# Thinking fictionally about middle powers Let’s accept that international relations (IR) is a drama, or as Mearsheimer would have it, a tragedy. Everyone loves a good story, and of course accepts that the main characters are central and consequential to the outcome, like Huck, Jim, and Tom, in Mark Twain’s _Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_, or Winston, Julia, and Goldman in George Orwell’s _1984_. Who really cares about the side characters—the passing characters—like the Duke and the King in _Huckleberry Finn_, or Tom Parsons, Winston Smith’s neighbor and colleague at the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s in _1984_? They’re just there to add color to the main characters—and so it is with middle powers in international relations, it often seems. Think of the four “required texts” to be read in any international relations course: Morgenthau’s _Politics Among Nations_; Waltz’s _Theory of International Politics_; Keohane’s _After Hegemony_; and Wendt’s _Social Theory of International Politics_; each book represents fundamentally different approaches to international relations—classical realism, structural realism, neoliberal institutionalism and constructivism—and understandably, none make middle powers a central category of analysis. Each text does at times discuss smaller states, and indeed the works of each are readily applied to middle powers—Keohane also spent much time focused on them in earlier works. Yet, in these core texts read by every IR student, there is enormous attention paid to explaining the behavior of a handful of powerful states, while treating the majority of states as secondary actors, structural constraints, or objects of great-power policy. In IR, middle powers are treated as the King and the Duke performing the Royal Nonesuch and getting tarred and feathered, or Tom Parsons being denounced to the Thought Police by his dutiful daughter. Let’s take this analogy just a little further.  In Mark Twain’s _Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_, Huck and Jim come along the King and the Duke who appoint themselves to aristocratic titles and travel from town to town, surviving through deception, improvisation, and increasingly desperate schemes. While with Huck and Jim, they put on a performance of _The Royal Nonesuch_ to briefly win an audience, but their antics eventually catch up with them. They’re exposed, and tarred and feathered, and paraded through the streets. Twain uses the King and the Duke to show that even though two such individuals are, to the reader’s perception, awful, the punishment accorded to them by the townsfolk is worse. In Huck’s narration: “Human beings can be awful cruel to one another.” To most of the audience, Iran occupies the same marginal position in the international order as the King and the Duke in _Huckleberry Finn_. Sanctioned, excluded from much of the international financial system, and denied the privileges of respectable membership, it survives through improvisation, alternative trading networks, and the exploitation of opportunities beyond the established rules. Like the King and the Duke, it insists upon its own importance while the more powerful characters regard it as a nuisance, an outsider, or a villain. And when the punishment comes, in much the same way, the audience should not regard the spectacle as justice, but rather question how human beings can be so cruel. In George Orwell’s _1984_, Tom Parsons is Winston Smith’s neighbor and colleague at the Ministry of Truth, an enthusiastic, unquestioning supporter of Big Brother. He attends Party activities, repeats its slogans, and raises his children to become exemplary little informants. Yet his loyalty counts for nothing when his seven-year-old daughter reports him to the Thought Police for denouncing Big Brother in his sleep. Think Australia and the Fall of Singapore. Arrested and imprisoned, Parsons remains convinced of the Party’s righteousness, praises his daughter for reporting him, and accepts that he must be corrected. Australia plays a comparable role in the American and formerly UK-led international order: a dutiful ally that embraces strategic priorities, integrates its military into command structures, and enthusiastically repeats the language of the rules-based order. Yet, much the same as Parsons, loyalty offers Australia no guarantee of protection. Should American interests change, Australia could find itself abandoned, disciplined, or sacrificed to a larger strategic bargain. Like Parsons, it might even interpret its punishment as evidence that it had failed to demonstrate sufficient loyalty. The tragedy—or perhaps the comedy—is that neither Parsons nor Australia is important enough to determine the fate of the system to which they have devoted themselves. Nobody’s rooting for these side characters. Nobody’s even thinking they’ll hear what happens next to them. Mark Twain leaves us with the King and the Duke tarred and feathered, paraded through the streets on a rail, their ultimate fate unknown and their disappearance of little consequence to the story. George Orwell leaves us with Tom Parsons imprisoned in the Ministry of Love, awaiting punishment for a crime he cannot remember committing, his ultimate fate equally unknown and apparently unworthy of further mention.  Let’s take it a tad further, add a dose of imagination, and wonder what happens. King and Duke are run out of town, scorched, battered and bruised, and left for dead. On the outskirts of town, they run into a neighbor who runs a steel mill, and gives them a job. They join the union, strengthen links to neighbors all across the region, and the King is elected mayor, and Duke, state representative. They arrange for the new railroad to go _around_ the town where they were tarred and feathered, and see their revenge as the town and its inhabitants miss out on all the riches. Iran at the center of a new and transformed West Asia region? Tom Parsons, after years of rebellion occurring only in his dreams, takes action to join the underground resistance to Big Brother. He starts hanging around the proles, infiltrates deeper into the Party, and then one day encourages his fellow workers to rebel, seizing the Ministry of Truth and holding it against the Thought Police. For the first time in his life, Parsons is no longer a bit player in someone else’s story. He tears down the posters of Big Brother, broadcasts the truth across Oceania, and calls upon the proles to rise up. He leads Oceania to declare neutrality and withdraw from the perpetual war with Eurasia and Eastasia, dismantling the machinery of surveillance and repression that had sustained the conflict. Australia stepping away from AUKUS? Okay, that’s probably why literature teaches us that it’s impossible to position secondary or passing characters at the center. To my knowledge, there’s only one book where it’s done really well—and it really does teach us something significant in the context of international relations (tell me if you know others!) In Tom Stoppard’s _Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead_, two minor characters from Shakespeare’s _Hamlet_ become the main protagonists. Stoppard reverses the perspective. The great events of _Hamlet_ continue around them, but the audience experiences the story through these two bewildered minor characters who themselves struggle to understand what is happening. They attempt to exercise agency, but their fate has already been determined by a story in which they are peripheral. The middle-power analogy is almost perfect: great powers direct, while middle powers struggle to understand the plot, improvise responses, and occasionally discover that the script has already committed them to action. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern become the central characters of Stoppard’s play, but they can’t escape their subordinate position in Shakespeare’s tragedy. Middle powers can become protagonists, but they still remain trapped within the original great-power narrative. So even if the King and the Duke end up getting their revenge on the town, and even if Tom Parsons makes good, they’re still playing in a story where the plot is determined by the main characters. Now, this may all be taking liberties, because we know that these characters already have important roles in their respective texts. The King and the Duke allow Twain to expose the gullibility, hypocrisy, and cruelty of supposedly respectable society. Parsons allows Orwell to reveal the absurdity of unquestioning loyalty, where even the most obedient devotee can become its victim. That may well be true, but it certainly can’t stop us from wanting the secondary characters to play a larger role—and it can’t stop us hoping that more attention is paid to them! *** Help a starving writer, or at least a thirsty academic - [Buy Me a Coffee](https://buymeacoffee.com/junotane)! ## Related articles - [[2026-05-11 International relations theory fails middle powers|Trump in Beijing]] - [[2025-09-13 Misunderstanding Seoul in Washington|Misunderstanding Seoul in Washington]] - [[2026-04-30 It's better to have a distant ally than a nearby one?|It's better to have a distant ally than a nearby one?]] - [[2026-04-27 From Trump's nice little excursion to WW3?|From Trump's nice little excursion to WW3?]]