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Can the middle hold? Australian middle power diplomacy in a ruptured world order
Middle powers stand a better chance of resisting great power pressure, including being strong-armed into misguided ventures, if they stand together. A number of them did so in 2026 over the Iran war and Trump’s Board of Peace. They will not stand together over Taiwan, and Australian policy should be built on that distinction rather than around it.
Greater collaboration among middle powers is not a panacea. Many problems cannot be resolved without the great powers, whose actions and mistakes have an inevitably large impact. Amplified middle power diplomacy involves working with, around, and sometimes against them, both explicitly and implicitly.
For Australia, this means adopting a tough-minded approach to our relationship with the United States. The alliance will remain a cornerstone of Australia’s international settings, but Canberra should be prepared to say no more often. It should not be bullied or cajoled into making false, binary choices.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2026 has become a leitmotif of our times. He declared that the world was experiencing a rupture and pronounced the international rules-based order dead. The great powers had abandoned even the pretence of rules and values in the unhindered pursuit of their own interests, he said. As a result, there is “a strong tendency for [other] countries to go along to get along, to accommodate, to avoid trouble, to hope that compliance will buy safety”. If they negotiated with a hegemon only bilaterally, they would always do so from a position of weakness.
Yet Carney maintained that middle powers were not powerless and proposed an alternative way forward: they should form “different coalitions for different issues based on common values and interests” to hedge against uncertainty, buy insurance, increase their options, and chart a third path to withstand pressure. This risk management came at a price, he posited, but the cost could be shared by middle powers. “Collective investments in resilience are cheaper than everyone building their own fortresses.” In taking such a course, middle powers could be both principled and pragmatic, staying true to their values but recognising that progress would be incremental. In the long run, they would forge “a new order” based on “institutions and agreements that function as described”.
Carney recognises that the great power misbehaviour he describes is not new: “the strongest” have long exempted themselves from the rules “when convenient”, enforced trade rules “asymmetrically”, and applied international law “with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim”. He is also correct that many of the structures Australia and other middle powers have relied on for decades, such as the United Nations, are in danger.
Parts of this world order are being dismantled. China and Russia have been eroding aspects of the multilateral system for years, though they both want to preserve structures that privilege them, such as their veto powers as permanent members of the UN Security Council. But they represent different challenges. In a quest to reclaim parts of a fallen empire, Russia has invaded two of its neighbours, first Georgia and then Ukraine. The full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 abrogated key principles in the UN Charter, notably the sovereign equality of all states, the non-use of force, and the peaceful settlement of disputes. Vladimir Putin is also working to undermine NATO, a cornerstone of the US alliance system — an endeavour in which he has at times found an accomplice in Donald Trump.
Understanding China’s objectives and methods is clouded by the tendency for many commentators, including in Australia, to take unnuanced, polarised positions. Some blithely dismiss suggestions that we should be concerned about China, while others reach overly dire, even alarmist, conclusions, deploying Cold War language about fifth columns and red alerts.
Unsurprisingly, the reality falls in between. China is playing a complex game, which pulls to some extent in different directions. Given the scale of its domestic challenges, it craves stability in the international system. Unlike Russia, it has not invaded a neighbour, at least not yet. Again, unlike Russia, which happily plays a spoiling role in the United Nations, China wants to remake the international system from within by repurposing some of its institutions rather than pulling them down. But its commitment to the multilateral system has always only been partial. It refuses, for instance, to adopt the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) or join the International Criminal Court (ICC).
And hard facts lie behind Beijing’s flowery rhetoric about peace, “common development for a new future”, a multipolar world, and “openness and inclusiveness”. Under Xi Jinping, China has become more repressive at home and more muscular internationally, engaging in a rapid, comprehensive, and non-transparent military build-up, including in the nuclear sphere, and threatening Taiwan. Its bullying behaviour in the South and East China seas remains unabated. One of Australia’s most astute China analysts, Graham Fletcher, who served in our embassy in Beijing four times, first in 1986 and finally as ambassador between 2019 and 2023, is clear-sighted about China’s endgame:
China plainly wants to win, in everything, and displace (if not actually replace) the United States from its global leadership role … It is unembarrassed about exploiting bilateral leverage, linking economic carrots and sticks to political demands … In the past, China exerted pressure mainly behind closed doors, but is now less subtle … Compromise is seen as the last resort rather than a fair and worthwhile objective.
Yet, as Fletcher knows, China is not trying to overturn the world order. Indeed, it is managing to cast itself as a source of stability, cloaking some of its more assertive and disruptive activities. Like Russia, it has found a careless accomplice in this endeavour in the White House.
Carney’s Davos speech went viral because he had another unnamed hegemon front of mind — Donald Trump — when he maintained that the international system is rupturing. If the international rules-based order is experiencing a crisis, it is one manufactured principally in Washington.
