PRACTICING MIDDLEPOWERMANSHIP
IN A CHANGING WORLD ORDER
Written evidence submitted by
Dr Zeno Leoni, Mr Ahmed Aboudouh, and Mr João Vitor Tossini
1.Brief introduction about the person or organisation submitting evidence:
Dr Zeno Leoni is a Lecturer in Defence Studies at the Defence Studies Department of King’s College London within the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom - where he teaches high-ranked officers up to one- and two-star generals - and an affiliate with the Lau China Institute of King’s College London. He is an expert in US-China relations and world order and is currently working on his third book on this subject. His latest book – Grand Strategy and the Rise of China: Made in America (Agenda Publishing) – was published in April 2023. Dr Leoni engages policy-makers on a regular basis, and in the past he provided written and oral evidence on AUKUS, the CPTPP, and the inclusion of Australia and the UK in the US Defence Production Act. He is currently leading on the establishment of a Research Group on Middlepowermanship at King’s College London.
Mr Ahmed Aboudouh is an associate fellow with the Chatham House, based in London. He is a foreign affairs, security and geopolitics specialist. His research focuses on China’s rising influence in the MENA region, Gulf geopolitics, the US-China competition and its implications worldwide. Mr Aboudouh is a nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council in Washington, DC, and currently heads the China Studies research unit at the Emirates Policy Center (EPC). He holds a Master of Arts in International Relations from the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, with a specific focus on China’s influence and great power competition in the MENA region.
Mr João Vitor Tossini is a PhD candidate at the Sao Paulo State University (Unesp) and a visiting researcher at the Defence Studies Department of King’s College London. He is a writer for the UK Defence Journal, covering issues related to British power and standing worldwide. He is a member of Unesp’s Defence and International Security Studies Group (GEDES), the Navy Records Society, and the Army Records Society. Mr Tossini holds a Master of Arts in International Relations from the Department of International Relations at the Sao Paulo State University, focusing on the UK as a strategic actor in the South Atlantic and its regional military presence. His current focus is the relative decline of the UK in the post-Cold War era and the British position within an increasingly competitive international system.
2.Question addressed
- The UK’s place in the 21st century international order, while balancing security and prosperity.
3.Summary
- The takeaway of this evidence is that greater attention to middle powers and the practice of middlepowermanship needs to be consistently integrated into the UK government’s foreign policy. This would be an appropriate approach for two reasons. On the one hand, this would allow the UK to project influence more effectively across a geopolitical space of the international system whose trajectory is currently being evaluated amidst a changing world order. On the other hand, the UK as a power in between competing great powers, would benefit from networking with middle powers and from learning lessons on how these manage pressure stemming from great power competition.
4.Analysis
- At the beginning of the 21st Century, the UK has a peculiar and undefined position in the international system. On the one hand, the country still has a significant economic base, soft power, military capabilities, and diplomatic presence and initiatives overseas. On the other, traditional relative decline in relation to the Global West has long been replaced by a new decline regarding rising (great) powers in Asia. This characteristic contributes to the UK as a player constantly in doubt about its relative position and role. The struggle for a role definition – middle-power, great power, secondary great power, pocket superpower, soft-power superpower – reflects this peculiar British position, influencing policies set out by successive governments with different outcomes.
- The war in Ukraine has marked a watershed and accelerated the transition to a new international order. The drama of war has increased the leverage that the US has within the Global West – de facto, the G7 – and strengthened Washington’s sphere of influence. China’s ambiguous position towards Russia and the conflict, meanwhile, has contributed to creating an opposed front to that of the Global West, which increasingly sees (some) authoritarian countries as rogue states. As an ideological Iron Curtain 2.0 is taking shape amidst an international re-alignment, it is important to consider the positioning of middle powers during this transition. The idea of middle powers as a potential (fluid) bloc has been neglected so far; yet it would be inappropriate to think that such countries will be passive objects amidst the transition to a new world order.
- While scholars debate the New Cold War thesis, the international order is fast-evolving, and alliances within it are increasingly fluid and their resolve is tested by the war in Ukraine and the rise of China, at least compared to the defunct unipolar era.
- Middle powers are not medium powers; that means that these countries should not be judged purely based on their military or economic capabilities. Middle powers are many countries that find themselves in between great power – US, Russia, China – competition and that need to make sure they succeed in positioning themselves in a security and economic comfort zone as the international order changes.
- It is not accurate to think of the middle powers’ position in world politics as a 20th-century Nonalignment Movement. First, nowadays, middle powers possess far greater economic, military and economic power than those of the 20th Century. Second, these countries do not ponder building concrete anti-colonialism alliances based on ideological solidarity. They do not have a shared vision of the world order and operate in an intersected, fluid and complex system of interdependent groupings and coalitions. Second, middle powers share their resistance to being aligned with a superpower’s preferences. They prefer a more transactional, interest-based approach through hedging and balancing that shield them from bearing the brunt of great-power competition.
- In addition to their accumulated power levers, middle powers are much more activist on the international stage than before. This is because their leaders feel the heat of the crumbling unipolar moment and the transition to a new international setting, and they want to protect their security and interests. Some achieve this through the search for strategic autonomy, some through strict non-alignment, others through multi-alignment and issue-specific cooperation, and some through hedging. The main aim is to get their voices heard in the international system and achieve regional stability. A defining motivation they share is maximising their strategic gains from the rising Western and Eastern blocs.
