The U.S. has become an increasingly erratic superpower. Now, the world’s middle powers are rising. What’s next for places like India and Canada in a shifting global order?

Guests

Manjari Chatterjee Miller, professor of international relations at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. Senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Also Featured

Ahmad Rizky Mardhatillah Umar, fellow at the Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth University in Wales, United Kingdom.

Imran Bayoumi, deputy director and resident fellow at the Atlantic Council.

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Transcript of Full Broadcast

The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: The U.S. has become an unpredictable global superpower under President Donald Trump.

DONALD TRUMP [TAPE]: All the United States is asking for is a place called Greenland.

TRUMP: Uh, we are going to do something on Greenland whether they like it or not.

TRUMP: What I’d like to see, Canada become our 51st state.

TRUMP: I’m not happy with NATO because of what they did with Greenland, and I’m not happy with NATO because of the fact that they didn’t want to help us with the number one state sponsor of terror. That’s Iran.

TRUMP: I will sign a historic executive order instituting reciprocal tariffs on countries throughout the world. Reciprocal.

TRUMP: I did a 90-day pause for the people that didn’t retaliate. Because I told ‘em, if you retaliate, we’re gonna double it.

TRUMP: It’s a memorandum of understanding. And if I don’t like it, we’ll go back to shooting at ‘em, dropping bombs on their head. If I don’t like it, if they don’t behave, we’ll go right back to dropping bombs right smack in the middle of their head.

TRUMP: Your country is in big trouble.

VOLODYMYR: ZELENSKY: I know. What about —

TRUMP: If you didn’t have our military equipment-

ZELENSKY: You invited me to sp-

TRUMP: If you didn’t have our military equipment, this war would’ve been over in two weeks.

ZELENSKY: In three days. I heard it from Putin. In three days.

TRUMP: Spain is a terrible partner in NATO. Uh, they don’t participate, they don’t pay. Uh, I don’t want anything to do with Spain. Cut off all trade with Spain, please.

CHAKRABARTI: That’s the president over just the past year or so. Trump’s hostility towards alliances is forcing many nations to reconsider their relationship and reliance on the United States.

MARK CARNEY [TAPE]: We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition. Great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited. You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.

CHAKRABARTI: Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney made a pointed speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos at the beginning of this year. In it, he called upon the world’s middle-power countries, places like Canada, India, some parts of Europe, to pull together.

CARNEY [TAPE]: I argue the middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu. We believe that from the fracture, we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just. This is the task of the middle powers, the countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses, and of most to gain from genuine cooperation. The powerful have their power. We have something, too: the capacity to stop pretending, to name reality, to build our strength at home, and to act together.

So how are these middle-power countries challenging the tradition of a unipolar or bipolar international system? And can they influence critical global issues in a way that the US or China have not or cannot? Well, joining us now is Manjari Chatterjee Miller. She’s a professor of international relations at the University of Toronto, and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Professor Miller, welcome to On Point.

MANJARI CHATTERJEE MILLER: Hi, Meghna. Thank you for having me. I’m delighted to be here.

CHAKRABARTI: It’s really great to have you. Well, let me just start off with this sort of general question in terms of how would you define what a middle power is these days?

MILLER: That’s a great question especially because it’s amazing to me as an academic how middle power has become the word of the day, the phrase of the day, until Mr. Carney’s speech in Davos earlier this this year very few people really talked about middle powers in the policy world, right? Middle powers was an area of research for academics. And so, to be quite frank with you, when we talk about middle powers, there’s no fabulous one-size-fits-all definition.

Sometimes, particularly, we call a middle power a middle power because it calls itself a middle power. So, Canada for years has called itself a middle power. But what we do know, just looking at the research on middle powers, is that it’s not about one thing. It’s not about the size necessarily, right?

It’s not about the capabilities. It’s not even about a certain level of economic value. It’s not about moral or democratic values. What it really is about is a country that has a particular amount of influence in an area that aligns with its interests. And in those areas, they exert influence, but they’re unwilling to or unable to step up and have a much larger role either globally or sometimes even regionally.

So I’ll give you an example. So, Canada is a middle power, but we also think of Singapore as a middle power, and that’s two very different countries, very different size, very different geographically. But for Canada, one of the big areas where it has always wanted to have influence and it’s interested in is human rights, so that’s where Canada has expanded its influence.