For all its faults and hypocrisy, the United States invested in the post-war global order for decades, believing this would make it wealthier and more secure. Trump has discarded that worldview, charging that the United States was being ripped off. True, the United States expended considerable resources upholding the post-war order, but it did not do so out of altruism. It did so because the post-war order served its national interests. The United Nations gave every nation on Earth a voice, but it also established the United States as a permanent member of the Security Council with a veto. NATO protected Western European states, but it also reinforced American strategic power.
Yet American backing for the international post-war order has never been wholly consistent. Rather, exceptionalism and a sense of manifest destiny are deeply rooted in American political culture. These have taken different forms over the decades, sometimes benign and sometimes destructive. Animated by a belief that international rules apply to other countries but not the United States, some US presidents have scorned parts of the multilateral system that was forged after the Second World War. George W. Bush withdrew from the Kyoto climate change protocol, refused to join the ICC, snubbed the UN Human Rights Council, and waged an ill-fated war in Iraq on faulty or juiced-up intelligence, with dreadful long-term consequences for the Middle East.
But Trump represents a different kind of rupture. Bush never savaged US allies, nor did he reject the United Nations in toto. Indeed, his administration mounted its case for invading Iraq in the Security Council. Trump has, by contrast, assaulted the post-war order in a much more wide-ranging manner. Even a partial list of his destructive decisions over the past 20 months, often made for capricious, vengeful, or ruthlessly transactional reasons, is dizzying: punitive unilateral tariffs; gutting the US aid program, leaving millions around the world in desperate circumstances; withholding funds from the United Nations, imperilling its basic operations; withdrawing from 66 international bodies and agreements; ignoring the rules of war and breaching international law; launching a concerted campaign to dismantle the ICC; and threatening to make Canada the 51st state of the United States, annex Greenland, and leave NATO. The disastrous Iran war, launched without a coherent plan, an exit strategy, or consultation with US allies aside from Israel, has upended the Middle East, left a brutal regime in place, and damaged the global economy. The political scientist Francis Fukuyama summed up the cumulative impact: “There has never been a time when the United States was more distrusted, by both traditional friends and by rivals, as at the present.”
If Carney is right about the brutish conduct of the great powers, his speech contains an odd contradiction for an avowed multilateralist. He maintains that the rules-based order is both “a pleasant fiction” and something that provides “open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes”. But it cannot be both. The assault on the multilateral rules-based order is so significant precisely because it was not and still is not a fiction. The United Nations has given middle-ranking and smaller countries a voice in global affairs for decades and overseen the conclusion of 560 major multilateral instruments and foundational declarations such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. UN peacekeeping operations have played a crucial role, including in our own region in Cambodia (1992–93) and East Timor (1999–2002).
Today’s multilateral system presents an uneven picture. Some areas have been sclerotic for years, yet the United Nations retains unmatched convening power. It also delivers vital public goods daily: food, health care, and shelter for people in dire need; and the systems that keep global transport, patents and technical standards, telecommunications, and meteorological services functioning. If the United Nations did not exist, we would have to invent it — warts and unavoidable compromises included.
Norms matter because they set global benchmarks and expectations, not because they are always observed. Some countries flagrantly ignore them, while others hedge. What counts is that a majority of UN member states remain willing to support certain standards and processes. The Human Rights Council has not stopped abuses, but the world would be a much darker place without its work upholding universal rights and exposing abuses of those rights. The same is true of the WTO: 72 per cent of global merchandise trade still runs on the most-favoured-nation principle enshrined in the organisation’s rules, and countries continue to negotiate bilateral agreements in line with it.
In the face of these challenges, with the great powers flexing their muscles in ways that undermine the rules-based order, is middle power diplomacy a viable solution?
Some commentators, both at home and abroad, would have Australia double down on its alliance with the United States rather than commit more effort and resources to middle power diplomacy. Former prime minister Tony Abbott argues that Carney’s talk about middle power diplomacy is “no more than a rhetorical cop out to cover the green left’s phobia against having, and if needs be, using the force that’s vital to support our national values and interests”. Abbott argues we should have committed military assets to Trump’s attack on Iran, just as we did in Korea, Vietnam, the two Gulf wars, and Afghanistan, in the cause of “making the world safer for free peoples everywhere”.
The American political scientist Michael Beckley argues that the middle in global affairs is “a minefield”, not “an open marketplace”. The à la carte order imagined by some scholars — in which middle powers take security from one great power, technology from another, and market access from a third — does not exist. He dismisses what he calls “coalition shopping”, and the summitry that goes with it, as “symbolism instead of strategy”. Against a backdrop of hardening US–China rivalry, he concludes, middle power free will is “a fantasy”. In this dark world, hedging comes to look like betrayal, and middle powers must choose which great power to align with.