- However, the middle powers’ share of global stability could be the source of global instability. This could unfold in the form of middle powers’ proxy wars in other middle and small states or middle powers fighting each other to assert/protect their parochial interests. The state of instability and conflicts could inadvertently also involve great powers, as has been the case throughout the 20th-century world systems transformations or during the Cold War era. Thus, middle powers’ interests and their ability to assertively bear high costs to achieve them should be treated as a rising cornerstone source of change that could define the new world order.
5.Conclusion
- In observing, influencing, and learning from middlepowers, the UK government would benefit from assimilating practices of middlepowermanship. This can be represented by at least five features. Firstly, middle powers could mediate between great powers, especially when their relationship with them is not as binding. Secondly, middle powers are such when they can take decisions autonomously from a particular great power – not necessarily opposing that great power’s preferences. Thirdly, middlepowermanship is characterised using language in strategic documents and key speeches that target grey areas or that endorse great powers’ policies but in an attenuated manner. Fourthly, middlepowermanship involves cooperating and competing with each great power at the same time. A fifth characteristic of middlepowermanship is that of the pursuit of networking with countries that face great power competition and exploring best practices on how to manage such pressure.
- From a UK perspective, whether it sees itself as a middle power or not, it has an interest in fostering pragmatic and complex networks with rising middle powers. This approach could be a low-cost, low-risk force multiplier posture. It would give the UK the strategic advantage of projecting influence in faraway regions through non-binding shared visions with like-minded (or otherwise) powers. It would grant the UK decision-makers more autonomy and leverage to determine the strategic direction and more manoeuvring space to implement it. It would also maximise the UK’s transactional gains from China while at the same time deepening its commitment to the US and G7 countries’ security and prosperity.
6.Recommendations:
- The UK needs to address how it defines itself and how other actors evaluate the British position. Clarity about a definition of the UK’s relative position in a rapidly changing international order is necessary to aid policy and decision-makers to engage with other countries, creating the base for feasible policies. Defining and understanding its possible position as a power that is too big to simply be in the middle of great powers’ disputes but also not large enough to claim a primary position in the international system is necessary to better calibrate engagement and cooperation as a flexible secondary (great) power of the Global West that can use its extra clout to engage all sides of a new international order.
- The British government should assimilate more systematically the idea that middle powers matter, especially if these are seen in aggregate. If united together, several middle powers could determine the outcome of competition between great powers and shape the international order. Understanding the short- to mid-term trajectory of middle powers can also help policy-makers as much as scholars make sense of the long-term trajectory of the international order. The UK, regardless of how it sees itself – a “softpower superpower” – remains a country affected by the choices of great powers, and as its relative power declines, it will be even more so.
- To appeal to middle powers aspirations, the UK should incorporate the concept of middlepowermanship in its strategic assessments (including the Integrated Review Refresh 2023) as a core component in UK foreign policy. It should also maintain and develop its competition-engagement approach to China and build on the Foreign Secretary’s recent visit to China to improve relations. This will increase the UK’s strategic value as a power that has sway over the two great powers in other countries’ perception.
- Only by listening to the needs of increasingly ambitious middle powers will the UK be able to maintain influence over these countries. Some of these emerging economies will show limited interest in values and human rights. While it is crucial to push forward an agenda of respect for human rights, political rights, and democratic values, some of these countries will only be persuaded with access to R&D, greenfield investments, and support to import-substitution industrialisation.
- The UK is a power in between superpowers with a past as great power. As such, it should use its influence to promote and lead in forums of middlepowers.
- The UK should recover fast from the Ukraine trauma and increase its investment in its diplomatic capabilities in regions close to its shores that are likely to witness a power gap due to the US’s greater focus on the Indo-Pacific. This primarily includes the Middle East and Africa. This could be achieved through greater involvement in conflict resolution (Sudan, Libya, Yemen, Niger), better-designed finance and debt-relief initiatives, and cooperation with other G7 powers to roll out investment projects capable of competing with China’s.
8.References
Chalmers, M. (2021) The Integrated Review: The UK as a Reluctant Middle Power?, RUSI, March, https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/occasional-papers/integrated-review-uk-reluctant-middle-power
English, R. and Kenny, M. (eds.). (2000) Rethinking British Decline, London: Macmillan Press Ltd.
Ferrari, A. and Tafuro Ambrosetti, E. (eds.) (2023) Multipolarity After Ukraine: Old Wine in New Bottles? Milano: ISPI
https://www.ispionline.it/en/publication/multipolarity-after-ukraine-old-wine-in-new-bottles-116515
Ishmael, L. (2023) Aftermath of War in Europe: The West VS. the Global South?, Rabat: Policy Center for the New South
Kampfner, J. (2022) Britain must get real about its place in the world, Chatham House, December, https://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/the-world-today/2022-12/britain-must-get-real-about-its-place-world
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Leoni, Z. and Tzinieris, S. (2022) ‘To exclude or not to exclude: AUKUS and order-engineering’, Security & Defence PLuS, February, https://securityanddefenceplus.plusalliance.org/essays/to-exclude-or-not-to-exclude-aukus-and-order-engineering/
Miliband, D. (2023) ‘The world beyond Ukraine: the survival of the west and the demands of the rest’, Foreign Affairs, May/June, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/world-beyond-ukraine-russia-west
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Spektor, M. (2023) ‘In defense of the fence sitters: what the west gets wrong about hedging, Foreign Affairs, May/June, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/global-south-defense-fence-sitters
Stallings, B. (2020) Dependency in the Twenty-First Century? The Political Economy of China-Latin America Relations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Thorp, J. (2021) ‘Size does not matter: the UK’s continuing great power status’. Wavell Room. March, https://wavellroom.com/2021/03/26/size-does-not-matter-the-uks-continuing-great-power-status/