Technology & SocietySeptember 4, 2026

What Middle Powers Can Build — and What They Still Cannot Supply

By Oguzhan Tekin•Back to Blog

Influence Is Not Order

Imagine Canada, Japan, Australia, and several European countries agree on common rules for AI, trade, and maritime security.

The agreement works — until a great power decides it doesn't.

Who imposes the penalty? Who protects shipping routes, supplies military intelligence, provides emergency financing, or absorbs the economic retaliation?

At that point, the problem is no longer writing rules.

It is supplying order.

This distinction matters when reading Margaret MacMillan's New York Times essay, "A New World Order Is Coming. We Aren't Ready."

MacMillan argues that the postwar international system is weakening. The United States is stepping away from institutions and alliances it once supported. Conflicts are multiplying, diplomacy is becoming more performative, and countries can no longer assume that yesterday's arrangements will survive tomorrow.

She is right about the direction of travel.

She is also right that middle powers should not wait passively for the old order to return.

Middle powers are states with substantial economic, diplomatic, and regional influence, but without the ability to provide global military or financial order on their own.

Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea, and many European countries fit this description in different ways. They possess important markets, technology, diplomatic experience, and institutional influence.

But there is a limit that MacMillan's argument risks understating.

Middle powers can influence an international order.

That does not mean they can supply one.

What Makes an Order Work?

International order is often described through institutions, treaties, and shared rules.

Those things matter. But they are only the visible layer.

Underneath them sit harder capabilities.

Someone must deter military aggression, protect trade routes, provide intelligence and logistics, keep markets open, supply emergency liquidity, enforce sanctions, and bear disproportionate costs when other countries contribute less.

Political scientists have debated whether these functions require a dominant power.

Charles Kindleberger argued that the economic collapse of the 1930s became more severe because Britain could no longer stabilize the international economy and the United States was not yet willing to do so. No country was prepared to keep markets open, provide sufficient lending, or act as a financial backstop.

Robert Keohane and Duncan Snidal later challenged the idea that cooperation always requires a hegemon. Institutions can survive after the power that created them begins to decline. Countries can continue cooperating when their interests overlap and institutions reduce uncertainty.

That qualification is important.

But cooperation among willing participants is not the same as enforcing rules against a determined aggressor. Nor is it the same as supplying dollars during a financial panic, defending a distant ally, or accepting casualties when diplomacy fails.

Influence helps determine what countries should do.

Order becomes visible when someone must decide what happens if they refuse.

Canada and the Ottawa Process

The campaign to ban anti-personnel landmines is one of the clearest examples of middle-power leadership.

Traditional arms-control negotiations often moved slowly because they sought agreement among states with very different security interests. Several military powers were unwilling to accept a comprehensive prohibition on landmines.

Canada helped move the process outside those traditional forums.

Working with supportive governments and civil society organizations, it helped organize a coalition willing to proceed without universal agreement. The result was the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty.

This was more than diplomatic symbolism.

The treaty established legal obligations for participating states, shaped international expectations, and strengthened the norm against anti-personnel mines. It demonstrated that a middle power could change the agenda instead of waiting for the strongest states to agree.

But the case also reveals the boundary of that influence.

Several major military powers remained outside the treaty. Canada and its partners could establish a rule for willing participants. They could increase the political cost of rejecting it.

They could not compel every powerful state to join.

The Ottawa Process shows that middle powers can build norms and institutions.

It does not show that they can enforce those norms universally.

Japan and the Rescue of the TPP

Japan demonstrated a different form of leadership after the United States withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership in 2017.

The American withdrawal could have ended the project. The United States had been the agreement's largest economy and one of its principal architects.

Instead, Japan worked with the remaining participants to preserve most of the agreement. The result was the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership.

This was a substantial achievement.

Japan helped prevent years of negotiation from being lost. It preserved common rules governing tariffs, investment, intellectual property, state-owned enterprises, and other areas of trade.

It also showed that middle powers do not always need to wait for Washington.

But the CPTPP replaced American leadership in one trade agreement.

It did not replace the American market. It did not provide a regional military guarantee. It did not replace the dollar, the Federal Reserve, or the US alliance network in the Pacific.

Japan preserved a module of economic order.

It did not replace the wider system in which that module operated.

Suez and the Limits of Peacekeeping

The 1956 Suez crisis provides an even sharper illustration.

After Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal Company, Britain, France, and Israel launched military operations against Egypt.

Britain and France used their Security Council vetoes to block action against their intervention. The crisis therefore exposed a central weakness in the United Nations: the organization responsible for international peace could be paralyzed by the states causing the conflict.

The issue moved to the General Assembly under the "Uniting for Peace" process.

Canadian diplomat Lester B. Pearson helped develop the proposal for a United Nations Emergency Force that could separate the combatants and supervise the ceasefire.

The force was an important institutional innovation. It created space for withdrawal and helped stabilize the area for a decade.

It also became part of Canada's international identity as a peacekeeping middle power.

But the mission depended on consent.