The US Under Secretary of War for Policy, Elbridge Colby, gave a similar take in Manila in August this year. Dismissing what he called “liberal shibboleths” and “the panjandrums of the global elite”, he rejected “the delusion of fashionable but superficial ideas like middle power alliances designed to exclude the United States”. Declarations by middle powers that they will build a new type of aircraft or launch a new maritime security framework should be judged, he argued, by whether they delivered. Fair enough. Concrete results always matter and nice but empty announcements will not advance the interests of a middle power like Australia.
But Colby offered a stark US-centric point of view: you are either with us or against us. His framing does not admit the possibility that middle powers can sensibly opt to prosecute their interests through various formats that are designed to sometimes work around and sometimes work with the United States. Some of his claims ring hollow. He contended that the Trump administration’s foreign policy is based on a combination of “hard-nosed” realism and a willingness to speak “softly” or “quietly”. Yet it is telling that he did not mention the elephant in the room: the disastrous war of choice against Iran that has resulted in reams of hot rhetoric and depleted US munitions, and drawn US military assets away from the Indo-Pacific. There is nothing hard-nosed or quiet about this. And South Korea has discovered what Colby’s promise of respectful partnerships with sovereign states means if you step out of line. Annoyed that Seoul has declined to participate in the conflict with Iran, Trump curtailed joint military exercises just a week after Colby spoke in Manila. He again praised Kim Jong Un, a brutal dictator who continues to build nuclear weapons, saying North Korea had been “unthreatening and respectful” towards his administration.
Recent developments give ample reason to pause and reflect, but the way forward propounded by Abbott, Beckley, and Colby misreads the complexity of the international system, narrows Australia’s options in a self-harming manner, and implies that we must make false binary choices.
Managing Australia’s foreign relations always entails choices. But those choices should not be reflexive, automatic, or grounded in a priori assumptions. They should weigh changing circumstances and take the wide view. Australia will often still choose the United States for sound national interest reasons. Some commentators argue, however, that it should abandon the alliance altogether. That, too, is a false binary choice. The challenge is to stay nimble and clear-sighted about where the balance lies.
Australia’s foreign policy choices are always shaped by global power dynamics. The great powers can maintain or destabilise the strategic balance, as the US conflict with Iran and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have graphically demonstrated.
Those powers also remain critical to tackling major international challenges. They can make or break a negotiation, or undercut a deal once done. They have rebuffed, for instance, arms control measures, including those regulating landmines and conventional weapons. Even so, norms have held without them. It matters that more than 160 states signed the Ottawa Convention. But it also matters that five European states that share a border with Russia have withdrawn from the Convention in the past two years, in the face of mounting Russian aggression. Norms are not fictions, but nor are they self-enforcing, and their maintenance is precisely the kind of unglamorous work middle powers are left to do.
A durable and comprehensive international climate deal is impossible without the United States, but that does not stop other countries working on the technical issues in the meantime. Such work will be vital if a future US administration re-engages. And significant multilateral accords are still possible in Washington’s absence, especially if another great power lends its weight. In May 2025, China joined Australia and 122 other countries in backing the World Health Organization’s Pandemic Agreement. Russia abstained, and the United States, having announced its withdrawal from the organisation, did not vote.
The great powers are not invincible. According to one assessment, the geopolitical influence of China and the United States has plateaued since 2015, in part because the global order has become more dispersed and fragmented. Hubris and over-reach also ensnare them. After four and a half years of grinding war, Russia has failed to defeat its much smaller neighbour, Ukraine, advancing as little as 15 metres a day at dreadful cost. British intelligence estimated almost 500,000 Russian soldiers dead by May 2026; CSIS puts total casualties near 1.4 million. An already shaky Russian economy is deteriorating further as Ukrainian drones strike deep inside Russia, destroying infrastructure, military installations, and energy supplies. The budget deficit (US$83 billion in the year to May), inflation (6.3 per cent in August), and bankruptcies are soaring. The banking system is buckling and one of the world’s largest oil exporters is now importing petrol.
By many measures, the United States remains the most powerful country in the world. As Beckley notes, the US dollar dominates global finance, US firms supply roughly half of global venture capital, and the US consumer market is bigger than the next seven combined. Yet other data tell a different story. The national debt will soon hit US$41 trillion (126 per cent of GDP), inequality is deepening (the bottom 50 per cent of the population hold only 2.5 per cent of overall net wealth), and life expectancy lags 3.7 years behind other developed countries. More tellingly, despite the application of massive force at an eye-watering cost (US$113.3 billion during the first 108 days of Operation Epic Fury), the globe’s most advanced military power has not achieved its objectives in Iran.
Two great powers have been unable to bring two middle powers to heel.