If you look at Singapore, Singapore has prided itself on playing a balancing role in Southeast Asia and wields influence through ASEAN, and it has an influence in the region that is out of proportion to its size. So they’re both middle powers but very different.

CHAKRABARTI: So, it seems to me, and please feel free to tell me if this is just too elementary, but I might put the, your description in kind of three different buckets. And in fact, Canada and Singapore, I would say, fall into two of those buckets. One of them, let’s call it just purely in terms of geopolitics can we call one of the buckets, these are countries that are not either, they’re not formally committed politically to the United States or to China. They’re kind of geopolitically between the two of them.

MILLER: I think that would be true today. I think historically it’s a different case, and we can get into that a little bit later if you like. But, I would say that in general, these countries today could play a balancing role between the United States and China.

But in general, these countries have bought into and have benefited from, historically, the liberal international order that the United States and its allies created after World War II. They’re not revisionist states. They’re not revisionist states.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Okay. So that’s important to remember. Yes.  In fact, they’re probably more committed to the traditional international order than even the United States is now.

MILLER: That’s probably true, yes.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So the other two buckets that I would say is for example, in the in the Singapore situation, these are these are countries that as you say, play, are playing this outsized weight. They punch above their weight in terms of not just regional influence, but maybe influence in, in certain global issues like technology, security, et cetera. Would you would you put even some of the, like, say the Gulf states in that bucket?

MILLER: Yes, I think you could think of Saudi Arabia as a middle power, for example that has been trying to punch above its weight in international relations and exert influence. They have oil money so yes, that, that would be correct.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. And then I guess there’s one kind of in the middle that the countries that have a, a, a political economy that make them very relevant, and maybe I should have put the Gulf states in that in that category. But I’m starting to get a, a clearer sense of what middle powers kind of roughly means. By the way, just as an aside, what got you first interested in taking a long and deep look at these countries which I suppose until recent times, as you said, don’t really often make the headlines?

MILLER: Yeah, so middle power research can be, in academia, is two buckets, right? So then there’s a theory bucket where people define them, describe them, catalog them, categorize them, and then you have the bucket of people who look at bigger picture issues or particular cases that fit into bigger picture issues, and middle powers play a role in that.

So, I fall into that second bucket where I look at big picture issues of what we call power transitions. So why is it that some countries become great powers, some countries rise, others fail to rise, and how does, does that impact the international order in the process? And the cases I often look at are China and India, and so then that naturally lends itself to the category of middle power because I think of India as a middle power country.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. You know what? I’m gonna write that down, Professor Miller, because I’m gonna come back to that a little later in the speech. You had mentioned historically this, even though this may be the first time in recent memory that this phrase middle powers has become more often repeated, this is not the first time in history that there have been middle powers that have tried to sort of seek alliances between each other or seek ways to influence global geopolitics.

I mean, I suppose, what, early in the, in the sort of middle 20th century if memory serves, there was the Non-Aligned Movement. Is that right?

MILLER: Yes, that’s correct. The Non-Aligned Movement was a collection of post-colonial states, so post countries that had been under colonial powers that were newly independent, and they didn’t want to either join the Soviet Union or the United States and remain non-aligned, essentially not join any alliances, and yet benefit from both superpowers.

So it wasn’t neutrality, it was rather just not joining formal security alliances. And so these countries came together and formed the Non-Aligned Movement, and India was the leading country in that, so was Yugoslavia, the former Yugoslavia. And the whole point was to create this block that would be able to carve out an independent path in foreign policy.

So I guess you could call that. Because again, we’re talking about very poor countries at that point. I think the term that was used then was the Third World, what we call developing countries. And I don’t know that each of them individually would have had clout simply because their capabilities had not, had not caught up. But as a block, they were influential.

CHAKRABARTI: So that’s different than the, than what we’re talking about now because many of these, quote-unquote, middle powers are actually, they’re very economically developed.

MILLER: Yes, it is, it is slightly different, but but the concept that you’re talking about, which is that where you come together to be able to exert influence in a certain area that punches above its weight, that’s correct, right?

So that idea of, like, striking that balance is correct, but each of those countries then I would not have thought of historically as middle powers. They were just too new and too undeveloped.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Miller, in the first part of the conversation, I had you sort of describe what a middle power is, but I thought just out of sheer clarity, I’m wondering if you could name some of the other middle powers. We talked about Canada. You mentioned Singapore, Saudi Arabia, India, obviously.