It was not a Chapter VII peace-enforcement operation. It could monitor a ceasefire, separate forces, and reduce the risk of accidental conflict. It could not impose a settlement against a determined great power.

When Egypt withdrew its consent in 1967, the force left.

The Suez case demonstrates what middle powers can do particularly well: design an institution, build legitimacy, and create a workable compromise when larger powers are divided.

It also shows what they cannot do alone.

They can create the mechanism.

They still depend on a wider balance of power to make the mechanism possible.

The Financial Order Is Also a Power Structure

Discussions about international order usually begin with armies and alliances.

Financial power is just as important.

Much of the global economy operates through dollars. Banks outside the United States borrow and lend in dollars. Companies use dollars to settle international transactions. Governments hold dollar reserves. US Treasury securities provide collateral and a place to store large pools of capital.

This system becomes most visible during a crisis.

When dollar funding markets came under pressure during the 2008 financial crisis, the US Federal Reserve supplied dollars to selected foreign central banks through liquidity swap lines. It expanded those arrangements again during the market disruption of 2020.

The foreign central banks then supplied those dollars to financial institutions in their own jurisdictions.

This was not simply cooperation among equal central banks.

The system depended on one institution possessing the unique ability to create the currency everyone needed.

Access was also unequal.

The Bank of Canada, Bank of England, European Central Bank, Bank of Japan, and Swiss National Bank eventually received standing swap arrangements. Other countries received temporary access, relied on their reserves, or turned to the International Monetary Fund.

The system therefore contains a hierarchy.

Countries closest to the centre receive more reliable access to emergency liquidity. Countries farther from it must hold larger reserves, borrow on less favourable terms, or accept conditions attached to outside assistance.

A coalition of middle powers could create regional financing arrangements, expand trade in other currencies, or build alternatives to parts of the dollar system.

What it cannot do quickly is reproduce the combination of deep capital markets, trusted assets, payment networks, central-bank capacity, and global demand that allows the Federal Reserve to act as a dollar backstop.

Financial order is not maintained by declarations.

It is maintained by balance sheets.

The Burden Test

This leads to a practical way of judging any proposed coalition.

Who provides the ships?

Who supplies the intelligence and military logistics?

Who protects members facing economic retaliation?

Who offers emergency financing during a crisis?

Who can create the currency that markets demand?

Who bears the cost when another country contributes less than promised?

And who is prepared to use force if deterrence fails?

A coalition does not need one answer to every question. Different countries can contribute different capabilities.

But someone must provide them.

The European Union is the closest existing approximation to a non-hegemonic provider of regional order.

European states have built a large common market, binding legal institutions, a central bank, trade-negotiating power, competition enforcement, and significant regulatory influence.

This is far more than informal diplomatic coordination.

The EU demonstrates that countries can collectively provide substantial elements of order when they establish common institutions and accept binding obligations.

It also demonstrates the scale of integration required.

The EU has courts, treaties, a common budget, a central bank, and institutions with powers that resemble those of a state. Even then, European security has remained closely connected to NATO and the American military guarantee.

Its economic and regulatory reach is global. Its ability to provide military security or financial backstops beyond Europe is more limited.

The EU therefore reinforces rather than weakens the argument.

Collective order is possible. But it requires deep integration, pooled resources, and credible enforcement — not simply a coalition of countries with similar values.

The Security Council Reveals the Hierarchy

The United Nations Security Council offers another picture of where influence ends and power begins.

Ten members are elected for two-year terms. These countries can negotiate language, chair sanctions committees, introduce regional perspectives, and build coalitions.

Their votes matter.

A substantive resolution requires nine affirmative votes. Even if all five permanent members agree, at least four elected members must support it.

Elected members can therefore prevent adoption by withholding the required votes. They can improve draft language, lead negotiations, and increase the political cost of a veto.

That is real but non-coercive influence.

They cannot override a veto.

Under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, the Security Council can impose binding sanctions and authorize military action. It is the only international body with universal legal authority to adopt such enforcement measures.

That authority remains concentrated in five permanent members: the United States, China, Russia, Britain, and France.

Formally, there are five veto powers.

On the most divisive files, however, voting patterns often cluster around three effective blocking centres: a US-aligned Western grouping consisting of the United States, Britain, and France; China; and Russia.

Britain and France retain independent vetoes and sometimes disagree with Washington.

But the broader alignment is difficult to miss.

I analyzed 2,199 comparable Security Council draft-resolution votes from 1992 through July 2026. The United States, Britain, and France cast the same vote approximately 97.5 percent of the time.

Britain differed from the United States in 48 votes, including 12 direct yes-versus-no disagreements. France differed in 55 votes, including 25 direct disagreements. Many of those divisions concerned Israel and Palestine.

The Western powers also exercise influence before a vote.

Through the informal penholder system, the United States, Britain, and France have traditionally drafted and managed many Security Council resolutions. Elected members may receive a proposal after much of its direction has already been established.

Middle powers can shape the process.

Great powers retain the ability to stop it.

The Old Order Was Not Peaceful for Everyone

There is another reason to be cautious about nostalgia.

The post-1945 order looked most orderly from the countries most securely protected by it.