China has prodigious economic and military strength, but it confronts serious domestic problems: an unbalanced economy with weak domestic demand, soaring corporate debt, a property market meltdown, a rapidly ageing population, and a shrinking workforce. According to the World Bank, by 2050, there will be 160 million fewer Chinese than today and 52 per cent of the population will be dependent. China has also discovered that maintaining its footprint in the South China Sea is arduous. In 2025, it deployed between 200 and 300 coast guard and maritime militia vessels there at considerable expense. Perhaps, as Rory Medcalf has posited, Chinese power has already peaked. And watching Russia and the United States become bogged down in Ukraine and Iran has given China’s President Xi Jinping reason to pause over Taiwan.
None of this makes great powers weak. It makes them less capable than they appear, and that gap is where middle powers have room to work.
Some commentators, responding to Mark Carney’s speech, have suggested that middle powers might counter-balance the great powers and build a new order. Tobias Ellwood, a former British soldier and Conservative MP, has even spoken about middle powers forming “a stability alliance”. Such contentions reach too far. Middle powers have no desire to become a collective hegemon, and even where burden-sharing and coordination are strong, they must still reckon with the great powers. Their combined weight can constrain only so far; they cannot stop unilateral action, as Russia in Ukraine and the United States in the Middle East have shown. And despite Trump’s antics, the United States remains vital in a positive sense: a strategic balance in the Indo-Pacific is impossible without American power.
Still, middle power diplomacy deserves a larger place in how Australia conceptualises its foreign policy. In Fear of Abandonment, Allan Gyngell delineated the three pillars of Australia’s approach to the world since 1942: a close relationship with what Robert Menzies called “our great and powerful friends”; engaging and shaping our own region; and supporting and making good use of the international rules-based order. We should now add a fourth: middle power diplomacy, understood as both a way of working — through coalitions rather than alone — and a basis for deciding whose company we keep in pursuing our interests.
The weighting between these four elements has shifted over the decades, though the first has been the strongest. Here, Australia’s history and geography have played a powerful role. Gyngell encapsulated this well: “The fear of abandonment lies deep in the history of European settlement in Australia”. In response, we have aligned ourselves with a great and powerful friend over the decades, first the United Kingdom and then the United States. This alignment has brought both benefits and costs, providing security but entangling us in wrong-headed ventures from Gallipoli through Vietnam to Iraq. We have been prepared to say no at times to some British and American policies, but we have been comfortable, often overly so, in the slipstream.
Australia’s conservative governments have had a mixed attitude towards middle power diplomacy. Malcolm Fraser happily saw Australia as a middle power that should strive to influence great power relations. In 1980, he told parliament that “strengthening relations with middle sized powers” was one of the “four essential components of our foreign policy”, along with the Western alliance, regionalism, and the Commonwealth. Malcolm Turnbull took a similar approach when he became prime minister 35 years later.
But other conservative leaders have been sceptical about middle power diplomacy, even hostile. John Howard’s government prioritised the US alliance and explicitly eschewed middle power terminology. In 2006, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Alexander Downer, declared: “Labor seems to have a middle child complex when it comes to our place in the world. We are not ‘middling’ or ‘average’ or ‘insignificant’ … we are a considerable power and a significant country”. This formulation overstated Australia’s standing in the world and falsely, even mischievously, commingled middle with middling. As prime minister, Tony Abbott was prepared to describe Australia as “[a] significant — even a substantial — middle power”, though the addition of the two adjectives was an indication that he perhaps saw his country differently. He has since abandoned even this qualified view of Australia as a substantial middle power.
Labor has a deep middle power tradition reaching back to Herb Evatt, Gough Whitlam, and Gareth Evans. It is unsurprising then that our current foreign minister, Penny Wong, has been arguing since 2021 for “creative” or “amplified” middle power diplomacy. Like Carney, she too has been calling on middle powers to be more ambitious and assertive, working harder in new coalitions and alignments to create more common ground in the quest for “strategic balance in a multipolar world”.
The Australian government has been managing its own balancing act, doing more with other middle powers but underlining the importance of the US alliance. It has eschewed a running commentary on Trump’s outbursts, sensibly trying to avoid attracting his ire. Wong has pressed for more ambitious middle power diplomacy without criticising the United States directly, though at times she appears to be biting her lip. This small-target strategy has sometimes looked evasive, but it has mostly made sense. AUKUS also acts as a brake. Having put so many of our defence chips on a long-term bet, the government has too much to lose by provoking a spiteful president. Yet preserving the US alliance need not stop Australia from doing more with middle powers.
Working with other middle powers provides Australia flexible options for pursuing its interests. This does not mean rejecting the alliance with the United States, which will remain our single most important international relationship for decades to come. But it does mean keeping enough room to ensure Australia is not boxed in. We should judge each issue on its own terms and decide which mix of bilateral, regional, minilateral, and multilateral tools works best. With finite human and financial resources, that entails hard-headed decisions about when to part company with the United States and when to put other middle powers first. Such hedging makes eminent sense if it keeps Australia from being dragged into something wrong-headed or against its interests.
