# The 2026 holy middle power month The holy middle power month of September is near ended. Annually, in the ninth month of the year beneath the shadow of the United Nations, we religiously mourn the passing of the middle-power era before furiously whipping ourselves into a frenzy, perform incantations, and bring forth its resurrection. With all due respect to this solemn occasion, it is my duty to put forward three heretical observations. **It’s all rhetoric** First, it is important to recognize that the middle-power concept has three overlapping strands: politics, diplomacy, and academia. Rarely does anyone bother to separate them, and some of our greatest misunderstandings lie precisely in the liminal gutters between each space. Depending on who is speaking, and where, “middle-power diplomacy” can mean just about anything. At the moment, it is in the political gutters that middle-power diplomacy has taken on its most powerful odor. The rhetoric of Prime Minister Carney is just that—an odor letting us know that something has died. Now, that is not to say that what Carney is doing is unimportant. Political rhetoric serves an incredibly important purpose. It rallies, reassures, and gives direction. Faced with a more hostile and uncertain international environment, Canada needs a story about where it stands, what it represents, and how it intends to navigate what comes next. Carney’s middle-power rhetoric provides that story: a national rallying cry around which Canadians can make sense of a changing world and imagine a purposeful place within it. All states need something of this kind, particularly when the assumptions that previously anchored their foreign policy begin to fall away. The mistake is not in producing such rhetoric, but in confusing its political purpose with an analytical description of how the international system actually works. Australia’s Albanese does the same. His language of Australian agency, regional responsibility, and a rules-based order provides Australians with a reassuring account of their place in an uncomfortable and increasingly hostile world. Australia is not merely being buffeted by great-power competition; in this telling, it retains choices, partners, influence, and the capacity to shape its region. Again, there is nothing inherently wrong with this. States need narratives that turn uncertainty into purpose. Middle-power rhetoric performs an important function. It gives these states a vocabulary of agency and identity at moments when the international system is reminding them rather brutally of the limits of their power. The concept, however, means more to countries like Canada and Australia, than it does for Kenya, Iran, Indonesia, or Turkey. Australia and Canada formed their modern international identities around the concept. Turkey. Kenya, Iran, Indonesia, in contrast derive a more distinguishing identity from religion and culture, national struggle, ethnicity and geography, or past glories. The greatest problem comes when the odor from the political gutters begins to seep into the diplomacy smoking room and the academic study. Diplomats begin to see middle power diplomacy as an alternative to working within the international order that surrounds them, as if coordination among similar sized states will allow them to transcend the realities of geography, hierarchy, economic dependence, and great-power competition. Meanwhile, academics start spewing all sorts of shite that is as far from reality as Canberra is from New York. Political slogans and diplomatic aspirations are dressed up as concepts, typologies, and theories, until a convoluted hotpot of gutter swill is published by a senior academic and declared the latest addition to the field. This in turn leads to the next observation. **The 1990s are over** In the 1990s, there were academic papers, conferences, and Track-2 and Track 1.5 conferences—an entire field of studies dedicated to the middle power and from it sprang an ontologically weak and bizarrely circular definition: middle powers were those states that practiced middle-power diplomacy, while middle-power diplomacy was the particular style of diplomacy practiced by middle powers. Unable to say convincingly what a middle power was, the literature increasingly defined the category by what its members supposedly did. For a time, the literature could get away with this because middle-power diplomacy was both a product of, and practiced within, the liberal international order. Multilateralism, coalition-building, institutional activism, niche diplomacy, and the familiar language of good international citizenship all made sense within an order that rewarded precisely those behaviors. The order provided the rules, institutions, and ultimately the great-power backing that made middle-power activism possible. Consequently, it was remarkably easy to mistake a particular diplomatic style enabled by a particular international order for an enduring attribute of a particular class of states. Middle powers appeared to possess agency when, to a considerable extent, they were exercising the agency that the order afforded them. This fact today leaves those expecting middle powers to innovate, lead or restore order, up shit creek without a paddle. It is no longer the 1990s. The amount of information (let alone misinformation and disinformation) that is available today breeds an overarching cynicism in the public when leaders gush over a restoration of rule of law at one moment and then stay stunningly silent on the gravest violations of that very same institution. On the 21 September, Carney and crew came together highlight their [commitment to multilateralism](https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/statements/2026/09/21/joint-commitment-multilateralism-international-law-peace-and): “We reaffirm that the multilateral system founded on the United Nations Charter remains indispensable,” yet two days later, not even crickets could be heard after [President Trump](https://www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2025/09/at-un-president-trump-champions-sovereignty-rejects-globalism/) threatened to “annihilate the Republic of Iran... quickly.” A war of aggression, support for genocide, and a threat to use nuclear weapons—it don’t get any worse than that. How did Carney or Albanese respond? Well, they didn’t. Carney may present himself as the counter-Trump, but what he really wants is a return to the 1990s, when the same power came wrapped in the more palatable language of multilateralism, rules, and international order: A Clintonian humanitarian intervention in Kosovo—ostensibly to halt Serbian repression, but with the broader effect of further dismantling Yugoslavia and diminishing Russian influence in the Balkans—or George W. Bush style search for weapons of mass destruction, with the broader effect of Iraqi regime change and re-ordering the Middle East under American power. The 1990s are over and we’re in a different international order—and it’s here where many commentators are most lost when they talk about middle powers.  **A middle power has to know its limitations** There’s today a powerful strong unwillingness to accept reality. With our heads in the clouds sitting near the top of the pile in the U.S.-led liberal international order during the long 1990s, the air got thin and we all got light-headed. Somehow we started thinking that everything lasts forever—all that it takes is a patch here or a patch there, and everything will return to just how it was. There are three perennial ahistorical truths neglected by most. _1. Middle powers don’t build international orders_ As a Canadian Prime Ministerial [press release](https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/news-releases/2026/09/23/prime-minister-carney-advances-collective-security-climate-and-peace-priorities) put it: “As the international order faces a rupture, Canada is stepping up to build and shape a new one...” Unfortunately, my backwards-looking Canadian friends, that is not what middle powers do. Middle powers do not build international orders and there is not one example in history that suggests they can. After the Second World War, the international order was established and built by the U.S. and U.S.S.R. in recognition of the balance that existed between them and their partner states. A distinct set of middle powers, which were close allies or partners of the great powers benefited from that order; and some benefited even further when it broke down, and was replaced by a unipolar order. Despite their maneuvering and tinkering round the edges, they did not “build” as much as they “benefited.” This is what middle powers do. _2. The international order determines the diplomatic system_ Middle powers have absolutely no capacity to determine the diplomatic system that prevails within an international order—this is determined by the dominant or agreed upon by the set of dominant great powers. This means that the norms for diplomatic practice, ranging from protocol and language use, to geographic locations and negotiation formats, are decided by not by middle powers but by great powers. This means middle powers pushing to fix or restore multilateralism are simply putting their fingers into a hole in the dyke when whole damned dyke is crumbling around them. Initiatives such as Partners for Multilateralism (P4M) launched on the sidelines of the 81st UN General Assembly are at best a stop-gap measure. P4M is like Korean and Vietnamese representatives talking in 1880s Beijing about how to restore tributes to the Qing. The great power supporting the system has all but abandoned it, and the middle powers are now just talking in circles until a new order is determined. The longer they wait, the greater disadvantage they’ll be at in the next order. The only way that multilateralism will survive is if the great powers see it in their interests to let it continue—and this will more than likely require a rebalancing that will not be so favorable for those that benefited in the 1990s. More for Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, the Central Asian states and relatively less for Canada, Australia, and the Nordic states. Get used to it Charlie, it’s already happening and sticking your finger in the dyke ain’t stopping it. _3. Middle powers work within an international order_ If you’re a computer nerd, you’ll enjoy this. Think of the international system as a computer. Great powers operate at the level of the hardware, BIOS, and POST—the basic start-up process through which a computer checks that its essential hardware is present and working before anything else can happen. They establish the underlying architecture, determine what resources are available, and set the basic parameters within which everything else will run. Only after the machine successfully completes this process can the operating system load. Middle powers operate at this level. They can organize the desktop, run programs, establish protocols, connect devices, manage files, and occasionally make the whole machine work considerably better. Given sufficient room, they can even reshape much of the user experience. But they cannot wish incompatible hardware into compatibility or persuade a machine that has failed its basic start-up checks to boot. Their agency is real, but it is downstream from the architecture that makes that agency possible. This is what much of the middle-power literature gets backwards. It observes Canada, Australia, Korea, the Nordics, and others busily running programs during the relatively stable operating environment of the liberal international order and concludes that running programs is itself a source of systemic power. It is not. Coalition-building, institution-building, niche diplomacy, norm entrepreneurship, and multilateralism flourish only after more fundamental questions of order have been settled. When great powers cease agreeing on the architecture, middle powers cannot simply reboot the old operating system through greater diplomatic enthusiasm. At some point, you are clicking furiously on an icon while the machine is still stuck in BIOS. The lesson is simple: middle powers work within systems; they do not determine the systems within which they work. Their success therefore depends less on pretending they can preserve a particular order than on recognizing when the underlying order has changed. The most successful middle powers are not those that cling most faithfully to yesterday’s rules, but those that recognize early that the rules, the players, or even the game itself have changed—and adapt their diplomacy accordingly. **Surviving middle power week** Middle power week is almost over. If you haven’t barfed yet, you have a chance of keeping your last meal down. The faithful gathered in New York, the incantations were recited, multilateralism was reaffirmed, the rules-based order was invoked, and middle-power diplomacy was once again summoned from the dead and walked amongst us. Why Carney’s sermons are labeled “middle power diplomacy”, yet Iran’s actions holding back the world’s most powerful military, transforming its regional security architecture, and building and maintaining a network of regional support, are not considered “middle power diplomacy” astounds me—and it should astound you. We’ve lazily let “middle power diplomacy” become associated with a distinct form liberal-democratic diplomatic behavior from the height of the U.S.-led liberal-international order in the 1990s. That time has passed. We should let the dead remain buried, and return to the land of the living. Only then can middle powers set themselves up for the future. *** Espresso and a donut? - [Buy Me a Coffee](https://buymeacoffee.com/junotane)! ## Related articles - [[2026-10-12 Middle power diplomacy as nationalism|Middle power diplomacy as nationalism]] - [[2026-06-18 The three types of middle power articles|The three types of middle power articles]] - [[2026-05-06 Middle power nostalgia is not a strategy|Middle power nostalgia is not a strategy]] - [[2025-10-23 APEC The curdled yogurt of middle power diplomacy|APEC: The curdled yogurt of middle power diplomacy]]