What are some of the other sort of notable middle powers in your mind?

MILLER: I would consider Australia a middle power. Turkey, that’s another one, right? These are middle powers. maybe, Nigeria, right, coming up as a middle power.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, and what about something like Taiwan? I’m just curious.

MILLER: Oh, that’s a tricky one. Yes, that is tricky. Yes and no, just simply because of the, the potential for conflict in the, in the with China. But Taiwan certainly punches above its weight in technology. I mean, TSMC, the manufacturer of semiconductor chips that we all hear so much about nowadays is based in Taiwan. So, yes, but I think the case would have to be very carefully made.

CHAKRABARTI: A point well taken. Brazil?

MILLER: Yes, Brazil. Brazil, that’s another one. Okay. Yeah, that’s a good one.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, good. I just wanted to, to sort of name some countries specifically to give both myself and listeners kind of a concrete sense as to what we’re talking about with middle powers. Okay, so here’s another one. This is Sheikh Tamim ibn Hamad Al Thani. He’s Qatar’s prime minister and minister of foreign affairs, and he was also at Davos in January. And what’s interesting is he said that even though President Trump might be sort of the headline-making disruptor of the global international order, ibn Hamad Al Thani said that the world order has been shifting for two decades or so.

SHEIKH TAMIM IBN HAMAD AL THANI [TAPE]: In the past couple of decades, there, there has been, like, drastic change in this world order in many events, in, in many occasions that those checks and balances that we used to have, they are not there anymore. These changes been happening to us throughout these years, but we were not noticing it because of the time difference between them. And the last couple years, I mean, and this year, we have seen there is an acceleration of that, so everyone is noticing that there is something is happening. But, this is the system that’s been needs a lot of reforms that we, we didn’t look at for the past two decades.

CHAKRABARTI: So Professor Miller, this is very interesting to me because the past two decades would put us in the, the George W. Bush, Barack Obama timeframe of American politics. Would you agree with Al Thani that there’s been sort of this disruption since then that has caused the middle powers to sort of reconsider what their role is?

MILLER: That is a really interesting statement by Al Thani. So what you’re talking about and what he’s talking about is a disruption to the liberal international order, okay? And I think to understand this, we do have to, think of the liberal international order in historical context, okay? And I’m gonna slide right into my, into my teacher mode and just talk very briefly about what the liberal international order is because, again, it’s one of those phrases that’s thrown out, and people are like, “What is it?” So the liberal international order was established by the United States and its allies after World War II. And it’s basically the arrangements that govern states, right?

So if you think about the norms, the rules, the institutions that we have in place in the world today that is the liberal international order. Now, during the Cold War, you also had the socialist order, and that was led by the Soviet Union, and the liberal international order stood in contrast to that, right?

Now, the thing to remember is that it’s not this I know it sounds so academic, and it sounds like this really esoteric thing that you only read about on, in the pages of The New York Times or, or here on NPR. But I tell my students about this all the time. It really is important because it touches our lives, our day-to-day lives in ways that we may not even realize, right?

So for example when I go to the store, let’s say I go to an Asian grocery store. And I pick up a a moisturizing lotion that’s made in India, right? And I look at the back and it’s got a list of ingredients on it, right? Those ingredients are in place because India has exported that to the United States.

And then because of United States regulations they’re required to list the ingredients. If you pick it up in India, you will not see a list of ingredients. Do you see what I’m trying to say?

CHAKRABARTI: Ah. Yes.

MILLER: Now, those rules and institutions are in place because of the liberal international order. That comes from, it’s a very day-to-day way of thinking about how those rules affect our lives. Or if you think about the World Health Organization, which is a multilateral institution established in 1948 as a consequence of the institutions that were established after the liberal international order, and then you think of the eradication of smallpox or the fact that, in 2020, Africa became the fifth WHO region to declare that it had, it had eradicated polio, right? Or when you look at vaccine delivery. So these are all consequences of the WHO, which is very much a liberal international order institution that brought states together to engage in multilateral cooperation on global health.

So, it’s something that’s very, seems so far away from us, but actually touches us in many different ways. So now when you get to the end of the Cold War, the socialist order is gone, and what you have remaining is the liberal international order, right? So, it triumphs in a way. So at many points in the past, the liberal international order has been disrupted.