An amplified middle power diplomacy should reflect Australia’s external outlook, interests, and geography. It can take various forms: some well established, others recent; some broad, others ad hoc or issue-specific. Shared values bind some of Australia’s middle power partnerships, but calibrated pragmatism matters too. At times, Australia should work with middle powers that do not share all its values and interests. At different junctures, this diplomacy will involve working with, against, or around the great powers, explicitly and implicitly.
Australia’s established middle power partnerships are its most enduring. We work well on multiple fronts with Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the Western Europeans, Japan, and South Korea. These collaborations draw on longstanding political and economic ties and shared values: the rule of law, human rights, and a global system based on international law. A surge in high-level visits to Australia in the first half of 2026 by fellow democratic middle power leaders — Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in March, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi in May, and New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon in June — has reinforced these links.
This does not mean we always see eye to eye with other democratic middle powers. Australia was at loggerheads with the Western Europeans for decades about trade protectionism. But even here, we have recently seen positive movement. While von der Leyen was in Canberra, Australia and the European Union concluded free trade agreement (FTA) negotiations after years of difficult talks. Importantly, they also signed a Security and Defence Partnership (SDP). The SDP’s terms are expansive, envisaging cooperation across a wide range of global and regional security challenges: emerging and disruptive technologies, economic security (including critical minerals), hybrid threats, maritime security, space security, and arms control. The SDP foreshadows greater defence industry collaboration, joint military training, combined maritime operations, and intelligence sharing.
Trump played an indirect role in these developments. His punitive tariffs and disparaging remarks about US allies helped push Australia and the European Union to reach agreement on both trade and security. The SDP explicitly rejects the Trumpian worldview. It is no accident that it underlines what the president has shunned: support for Ukraine (though he has yielded some ground on this), action on climate change, the importance of the international rules-based order, and a commitment to gender equality (witness the Trump administration’s dismantling of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs). The FTA carries a similar values dimension, reinforcing “the shared commitment of Australia and the European Union to open and rules-based trade”.
The SDP does not represent a rejection of the United States. It certainly will not supplant the US alliance or the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing arrangement. However, taken as a package, the EU FTA and the SDP expand Australia’s options and articulate matters that are important to us and other middle powers. They send a political message that Australia and the European Union will not be browbeaten into compromising their values and commitments.
Australia’s links with Japan, South Korea, and New Zealand draw on strong convergent geostrategic and geoeconomic interests and shared democratic values. All four countries want an open, rules-based, and peaceful region and support multilateralism. All four are concerned about China’s rising power and see North Korea as a menace. They also have the most advanced economies in the region.
The expansion of Australia’s relationship with Japan indicates that the regional dimension of our middle power diplomacy is gaining more substance. While Takaichi was in Canberra in May, she described Australia and Japan as “quasi allies”. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese implied as much, declaring that the two countries had “never been more strategically aligned”. The two leaders issued joint statements covering enhanced cooperation on defence, economic security, critical minerals, and energy. Concrete collaboration is accelerating, with Japan testing more missiles and other advanced weapons in Australia. A de facto alliance is emerging, with Australia purchasing significant military kit from Japan, including new frigates.
Such an arrangement is less likely with South Korea. Australia’s desire to lift the bilateral relationship has only ever been partly reciprocated. South Korea has often been understandably preoccupied with the great powers and its belligerent sibling. As one recent study noted, Australia–South Korea relations have “historically exhibited a pattern of intermittent and incremental progress, with windows of opportunity for deeper cooperation opening and closing, especially in the partnership’s security dimension”.
Not that the relationship lacks milestones: a free trade agreement came into force in 2014, and South Korea is now our fourth-largest trading partner (totalling AU$67.5 billion in 2025). As strategic outlooks converge, Australia has also turned to South Korea for self-propelled howitzers, artillery ammunition, and infantry fighting vehicles. But cooperation in advanced defence technology, as Yeonsoo Kim has rightly observed, “remains largely program-specific rather than institutionalised”. The two countries should do more to deepen this partnership, tapping into South Korea’s scalable manufacturing capacity and Australia’s “expansive test and evaluation environments”. That will require concerted political will on both sides.
But it is not just in the bilateral realm that Australia is doing more with its middle power partners in the region. Established in 2022 when Joe Biden was US president, the Indo-Pacific Four (IP4) brings together Australia, Japan, South Korea, and New Zealand in a dialogue with NATO about shared security challenges, including defence industry collaboration, countering disinformation, cyber defence, and critical technologies such as AI and quantum systems.
