The Return of “Middle Powers”

The top image of the Berlin Wall by Sharon Emerson is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

The previous post on this topic commented on the implications of Mark Carney’s Davos speech. I am encouraged that the vision he began to articulate about a multipolar world raises the possibility of collective global action that aligns climate action and economic activity. Hopefully, we will look back in five years and marvel at how profound the shift was.

The idea of “middle powers” is not new. What is new is the context in which they are operating.

The architecture of the current world order was established after World War Two. During the Cold War, middle powers largely aligned with one of two blocs. After 1991, they operated within a US-led order that, for all its flaws, provided a degree of predictability. Today, neither condition holds.

What distinguishes the current moment is that middle powers are being pulled into a structural leadership role, not because they seek dominance, but because global problems increasingly fall between the cracks of great-power rivalry.

Climate change is the clearest example.

The physics of climate do not wait for geopolitical alignment. Emissions reductions, regeneration, adaptation, and resilience require coordination at scale – across supply chains, finance, standards, and knowledge systems. Yet the institutions designed to deliver that coordination are increasingly paralysed.

Middle powers are therefore faced with a choice: wait for alignment among superpowers, or build functional cooperation where they can. Mark Carney (see our earlier post) suggests operating in the tension between values and pragmatism.

This is where the notion of climate “clubs” (collectives of nations), aligned industrial policy, shared carbon accounting, and coordinated finance becomes geopolitically significant. These are not abstract governance ideas; they are mechanisms that reshape incentives in the real economy.

Importantly, this form of leadership does not rely on moral purity. Many middle powers are deeply compromised by fossil fuel extraction, industrial emissions, or agricultural impacts. But that is precisely why they matter. They sit where transition is hardest, and therefore where credible pathways are most valuable.

Seen this way, middle-power climate cooperation is about systems repair: stabilising energy systems, reducing exposure to shocks, and maintaining social cohesion during transition.

This is not a rejection of multilateralism. It is an adaptation to its limits.

Beyond Washington vs Beijing: Climate Action in a Post-Unipolar World

Much climate commentary still frames the world through a US–China binary. This is understandable, but increasingly misleading.

China is now the world’s largest emitter, and also the world’s largest manufacturer of clean energy technologies. The United States remains a scientific and financial powerhouse, and is also politically volatile on climate. Neither alone can deliver global stability. A middle-power approach offers a third pathway: alignment without allegiance.

Rather than choosing sides, middle powers can set rules and standards that shape behaviour across blocs. Trade, finance, and regulation become climate tools. Participation becomes conditional on transparency, carbon intensity, and social safeguards.

In this framing, China is neither saviour nor villain, but a participant whose scale can be channelled toward better outcomes if governance conditions are right. The United States becomes one actor among many, sometimes leading, sometimes lagging, but no longer singular.

This is not idealism. It is geopolitical realism under planetary constraints.

The deeper point is this: climate action now depends less on declarations and more on institutional evolution. New coalitions will not replace existing ones overnight, but they can make older structures less central.

That is how systems change.

This post was developed with the assistance of AI as a thinking and drafting partner. Responsibility for the analysis and views expressed rests entirely with the author.