trump’s tariffs. We’re using them as a spur to build new trade and political relationships in Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa, at an unprecedented rate, and to spend $100+ billion at home to build what you might call “Canada 2.0.”
There are plenty of examples of successful multilateral agreements on the global level. They’re usually not glamorous; but then, they’re not intended to be. Take the Montreal Protocol on the banning of ozone-damaging CFCs. Right now, the quintessentially multilateral High Seas Treaty is inching its way towards ratification. Such treaties and agreements don’t necessarily go through the UN, but it can be a powerful tool to promote them. What often stands in the way of ratification in the General Assembly is not disagreement among the member nations, but a clash between a proposal and the interests of one of 1945’s great powers, who hold veto power.
In the power vacuum left by America’s abdication of leadership and Russia’s self-immolation in Ukraine, what’s left is not chaos, but the UN doing the job it was created to do—and the middle powers keeping things steady as it does. But the Security Council veto is a thorn in the side of a truly global democratic process.
Defanging the Veto
The United Nations has not outlived its usefulness; on the contrary, its importance only continues to grow. I think the best days of multilateralism lie ahead of us. What has outlived its value is the UN Security Council, at least in its current configuration. Reforming the Council could become the most historically important advance for global democracy since Parliament’s restraint of the powers of the English Kings. It would tip control away from the superpowers, and into the hands of the global majority. The erstwhile superpowers would still have tremendous influence over this majority, but a second layer of influence, which already exists, could come to the fore: the middle powers.
But how could the UN take away the core Security Council members’ veto? Nobody relinquishes power willingly, and the veto confers tremendous clout. Any amendment to the UN Charter to remove the veto would itself be vetoed.
If you live in the US or Russia you can be forgiven for believing that power can only be relinquished through revolution. That’s how history played out in those two countries, at least until fall of the Soviet Union. In contrast, according to the World Population Review, I live in one of the three “full democracies” in the Americas (the others are Costa Rica and Uruguay). Canada didn’t revolt to gain our freedom and become a fully democratic nation. Instead, we negotiated our way to it, over many decades.
The UN can be reformed without revising its charter. Various ways of doing this have been proposed; I like the one talked about in this Carnegie Endowment article. They call their approach “nonamendment reform.” It involves systematically reinterpreting the charter, through a series of steps each of which requires a 2/3 majority vote by the General Assembly. Although he didn’t name this process in particular, I believe this is what Finland’s President Stubb has in mind. His speech is out there now; it can’t be taken back. The idea has been floated to the General Assembly that the Security Council must be restrained. This is every bit as consequential as the idea that Parliament must restrain the power of the king was, in the 1600s.
Like that reform, this one is not going to happen overnight. Expect decades of wrangling. But there’s an inevitability to it now, because in their own ways, America, Russia and, yes, China as well, are on the wane. —Not because their power or wealth are decreasing, but because the power and wealth of the rest of the world is increasing.
This is neither a net loss for civilization nor the harbinger of an era of unrest. On the contrary, with the middle powers steering the ship, we can see calm seas ahead.
The Triumph of the Middle
The narrative of collapsing American power usually ends with China rushing in to fill a perceived power vacuum. The Chinese themselves seem to have read and bought into this narrative. But it’s not going to work out that way, because in twenty years there won’t be a power vacuum for China, or any other superpower, to fill.
This is a time to celebrate. The global rise of the far-right might seem to threaten the creation of some Orwellian version of EastAsia and Oceania. But that would be bad for business, and the middle powers know it. The erstwhile superpowers may continue to play the Great Game for decades to come, but while they do, the middle powers will be quietly running the place, and to do that they have to be cooperative, stable, and abide by the rule of law. The principle of multilateralism is that we work together for mutual prosperity, and it’s a far more powerful organizational principle and wealth-generator than conquest or economic strangleholds. Expect those nations that continue to practice it to flourish, while those that take isolationist, exceptionalist, or imperialist strategies shrink by comparison.
Once we restrain the Security Council, the rest of the planet can get on with the business of getting rich while solving our ecological crises. It’s already happening. Expect the trend to accelerate in coming years, perhaps invisibly while hand-waving showmen like Trump and Putin try to keep our attention somewhere else.
President Stubb just said the quiet part out loud. The best possible outcome is that Putin, Trump, and Xi didn’t notice.
Because believe me, the rest of the world did.
—K
The middle and smaller nations sense the sentiments by organizing outside starting with BRICS, the SCO and other such engagements. In part, that is what happened when the US backed out of the Transpacific Partnership because it did not have a veto. That org then reformed as the CPTPP. These are economic orgs but they formed from the sense as articulated in the Finish Presidents speech.
Karl echos the President's sensibilities but strongly emphasizes the time for "wrangling a workable way forward when the numerous planetary crises from food, fuel and climate are facing us today. If one looks at the UNFCCC and other UN related documents such as the Paris Agreement, the persiflage outweighs the commitment to action
As we know, there spectrum of those which echo the sentiments here, Canada, Costa Rica, Uruguay, New Zealand... but there is no means to catalyzing or coalesce actionable efforts in the face of the transactional sentiments today.
What makes me think this is the most likely future is looking at the situation through David Ronfeldt's TIMN social forms framework. A cooperative middle powers rise would represent a rise of his +N Networks form at the International level. Instead of international relations being dominated by a win-lose +M Market of competing superpowers, we get a stable +M+N competitive/cooperative system dominated by middle states leveraging each other up. We can double check this by looking through the S-curve development lens, noting that the superpowers have reached their apex and have nowhere to go but down, whereas the middle countries show obvious signs of rusing across the board, as you pointed out. Personally, I like the idea that America could eventually lay down the burden of being a superpower in the current world system. I hope we can overcome the obstacles to that future and sanely catch up to our middle bretheren as trustworthy members of the global community