The IP4 operates on three interconnected levels, serving as a dialogue with NATO, a platform for collaboration among the IP4 countries themselves, and an informal partial counterweight to China. It works because the four democracies largely share a strategic outlook.
If the IP4’s effectiveness turns on shared strategic perceptions, the question of enlargement follows. The Philippines and Vietnam are the most likely candidates: both are on the receiving end of Chinese pressure in the South China Sea. The Philippines is the stronger prospect. Australia, like Japan, is deepening defence cooperation with this fellow US ally, which, Bec Strating writes, is “at the coalface of a number of security challenges from China”. It also sits on the Defense Cooperation Council with Australia, Japan, and the United States. Yet neither is pursuing IP4 membership, at least for now, adhering as they do to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) principles of non-alignment and neutrality. Vietnam’s authoritarian political system is a further brake on joining a grouping of four democracies.
Other Southeast Asian candidates are even less likely, and in each case China is the pressure point. Australia has a close and multifaceted relationship with Singapore, including in defence. But Singapore, ever the pragmatic realist, adheres to a policy of strict neutrality, maintaining close ties with the United States but accepting a big Chinese role in the region. Australia is expanding its ties with Indonesia, signing a Treaty on Common Security in February 2026. But Indonesia refuses to align formally with any great power, although that has not stopped it from maintaining close links with Russia. Australia would like Indonesia to play a stronger regional role, but Jakarta is loath to do so, and it too accommodates Chinese power. The other ASEAN states are either cautious (Thailand, Malaysia, and Brunei) or aligned with China (Cambodia and Laos).
The question is in one sense misconceived. The IP4 is not a body with a membership, but a label NATO applies to four separate bilateral partnerships, each governed by its own tailored program. Enlargement would not be a matter of accession, but of NATO choosing whom to invite, and of Southeast Asian capitals accepting a NATO-linked association they have so far avoided. The IP4 is therefore best left as it is for now. Its effectiveness would be diluted by members with markedly different strategic outlooks.
Not that the IP4’s members are always on the same page. Longstanding unresolved historical and territorial issues can make South Korea–Japan relations turbulent at times, even bitter, though such tensions are currently muted. The two countries have also traditionally handled relations with China and Taiwan differently. Japan sees China as its primary security threat. Facing relentless Chinese pressure in the East China Sea and concerned about Beijing’s rapid military build-up, it has taken a forthright position on the Taiwan Strait. Its naval vessels have participated in joint patrols in the South China Sea with the United States, Australia, and the Philippines to uphold freedom of navigation.
For understandable reasons, Seoul has, by contrast, seen its troublesome twin as its primary security threat. Over the decades, it has looked to Beijing to help manage Pyongyang. This strategy has had mixed results, with China both propping up and restraining North Korea. South Korea has sometimes seen itself as a balancer or middle power bridge between China and the United States. Ever conscious of the need to elicit China’s cooperation on the peninsula, South Korea has accordingly kept a low profile on both Taiwan and the South China Sea. It has avoided public comment on the former (aside from formulaic wording in joint statements with the United States about maintaining peace across the Strait) and its naval vessels have not participated to date in the joint naval patrols in the latter. After a tense period under his predecessor, President Lee Jae-myung has moved to improve relations with Beijing, though this should be seen as a sensible hedge rather than a strategic realignment. Australia has stabilised its China relationship in a similar fashion.
These contrasting South Korean and Japanese postures arguably blunt the IP4’s potential as a partial counterweight to China. But the ground is moving. Several factors are encouraging Seoul to re-evaluate and perhaps harden its approach: sharpening economic and technological competition with China; deepening strategic and military cooperation between North Korea, China, and Russia; and a worryingly more assertive Chinese presence in another part of South Korea’s immediate neighbourhood, the Yellow/West Sea, where it has erected suspicious artificial structures. Bee Yun Jo, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, argues persuasively that “the strategic distance between the Korean Peninsula and the Taiwan Strait is closing”. Against this backdrop, public opinion is shifting in South Korea, with nearly 86 per cent of respondents in a recent poll — across the progressive–conservative divide — seeing China as a threat. By contrast, on the back of six recent positive leaders’ meetings, the number of respondents who view Japan favourably has climbed to 54.3 per cent, the highest score since the survey started in 2013. Without stepping on toes, Australia should encourage South Korea to continue recalibrating its strategic settings.
Seoul is unlikely to ramp up its public commentary on Taiwan, let alone militarise its Taiwan policy, but the IP4 now has more congruent strategic perceptions, which should help drive greater cooperation in the future. None of the IP4 members want to see the Taiwan Strait boil over. The current delicate balance would be shattered if China launched an invasion of Taiwan. If the United States intervened to defend Taiwan, the IP4 members would be confronted by a dreadful question. What would they do if the United States asked for direct or indirect military support? That is why they will continue to advocate, both privately and in public, for a continuation of the ambiguous status quo, with an autonomous Taiwan not declaring formal independence.
