We’ve all read them. The policy briefs explaining how Donald Trump should approach Kim Jong-un, how summit diplomacy could be structured, what concessions should be offered, and what outcomes should be pursued. More are suredly being drafted as you read this, and the smooth think-tank media monkeys and the social media algorithms will ensure we’re all exposed to them.

Think-tanks survive not by giving good advice, but by demonstrating influence. Influence requires visibility. Visibility requires participation in every major policy debate, whether or not the participants have any realistic prospect of affecting the outcome. There is something deeply absurd about this—think-tank Korea experts are offering advice to a man who has spent his political career ridiculing expertise, dismissing professional knowledge, and ignoring advice he does not like. Let’s think that through for a few minutes.

First, Trump doesn’t read. This is not a controversial. Throughout his political career, Trump has openly ridiculed expertise, dismissed specialist knowledge, and shown little patience for lengthy policy analysis. We’re not even sure ANY advice gets to him cos he surrounds himself with loyalists whose primary qualification is personal loyalty rather than technical competence. Traditional policy processes don’t interest him.

This creates a perverse incentive. If think-tanks want influence, they must find ways to speak to an audience that does not value expertise. Over time, they begin adjusting themselves accordingly. Analysis becomes rationalization. Rationalization becomes accommodation. Accommodation eventually becomes promotion.

The result is that organizations ostensibly dedicated to providing independent expertise find themselves explaining, defending, and ultimately legitimizing the actions of an administration that has little interest in expertise itself. The closer analysts attempt to get to power, the greater the temptation to tell power what it wants to hear.

Second, Trump’s diplomatic record gives absolutely no reason for optimism. Unconventional leadership can produce breakthroughs. Incompetent leadership does not. The summits with North Korea generated headlines but no lasting settlement. It was a pattern of disruption without durable outcomes. The belief that another Trump initiative toward North Korea would somehow succeed where previous efforts failed requires a level of faith unsupported by evidence. Recent events elsewhere make it even scarier. Trump’s Iran debacle is a monumental f%$k up.

To hear Trump’s 42nd deal to end the Iran war on the eve of a White House cage fight and conclude that Korea needs Trump’s attention is some f%^&%d up magic mushroom s%^t. It really requires a solid rethink.

Whatever one thinks of North Korea policy, there’s no reason to believe that impulsive, personality-driven diplomacy offers a path toward stability on the Korean Peninsula. Those who genuinely care about Korea should be cautious about encouraging not only another round of summit-driven spectacle but also the risks of an almost certainly senile senior with increasingly unpredictable behavior.

Third, renewed Trump engagement would likely accelerate long-term doubts about the alliance rather than strengthen it. The most significant development on the Korean Peninsula today is not North Korea. It is the growing debate over the future of South Korea’s relationship with the United States.

For decades, alliance managers could assume a broad consensus regarding American leadership. That consensus has ended. Questions about reliability, strategic priorities, burden sharing, and long-term commitment are now openly discussed even amidst conservatives. The uncertainty does not originate in Seoul. It originates in Washington.

Every episode of political turbulence in the United States reinforces a simple question: should South Korea permanently tie its future to a partner that appears increasingly unpredictable? Trump is at the center of this question. His transactional approach, his hostility toward traditional diplomatic practice, and his tendency to personalize statecraft all deepen concerns about American reliability.

More than anything else—it is his absolute incapacity to achieve outcomes, whether its tariffs, bilateral relations, alliances, war negotiations, or war itself—he has failed. If he turns to Korea, he will also fail there. Another Trump failure would be disastrous for the Korean Peninsula.

We really don’t need another think-tank brief on how Trump should approach Kim Jong-un. My advice for CSIS, Brookings, and friends? Write a brief detailing the end of the alliance because that’s the only outcome Trump has assured.

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It’s the end of the semester and between writing deadlines and teaching doldrums, academics gather to compare summer plans for conferences and research trips with barely concealed envy. As you probably are aware, once the ringmaster has introduced the clowns and the show is well underway, I like to throw a few left-handers and see how people react. Inevitably, these left-handers involve middle powers. This time it was Australia and Korea.

What would South Korea do if it had the resources of Australia? What would South Korea do if Hoju-do replaced Jeju-do as the southernmost province? What could be achieved if South Korea and Australia had a real strategic partnership, rather than one of those pointless, dime-a-dozen, rubber chicken diplomatic word salad Australian politician “is Korea a tropical country?” type agreements? What would Korea do?

The first thing it would do is stop exporting dirt! Not completely, of course. Australia would still export iron ore and the host of other minerals it digs up and sends around the world. But a Korean government would look at Australia’s economic model and immediately ask a simple question: why are we sending away the raw materials before the value is added?

Australia digs up iron ore, loads it onto ships, sends it overseas, and congratulates itself on another successful export. South Korea buys the ore, turns it into steel, uses that steel to build ships, cars, trains, machinery, and military equipment, and then sells many of those products around the world at a considerable profit.

Around three generations of Australian political leaders became messianic converts to 1980s University Economics 101. Ricardian comparative advantage ceased being an economic tool and became an article of religious faith. If Australia had iron ore, it should export iron ore. If someone else made the steel, built the ships, and captured the profits and jobs, that was simply the market at work. So Australia kicked the can down the road and kept digging things up, while others became rich making things.

If Korea ran Australia, that would change. Steelworks would be built near the mines. Why ship raw materials thousands of kilometres when you can add value before they leave the country? The objective would not be simply to dig resources out of the ground faster. It would be to capture more of the industrial chain.

Then Korea would look at Australia’s shipping industry—or rather, the lack of one. Australia is one of the world’s largest trading nations. Almost everything enters or leaves the country by sea. Yet Australia possesses a minuscule commercial shipping sector and builds almost none of the vessels upon which its prosperity depends. To a Korean policymaker, this would be extraordinary and absurd.

