Great power competition between the US and China is a fashionable topic. Comparisons abound with the Cold War era or the nineteenth century, when multiple actors in Europe competed with each other in the region and more globally. What is less discussed though is the emergence of a group of countries often referred to as “middle powers”. While attention is paid to what Washington or Beijing are doing to prevail in their competition, the middle powers could hold the key in the widening China-US rivalry.
It is hard to enumerate the exact elements that characterize certain countries as middle powers, but they mostly fall into a category of states that strive to increase geopolitical influence in their immediate neighborhood and occasionally play a pivotal role in the wider regional context. Those efforts, however, should be consistent, not limited to a short period of time, and bear resemblance to a well-thought-out, long-term strategic calculus.
Such states are Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and India – long-established middle powers. But there are also emerging ones such as Kazakhstan and to a certain extent Azerbaijan. Yet the success of these emerging middle powers is far from guaranteed. One of the prerequisites for a true middle power is its geographic position. They mostly border upon smaller and much weaker states. In the case of Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, however, they border on bigger states such as Russia/China and Iran/Russia respectively, which limit these two’s potential to project power beyond their borders.
The established middle powers fear being caught in the great power competition between China and the US. By avoiding the struggle, they thrive amid Beijing-Washington competition by stirring their own, seemingly independent geopolitical course, which ultimately aims at elevating their respective geopolitical might.
One of the strategies used by the middle powers is to avoid geopolitical fixation on any major power. This is what Saudi Arabia has been doing over the past couple of years and especially in the recent months. With its rapprochement with Iran, the Kingdom now tries to limit its security dependence on the US. But the most critical element here is China’s role. Beijing facilitated Iran-Saudi normalization, but this in no way means that Saudi Arabia is dodging its close security ties with the US in favor of alignment with China. Instead, Riyadh wants as many foreign policy choices as possible.
In the middle powers’ thinking, despite the challenges, the present China-US geopolitical competition also presents multiple opportunities. One of them is exactly what Saudi Arabia is doing – it hails closer ties with China but only to extract bigger concessions from the US. The longer this game continues, the bigger are the opportunities and possibilities for Riyadh to increase its profile as a critical regional power.
The two other actors, Turkey and Iran, have been pursuing similar policies for nearly a decade. For instance, Ankara undid its fixation on the West and looked eastward, deep into Eurasia, to find a balance to its foreign policy which would better align with the country’s geographic situation and grander political aspirations. The Eurasian twist has been visible all along in Iran’s foreign policy too. Pressured by the West, Tehran looks to other actors to find balance and thereby fortify its negotiating position.
The middle powers are highly self-interested. They feel how increasingly needed they have become in the present geopolitical landscape. Their relative power has grown, and is likely to continue doing so as the US, China, and Russia devise various tactics to win them over. The middle powers are not pro-someone; instead, they have their own agency and regional ambitions. For them, non-alignment now seems increasingly to be a winning strategy and a multi-vectorial foreign policy as an optimal response to the vagaries of the present world.
The middle powers are a direct result of the changing world order, which is becoming increasingly multipolar. This would have been impossible in the Cold War era when the world was strictly divided into two geopolitical blocs. The present scenario, if anything, resembles the pre-World War I situation, when multiple great and middle actors competed and shifted alliances. Overall, the role of the middle powers is now central to the China-US competition. Whoever manages to woo the Global South will hold the key to shaping the future world order.
Analysis by Emil Avdaliani
Emil Avdaliani is a professor of international relations at European University in Tbilisi, Georgia, and a scholar of silk roads.