So that disruption that Al Thani refers to is not new. So even, for example, you referred to the non-aligned movement, Meghna, right? The Non-Aligned Movement countries would tell you that the liberal international order wasn’t really liberal, right? Those rules and norms and institutions that we talk about were made for Western countries for, and they were Western institutions, and they existed to serve the interests of the West. So therefore, in the early 2000s, you have the emergence of the BRICS, right? So Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, that come together precisely because they claim that the global governance structures put in place by the liberal international order are discriminatory. They, they discriminate against non-Western states.

So, it’s not that there have not been challenges and there have not been disruptions. There have been throughout its history. But where I defer from Al Thani, right, and I would say where you really have a disruption today, is that today you have the United States, which is the creator of the liberal international order, the leader, the architect, we are talking about disrupting the liberal international order, right?

So the United States is saying that we are moving away from it, that it’s not working. That is a disruption on a scale and at a level that we have not seen before.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. I was thinking as you were describing this, this history that, while the BRICS nations, I do recall that they were saying, “Well, it’s not the liberal international order is actually built for the, the benefit of the West.” But on the other hand,  the pushback to that would be that this same post-World War II order, and definitely post-Cold War, as you said, is what brought about a long-term period of stability, development. I mean, the India lotion example is perfect. Stability, development, and prosperity for these very nations, or at least the opportunity for growth for these very nations. And that would not have happened without this liberal international order. So, with that argument in mind, it would seem to me that these same middle powers then are perhaps best or most incentivized to be a, to be ones that help preserve this very order, even as, as you’re saying, the United States, the big heavyweight here, is disrupting it.

MILLER: Absolutely. Absolutely, the liberal international order benefited these countries, and which is why middle powers come together to try to shore it up. But in practice, let me give you an example of how in practice when you try and shore it up, but you’re doing so without the United States, that could have perhaps even an unintended effect on the order writ large.

So let’s take tariffs and trade deals, right? Everybody’s favorite words nowadays. so if you look at the tariff policy that the United States has adopted since President Trump came to power for the second time, you will see that since then a country like India, which is, by the way 10 years ago India was very difficult to do trade deals with, right?

India is rushing into different trade deals. It has a trade deal with the EU. It is negotiating a trade deal with Canada, which should be announced soon. It has negotiated a trade deal with Australia, with the UK, right? So what does this mean? So let’s take the EU. So if you have a free trade agreement with the EU, that means that Indian products are now being geared for export to the EU market, right?

Now, in order to actually export to the EU market, it has to follow EU rules and regulations. EU rules and regulations are hugely different from United States regulations on products, health, safety, digital technology, everything, right? So this means that this trade deal means that in 10 years, if this trade deal stands and progresses as we expect, one of the largest middle power markets in the world is diversifying away from the United States, and it is hedging its future trade relationships to actually elevate European Union rules, and not American rules as the global standard.

CHAKRABARTI: Interesting.

MILLER: So now if you take a bunch of these little trade deals, right, and you see these different, what you’re seeing is the emergence of different little orders, that are competing to the larger global orders set up by the United States.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Okay. Another thing for me to put a pin into. This is so fascinating, Professor Miller. I’m already regretting that we don’t have several hours. I just wanna actually, listen to a little bit from another person that we reached out to in this conversation, and again, this is just in the realm of is this new or not new.

Ahmad Rizky Mardhatillah Umar, he talked to us and he said that countries in the Global South, as you have been mentioning, Professor Miller, to them, the international order has long been broken even before Mark Carney’s speech at Davos.

AHMAD RIZKY MARDHATILLAH UMAR [TAPE]: There is a sense that Carney’s statement is a bit late to the party. This is not simply because Canada was under attack by, by President Trump, that the old international order is broken. But the international order is not necessarily working for countries in the Global South in the sense that it doesn’t necessarily support their quest for development.

CHAKRABARTI: Umar is a fellow at Aberystwyth University in Wales, where he studies Indonesian foreign policy, so another middle power here.

And he says that Indonesian and Malaysian leaders have spent years advocating for what they see as a more just international order.

UMAR: As long as the distributions of the public goods the industries are concentrated only in certain countries, whether it is China or Europe or United States, there will be still concerns about economic justice in international order. Because what Indonesia wants is actually not simply distributions of economic resources, but the distributions of economic resources that will benefit the Global South countries to facilitate their own development.

CHAKRABARTI: And Umar says this is especially true when it comes to critical minerals, because Indonesia has the world’s largest nickel reserves. That’s an essential element in technology, like what’s in just about everyone’s pockets, smartphones. But Umar says that the country doesn’t always reap the benefits.