Whether it is classified as a tier-one middle power or a swing state, India has become an even more important partner for Australia in light of these complex and unnerving dynamics. Over the last two decades, ties between Australia and India have expanded across a wide front as their economic and geostrategic interests have increasingly coalesced. Both countries are concerned about an assertive China. Both are looking for ways to hedge and buy insurance. The depth and breadth of the bilateral relationship were reconfirmed when Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Australia in early July 2026. The two sides finalised the administrative arrangements allowing the export of Australian uranium to India. Much like the FTA with the European Union, this deal was long in the making: Australia and India concluded a civil nuclear cooperation agreement in 2015.
In a joint declaration, Albanese and Modi agreed that the two countries would take defence links to a new level, holding increasingly complex defence exercises, expanding aircraft deployments from each other’s territory, and sharing more information. The two leaders also endorsed a new partnership on cyber, critical technologies, and supply chains. Australia and India will not become formal allies. And New Delhi remains wedded to its longstanding policy of strategic autonomy. Nevertheless, during Modi’s visit, Albanese was able to describe India as a “top-tier security partner”.
That is not to say that Canberra and New Delhi are always aligned. India maintains strong links with Russia, including in the military realm, and is a member of the BRICS grouping. The two countries clash at times in the multilateral system on issues such as trade, arms control, and climate change. Aspects of Modi’s conduct at home, especially his marginalisation of minorities and readiness to use state instrumentalities to exert pressure on his political opponents, are concerning.
Unsurprisingly, Australia’s interests and policy settings do not always converge with those of other middle powers. Our approach should be pragmatic, judging each issue on its own terms.
Australia has been doing this in relation to trade for decades. Founded in 1986, the Cairns Group brings together 20 agricultural fair-trading nations, a mixture of established (Australia, Canada, and New Zealand) and emerging middle powers (Brazil, Indonesia, Argentina, and Malaysia). Ukraine became the most recent country to join in 2024. A more recent variant of this functional coalition-building is the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). It encompasses 12 countries from the Indo-Pacific (Australia, Brunei, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Vietnam), the Americas (Canada, Chile, Mexico, and Peru), and Europe (the United Kingdom). Its membership again spans established and emerging middle powers, and it advances concrete economic interests by removing tariff barriers and setting rules on government procurement, labour, and environmental standards. Australia was chair in 2025.
The United States has rebuffed the CPTPP. That is a good thing for the time being because Trump has turned his back on the rules-based trading system. China has applied to join. But that would not be in the interests of either Australia or the group as a whole. China has used economic coercion against CPTPP members, including in retaliation for political or security decisions, contradicting the group’s commitment to rules-based trade. It targeted Australia with punitive tariffs and other economic measures between May 2020 and December 2024 in retaliation for a raft of alleged political sins, including our foreign interference laws. It is currently imposing trade restrictions, export bans, and market access curbs against Japan after Takaichi suggested that the Japanese Self-Defense Forces might be deployed if China attacked Taiwan. Beijing complemented the trade measures with other intimidatory steps, sending coast guard vessels into the waters around disputed islands.
But it would be a step forward if South Korea came into the CPTPP. Given trade sensitivities between Tokyo and Seoul, it was significant that President Lee used a meeting in January 2026 with Takaichi in Nara, Japan, to confirm that South Korea would like to join the group. Seoul has not lodged an application yet, but Canberra should encourage it to do so. South Korean membership would both extend regional trade architecture and bring all four IP4 members into the CPTPP. Choi Kang, President of the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, contends that the CPTPP has strategic implications, strengthening broader alignment between South Korea and other US security partners such as Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom, and Canada. So long as the United States remains aloof, the CPTPP will continue to be a de facto middle power alliance.
Middle power diplomacy has also taken new forms in the security space over the past 18 months, with the United States acting as an unwitting catalyst. Since the beginning of his second term, Trump’s approach to the Ukraine war has been volatile, at times appearing to take Russia’s side: he has placated Vladimir Putin and lambasted Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Against this backdrop, 35 middle powers — including European nations, Japan, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Türkiye — have filled the void, forming a coalition of the willing to help Ukraine defend itself and uphold international law. Its members have provided Ukraine with vital economic and military support. In the face of Putin’s intransigence and Ukraine’s stiff resistance, Trump has shifted his position somewhat, approving secondary sanctions on states trading with Moscow and Ukrainian airstrikes against Russian infrastructure. Even so, Ukraine would have collapsed without the coalition’s backing. Here, middle powers are working around one great power (the United States) and against a second (Russia).