Western Europe, Canada, Japan, and Australia experienced an extraordinary period of stability and economic growth. The absence of direct war between the United States and the Soviet Union was a historic achievement.

But that was not the same as global peace.

Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, violent decolonization, coups, civil wars, counterinsurgencies, and conflicts across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East continued throughout the period.

The Cold War was cold mainly between the largest powers. It was often very hot elsewhere.

Historian Odd Arne Westad has shown how American and Soviet competition became entangled with revolutions, state formation, and local conflicts across what was then called the Third World.

These wars should not be reduced to superpower competition alone. They had domestic causes, regional actors, and local ambitions.

But they demonstrate that violence under the postwar order was geographically uneven.

That does not mean the system had no value. Its institutions reduced uncertainty, supported reconstruction, expanded trade, and helped prevent direct war among the most powerful states.

The point is narrower.

Some middle powers experienced peace because they lived inside a wider economic and security alignment.

Their peaceful experience does not prove that middle powers were governing the system.

It shows what a functioning alignment allowed them to do.

Mearsheimer and Sachs See the Same Transition Differently

John Mearsheimer's realist interpretation helps explain the limits of middle-power leadership.

Mearsheimer argues that international orders reflect the distribution of power among the strongest states. Institutions matter, but their possibilities are constrained by great-power rivalry, national interests, and the need for survival.

As the unipolar period ends, he expects the global liberal order to weaken. In its place, he anticipates a thinner international order alongside competing regional or "bounded" orders organized around the major powers.

From this perspective, middle powers may gain room to manoeuvre. But their choices will still be shaped by competition among the United States, China, and Russia.

Jeffrey Sachs begins from a similar diagnosis but reaches a different conclusion.

He also argues that the US-led unipolar period is ending. But he sees multipolarity as an opportunity to create a more representative international system rather than simply a return to balance-of-power competition.

Sachs calls for greater reliance on diplomacy and the UN Charter. He argues that international institutions should be reformed to reflect the growing economic and demographic weight of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

His position gives middle and developing powers a larger role than Mearsheimer's realism generally allows.

It also identifies a genuine weakness in the existing order. Institutions created in 1945 no longer reflect the present distribution of population, economic activity, and regional influence.

But Sachs's model faces its own burden test.

Reforming the Security Council requires the consent of the permanent members whose privileges would be diluted. Expanding representation does not automatically create military enforcement, emergency liquidity, or agreement among states with conflicting interests.

A more representative institution may be more legitimate.

It is not automatically more capable.

The challenge is connecting the two.

A sustainable order must recognize the realities of power without treating them as morally sufficient. It must also expand representation without assuming that representation alone can produce enforcement.

Middle Powers Will Remain Middle Powers

MacMillan is right that clinging to the past is not a strategy.

Middle powers should preserve trade agreements, establish technical standards, coordinate AI rules, strengthen supply chains, support peacekeeping, and reduce dependence on any single country.

They can build different coalitions for different problems.

Joint procurement, shared financing, interoperable defense systems, common technology standards, and coordinated responses to economic coercion would make those coalitions more durable.

These are modules of order.

They are valuable because they solve real problems without pretending that one new alliance can immediately replace the full architecture of the old system.

Their influence will probably grow as competition among larger powers intensifies. They will become coalition partners, institutional entrepreneurs, and regional anchors.

But whenever the question becomes enforcement, reserve currencies, nuclear deterrence, global logistics, or emergency finance, the distribution of power reasserts itself — increasingly to withhold order rather than supply it.

Three veto centres that cancel each other out do not provide order.

They deny it.

This does not weaken the case for middle-power coalitions. It sharpens it.

They may not be a lesser substitute for great-power order. They may be the only order anyone is still willing to build.

This is the honest form of the argument.

Order is not one thing that is either supplied or absent. It is a bundle.

Middle powers can provide parts of that bundle — trade rules, technical standards, regional financing, and peacekeeping.

What remains beyond them is the enforcement and monetary core: deterrence, reserve currency, and systemic rescue.

Influence is not order.

But the line between them runs through the bundle, not around it.

What is changing most fundamentally is not the position of middle powers.

It is the distribution of power above them.

The likely future is not a world governed by middle powers. It is a world in which middle powers organize themselves inside a changing balance among the United States, China, Russia, and other emerging centres of power.

Their choices will matter. They may determine which standards survive, which coalitions become viable, and which larger power gains support on a particular issue.

Middle powers do not need to govern the whole system to matter.

The central question is how they will position themselves as the balance among the largest powers changes — and whether they can build enough order below that level to prevent disorder above it from defining everything else.

Method note

The Security Council calculation uses the United Nations Peace and Security Data Hub dataset downloaded on September 4, 2026. The file contained 2,200 draft-resolution records from January 1992 through July 29, 2026. One record without a recorded French vote was excluded, leaving 2,199 comparable votes. "Same vote" means that the United States, Britain, and France were recorded in the same category — yes, no, or abstention. The dataset covers draft resolutions, including adopted and failed drafts, but not procedural votes or proposals withdrawn before voting.

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