UMAR: Many countries want to extract the resources, but if the technology is not really accessible to the countries who produce them, the demand is not simply about making the technology accessible, but also the making the technology affordable. China is to some extent offering this kind of affordability, but it is still limited, and this is something that is not really the case with United States.

CHAKRABARTI: And the U.S.’s unreliability these days has pushed Indonesia to engage with China more in recent years, Umar says. It’s also going to Russia for oil because of the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.

UMAR: The problem is that Indonesia is not only limiting the options only for middle powers. This is actually countries who are able to bring tangible economic benefits to Indonesia, so Indonesia can provide better public goods and provide better development domestically. If Prime Minister Carney wants to expand its broader middle powers engagements, it needs to bring a kind of the economic benefits, so it kind of sets the already existing benefits that the United States or China is actually offering.

CHAKRABARTI: So that’s Ahmad Rizky Mardhatillah Umar at Aberystwyth University in Wales. So Professor Miller, a couple of things there. First of all, we haven’t talked about China yet. I mean, the India EU trade deal is quite interesting, but are there similar sort of deals or even soft alliances being formed b- with the, between the middle powers and China now?

MILLER: Yes, I think that China has been reaching out to middle powers for a while, right? It’s not new. So if you think about the Belt and Road Initiative which is, which actually when, when China created it was very much in line with some of the norms of the liberal international order, the idea of multilateral cooperation, facilitating trade, et cetera, and China has expanded that Belt and Road Initiative into many parts of Asia, into many parts of Africa.  So China in some ways was ahead of the curve in, in offering this. Now, of course, there’s, there are downsides to the Belt and Road Initiative. We have all heard of debt trap diplomacy and, and how some countries fell into debt with China. There’s been questions of Chinese exploitation of workers in these countries. But that kind of alternative was never offered by the United States, right? Which is why the Belt and Road Initiative was seen by the U.S. as a threat. So China did begin reaching out quite a few years ago to try and create its own network of economic partners and friends and it’s not new.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. It’s interesting because then I guess the question is, and we’ll talk about this when we come back, are the middle powers looking to China to be the new sort of stabilizing force or not?

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Miller, before we talk a little bit more about sort of China’s view or position in all of this, I wanted to go back to something that you had said about the India-EU trade agreement that’s coming up, because we do have a little bit of tape from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. And he described this new free trade deal between the EU and India, again, back in January. And this is a clip of Prime Minister Modi. You’ll hear him through an interpreter.

NARENDRA MODI [TAPE]: This FTA will boost investment between India and the European Union. It will help forge new innovation partnerships and will strengthen supply chains at a global level, which means that this is not just a trade agreement. It is a new blueprint for shared prosperity.

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Miller, a few minutes ago you had also talked about how a trade agreement of this size, because obviously India is rapidly growing, and when taken in altogether, the economic size of the European Union rivals that of the United States, and that, we could be seeing the slow emergence of new global standards because of that. That was very fascinating to me. And, because let’s be honest, you’re talking to a mostly U.S. audience what impact could that have on U.S. trade, the U.S. economy, U.S. exporters? How do you see that?

MILLER: Sure. I mean, I can give you an example of that. So, one of the things that India has agreed to, apparently, with this trade deal is slowly reducing the tariffs on automobiles from the EU, right?

So now, if you actually have EU automobiles in the Indian market, what does that mean for American car makers, right, and their exports? That’s a pretty concrete impact on the U.S. economy. Also India is a huge exporter of textiles those used to be subject to about 12% tariffs from the EU, and now India’s gonna have a duty-free market in the EU with textiles.

So if Indian textiles are sent to the EU,  and, oh, diverted away from US markets where they face tariffs, right? What does that mean when you want to buy a nice pretty top that’s 100% cotton and made in India? You go online, and where are you going to find it?

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Could this make the U.S. even less competitive globally?

MILLER: It will, yes. Somebody’s got to pay for that, right? For those tariffs. And so what I would expect is that, that top that you’d like to buy when you go online to whatever, The Gap and it’s a made-in-India product, I would expect that price to go up considerably, and you would be paying that out of pocket.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. So it’s not just that the president has levied all these enormous tariffs on just about all global trade that the United States is engaged in. It’s more, more importantly, as you’re saying, it’s that these middle powers are not sitting just waiting for the United States to lower their tariffs.