Middle powers have come together in a more ad hoc manner in relation to the Iran war. On 17 April this year, the United Kingdom and France co-chaired a leaders’ summit to discuss the war and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. The 49 other countries that joined the meeting included a mix of established middle powers (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands, Italy, and Sweden), emerging middle powers (Türkiye, Nigeria, and the United Arab Emirates), and small states (the Marshall Islands, Panama, and Somalia). The United States was absent, while China sent its ambassador to France.
The Indian strategic analyst C. Raja Mohan is not persuaded that the summit was worthwhile. He contends that middle powers are “[flailing] around for ways of dealing with the current chaos … [and] nowhere is this incoherence more visible than in the diplomatic scramble around the Hormuz crisis”. Mohan argues that middle powers have in fact made it easier, not harder, for Washington to pursue unilateral outcomes by putting a multilateral scaffolding around the ceasefire.
Yet this analysis misreads both the 17 April summit and middle power diplomacy in general. The summit was never designed to end the conflict; the participants know that only the United States and Iran can do that. Nor have they wrapped multilateral scaffolding around the ceasefire, which has collapsed several times. The summit had three objectives. First, to defend multilateral principles and organisations under siege (in this case, freedom of navigation through straits and the role of the International Maritime Organization). Second, to signal that middle powers would help keep the Strait of Hormuz open once peace was restored, through an independent and purely defensive operation in full compliance with international law.
Third, and most important, to refuse to be bullied by Trump into joining a misguided offensive US operation, whether by granting overflight and basing rights or supplying naval vessels. Here again, middle powers were working around a great power, putting into practice one of Carney’s injunctions: refusing to go along to get along. That is much easier to do if middle powers stand together.
Australia was in similarly good company when it rebuffed Trump’s invitation to join his Board of Peace. Launched at Davos on 22 January 2026, just two days after Carney’s speech there, the board was originally supposed to oversee political transition, demilitarisation, and reconstruction in the Gaza Strip. But Trump dreamt up a more grandiose mandate: the board would become an alternative to the United Nations, settling conflicts around the world. Many other middle powers refused to sign up. With just 27 members, the board has met only once, in Washington in February, followed by a few committee sessions in June and July to discuss a pilot aid project. Lacking the legitimacy and resources of the United Nations, it has flopped.
Declining to lend legitimacy to such ventures is only the defensive half of middle power diplomacy. The constructive half is institutional stewardship. Australia can complement its issue-specific coalition work by continuing to do what it has been doing for decades, playing a leadership or coordinating role in both minilateral and multilateral processes. At present, it is central to at least five of them. It is serving as President of Negotiations for the 31st Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP31) and as chair of the International Whaling Commission, the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (which will play a key role in a durable settlement of the Iran war), and the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites. Reflecting again a cool-headed assessment of national priorities, it is leading, with Belize, the negotiations to prepare the high seas treaty for implementation.
Australia should assess each US request for support on its merits. The alliance should rest on neither a default yes nor a loyalty test. Each time, Canberra will weigh the consequences of declining, as it did this year on both the Board of Peace and the Iran war. On the latter, it struck the right balance, batting away Trump’s request for a naval vessel and sending instead a Wedgetail surveillance aircraft to assist the United Arab Emirates, another middle power. It held its nerve and suffered no specific retaliation.
That is not a guarantee. Trump sometimes dishes out punishment where Canberra has done nothing to provoke him, as with his tariffs on Australian exports, imposed despite a free trade agreement and a substantial US surplus in bilateral trade. The costs of refusal are real, but not reliably the ones governments fear.
Canberra will keep treading carefully, avoiding colourful rhetoric and needless friction with the Trump administration. Concerns about keeping AUKUS intact have tempered its willingness to speak out. But that dynamic cuts both ways: Trump chastised Australia for not dispatching a naval vessel to the Persian Gulf, yet Washington has not punished it, having its own stake in the alliance, including the joint facilities at Pine Gap and North West Cape and AUKUS itself.
Australia should be clear-sighted about the strains on the rules-based order, without concluding that it has failed. As Peter Varghese has argued, Australia cannot buy or bully its way in the world. It will continue to rely on an imperfect multilateral system, and should keep taking on leadership roles within it. The world will have to circle back to this system if it is ever to resolve wicked international problems like climate change. When that time comes, Australia’s standing will rest on the work it does now.
I would like to thank Peter Varghese, Richard Maude, Jeremy Kruse, Frank Bongiorno, Jane Hardy, Lisa Rice Madan, Bob Bowker, Gerald Thomson, David Dutton, Sam Roggeveen, Mihai Sora, and the two anonymous peer reviewers for their helpful feedback on drafts of this paper. Clare Caldwell edited the brief with her customary skill.
About the author
Lachlan Strahan
Dr Lachlan Strahan worked for the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade from 1993 until 2023, serving in missions in Bonn, Seoul, Delhi, Geneva, and Honiara.
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