They are forging ahead and creating whole new markets for themselves, new agreements. Really, really interesting. Okay, so let’s go back to China now. And let me just get a sense of clarity from you. Do you think that, you said that China has already been sort of investing or seeking to create ties with these middle powers. Do you think that will only increase over time, or are there some drawbacks for these middle powers to closer alignment with China?

MILLER: So it is already increasing. Canada and China, for example just concluded a major trade agreement earlier this year, and that was a sea change from Canada’s relationship with China, which had reached a pretty low point over the last few years.

China is definitely stepping up and responding to middle power overtures, even from countries it did not have a good relationship with. So we are seeing that happen. I think one thing that is in the United States’ favor, however, and we have to see how that is still in the United States’ favor, I should say, is that these countries also don’t trust China, right?

They really do not trust China. So, Canada is an example where Canada has accused China of interfering in, in elections, for example,  in Canada. India, of course, is, is another example of this. So, India and China fought a border war in 1962. That border conflict was never resolved.

There’ve been skirmishes along the border and there were casualties a few years ago along the border. So India, Indian domestic public opinion is extremely anti-China. The Indian government is very wary of China. So with these middle power countries, I think the one thing that is still in the United States’ favor is that they don’t like where the United States is heading with the liberal international order, but they don’t trust China yet.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So on that note, I want to listen to someone else who basically, because of this complex dynamic that you talked about with China, who believes this sort of middle powers moment may be overstated. So this is Imran Bayoumi. He’s deputy director and resident fellow at the Atlantic Council and he calls this middle powers moment a, quote, “mirage.”

For starters, Bayoumi says actually something, very much along the lines of what you were saying earlier, Professor Miller, that these middle power countries are actually very, very diverse. They have wide-ranging values and priorities, and because of that, he doesn’t necessarily see an emerging coherent multilateral block.

IMRAN BAYOUMI [TAPE]: A lot of the Gulf countries, for example, they’re wealthy, they have a military, but they’re not rooted in a values-based system. They’re not democracies. They don’t make human rights promotion core to their identity. And then I think you have other middle powers across the Global South too that really didn’t benefit from the U.S. system. Now that there’s this opportunity to expand their power, they’re not necessarily going to go back to what they didn’t think was working for them.

CHAKRABARTI: Plus, Bayoumi says that the United States, erratic or not, simply looms too large on the global stage.

BAYOUMI: We’re not seeing the United States just withdraw. We’re seeing it become more disruptive. It’s still there. It still has all its power, and it still wants countries to act in ways that benefit its own interest. So it’s not going to just stand by and let, Canada, the U.K., other middle powers build an al- alternate world order. It still wants that influence. And I think that’s a major challenge for middle powers, where they recognize this,  many of them are still reliant on the U.S. for their trade, their economics, their military security, and they’re caught between this tension of wanting to build something on their own and recognizing where the actual source of power in the world still is.

Bayoumi says that the middle power countries might be creating trade deals among themselves, or as we’ve been talking about with Europe, but all of the members of NATO are still there, and they’re continuing to try to engage the US because frankly, it’s hard to fully break away from American superpower because of not just our financial sway, but our military might as well.

BAYOUMI: No one really wants to be the first country to do that. They all want to stay partners with the U.S. Even though the U.S. is, disruptive, there’s threats of tariffs, there’s threats of annexation towards Greenland and Canada, the military and economic power of the U.S. is still too great for them to fully break away.

And finally, as we’ve been talking about regarding China, Bayoumi adds that even though the U.S. is less reliable as a global stabilizing force, those middle power countries know that long term, maybe they cannot place their faith in China.

BAYOUMI: I think middle powers, most of them understand that even though China is taking steps to portray itself as a stable, reliable actor in its current moment, it remains incredibly coercive. It’s not a reliable trading partner. It’s not compatible with this kind of values-based world order that a, a lot of liberal democracies seem to still want to rebuild. And so I think for many middle powers, they’re really caught between the U.S. and China. They have the US, their long-standing ally, kind of the anchor of this international system, who’s no longer willing to play that role. But China is, is really no better an alternative.

CHAKRABARTI: So that’s Imran Bayoumi, deputy director and resident fellow at the Atlantic Council. Professor Miller, your response?

MILLER: Yeah, I think that’s really interesting. So, I do agree with with the statements about China. I think just as I said, that China’s not a trusted partner, and, and these countries don’t trust China, and they have good reason to not trust China.

And so I think that is to the United States’ advantage. I think the problem, however, is that when you build an international order, any country that builds an international order, any superpower hegemon, you don’t do it by yourself, right? You need buy-in. Like, you’re building the order to bring together a group of countries that benefit from it and will therefore maintain it with you, right?

You don’t impose an order by yourself, maintain it by yourself, and expect buy-in unless you’re prepared to…  really cannot think of an example of a group of countries where you have a hegemon just maintaining an order all by itself with no buy-in from any other states, right?

You have to have some kind of buy-in that helps you maintain that order. Now, the root of that buy-in is ultimately trust. Of course, it’s power, right? Economic power and military power is preponderant, but trust is really important, and I think this is where… I mean, he brought up NATO as an example … and I think NATO is a great example of this because when you look at NATO, what is the deterrent value of NATO? It’s on the credibility of collective defense, right? There’s no court that can compel a country to act with NATO, right? So there’s no NATO court. There’s no NATO enforcement body that can force a member to send troops. Even though NATO states that an attack on one is an attack on all, even Article 5 will state that it, that each country has to take such action as it deems necessary.

That action could just be a diplomatic statement, right? It doesn’t have to be troops sent, sent to help. So ultimately, what makes NATO work is the trust that exists among these countries, that they are friends and partners and allies, right? That they’re there for each other because there’s no way to enforce it.

What’s gonna happen is if you don’t participate in an attack, your reputation is at stake, and it’s your reputation that’ll be lost, right? You will. We expect NATO countries to respond. So therefore, when you have the fraying of trust, particularly if you say, “We would like to annex Greenland,” well, Denmark, Greenland is a part of Denmark, and,  Denmark is a NATO ally.

What that does is it slowly chips away at that trust. Right? It’s a chipping of the trust. So yes, on one hand, because the United States is still preponderant, right, it is a great power it does have overwhelming military and economic  power, and yes, countries have to respond to that.

But as you have this fraying of trust over time that leads to the lessening of the bonds. And what holds the order together in large parts are these norms and rules that are based on trust. Because even the United States is not a global policeman.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Well, since we’ve been mentioning NATO and Europe quite a bit in this last part of the conversation, let’s just quickly listen to Finnish President Alexander Stubb. He too was at Davos in January, and he said that the world is at a pivotal moment.

ALEXANDER STUBB [TAPE]: For us, this is the 1918, 1945, or 1989 moment of our generation. It’s a moment when the world order balance and dynamics are changing. If we want to preserve the liberal world order, we need to give agency to those countries around the world which feel that the current order was built 80 years ago in the image of the West, and especially the United States. So give more power to the rest of the world, because I still think that there are more multilateralists, in this world than there are transactionalists.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Also at Davos in January, it’s actually quite interesting how often this came up. This is Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission.

URSULA VON DER LEYEN [TAPE]: We will only be able to capitalize on this opportunity if we recognize that this change is permanent. Of course, nostalgia is part of our human story, but nostalgia will not bring back the old order. And playing for time and hoping for things to revert soon will not fix the structural dependencies we have. If this change is permanent, then Europe must change permanently too. It is time to seize this opportunity and build a new independent Europe.

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Miller, we’ve got about two minutes left here, and I want to ask you, thus far we haven’t or you haven’t talked about the emergence of a one new anchoring force in this middle powers moment. So I wonder if that’s potentially a downside here, a sort of fragmentation of not only the previous alliances we were talking about, but even the very trust that you had mentioned.

MILLER: I think it is a fragmentation, right? So you’re seeing the liberal international order crumble, and remember, the liberal international order is the first truly global order, right?

If you think of international orders before, in the past, there were smaller orders, perhaps easier to enforce bind together with force, but here you have a global order. What you now have is fragmentation because these countries are putting together their own relationships among each other, right?

And we don’t know what kind of norms and rules and standards will be elevated and emerge that’ll stand as a contrast to the liberal international order. We see it happening. We see the, the order fraying. We see this, this fragmentation occurring. We see these little clubs forming, but we don’t yet see the contours of a global order and it’s not coming from China either.

That’s the interesting part, right? Because China has also not offered a concrete China-led alternative to the liberal international order. So I think the next decade or so will be absolutely crucial to see what emerges and which countries emerge to lead it, if it’s not the United States.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.