South Korea became wealthy not simply because it manufactures products. It became wealthy because it mastered the entire maritime ecosystem. It mines nothing, imports vast quantities of raw materials, turns them into high-value goods, builds many of the ships that move those goods, and operates world-class ports to export them.

Australia possesses the resources. Korea possesses the expertise. The obvious answer would be to do more together.

Imagine steelworks located close to iron ore deposits. Imagine shipyards built near them. Imagine Australian steel feeding Australian and Korean shipbuilding projects. Imagine bulk carriers, container ships, naval auxiliaries, and even submarines being built with Australian materials and Korean industrial expertise. Instead of exporting iron ore and importing ships, Australia could participate in the entire production chain. The same logic applies to infrastructure.

Australians have spent decades debating high-speed rail. Koreans would have spent those decades building it. The east coast of Australia contains the overwhelming majority of the country’s population and economic activity. Yet moving people between its major cities remains slower than it should be. Maybe it’s got something to do with QANTAS and the lifetime club membership for politicians? I don’t know, but Korea’s answer would not be another fast rail feasibility study. It would be fast rail construction.

Likewise with ports. Australia treats ports as isolated pieces of infrastructure to be sold away like it’s 1980s England and WHAM! can still wake you up before they go-go. South Korea would ensure ports become hubs within a broader industrial strategy linking rail, manufacturing, energy, logistics, and exports. Strategic national planning.

Energy would receive similar attention. Australia possesses vast solar resources, abundant uranium reserves, and enormous opportunities for power generation. Korea would not waste years arguing over whether the future belongs to nuclear power or renewable energy. It would build whichever combination generated abundant, reliable, and affordable electricity. Cheap energy is not an environmental policy. It is an essential industrial policy. Why Australians pay more for gas than Koreans, I’ll never understand.

Heavy industry requires power. Steel mills require power. Manufacturing requires power. Data centres require power. If Australia wants to move beyond exporting raw materials, it must ensure the energy necessary to support industrial expansion.

The automotive sector would inevitably return to the agenda. Korea transformed itself into a global automotive powerhouse within a generation. Looking at Australia, Korean planners would see a wealthy nation with stable institutions, plentiful resources, and access to Asian markets—the fourth most populist nation to its immediate north! The mystery would not be why Australia should manufacture vehicles. The mystery would be why it stopped.

Defence would be approached in exactly the same way. Australia currently seeks greater strategic self-reliance while maintaining a relatively limited defence-industrial base. Korea would view those two objectives as inseparable. Shipyards, steelworks, electronics manufacturing, missile production, and naval construction would be understood as both economic and strategic assets.

The submarine debate illustrates the point perfectly. Australia wants nuclear-powered submarines. South Korea builds some of the world’s most advanced conventional submarines. Rather than treating these as competing options, a Korean approach would pursue both. Conventional submarines could be built sooner. Nuclear submarines could follow later. Korea’s strategy—why build our own, why not build our own and export them to every other schmuck country that can’t! Most importantly, industrial capability would be developed continuously rather than postponed for decades.

Another angle? Australia’s migration debate focuses on filling immediate shortages in retail, hospitality, and low-productivity service sectors. At its heart, everyone knows the real aim is to keep the housing bubble afloat. Australia has immigration priority quotas that include yoga teachers for #%$^ sake! A Korean government would ask a different question entirely.

Which migrants help build industries? Which migrants help operate steelworks, shipyards, energy projects, rail networks, advanced manufacturing facilities, and defence industries? Refugees? Wha? Why?

The U.N. Convention on Refugees is today more abused than a suburban Sydney pub poker machine. Since its refugee system was introduced in the 1990s, South Korea has granted refugee status to 1,544 people out of roughly 122,000 asylum applications, or just under three percent. It does allow humanitarian stay, which grants protection, but by maintaining its strict interpretation severely limits the economic rationale into which the system has devolved. Instead, Korea asks which immigrants fit best into the society? The goal is not simply population growth. It is national development.

Oh, and Australia has a housing problem? Over the last twenty odd years, Korea built a second capital city, Sejong City, roughly the size of Canberra, on top of a tiny rural village. Around 400,000 residents housed in just over two decades!

Australia and South Korea are almost perfectly complementary economies. One possesses resources, land, energy, and capital. The other possesses industrial expertise, manufacturing capability, engineering talent, and decades of experience transforming national wealth into productive capacity. Yet despite endless talk of strategic partnership, the relationship remains modest. There’s no imagination or even sense of reality.

If Korea ran Australia, the focus would not be on exporting more iron ore. It would be on exporting steel, then ships, then trains, then cars, then advanced manufactured products built using Australian resources (and Korean expertise). The extractive banana republic (that ashamedly isn’t even a republic) that Australia has become, would end.

As the night went on, the ideas that the academics put forward between beers and mouthfuls of squid included Korean-led Special Economic Zones to stimulate joint investment, promote joint manufacturing, and accelerate industrial transformation; dedicated education and industrial visas for Korean investments; a Joint Economic Zones operating under development favorable regulations; a customs union; mutual recognition and labor mobility agreements; and my favorite—the relocation of a team or even integration of the two country’s football leagues.

Unfortunately, none of this would ever be seriously contemplated in Australia. Most Australian politicians still think of Korea as if it were the 1980s. They visit the country, are led around the U.N. Korean War cemetery and are praised incessantly for the nation’s sacrifice and soak it up as if they were part of the effort. I once heard an Australian politician sarcastically remark “Why drive a Hyundai, when you can drive a Mercedes?” before falling into line with the decision to secure the Korean-designed Redback Infantry Fighting Vehicles in 2023. In the back of their minds (and I’ve literally heard this), Australia has something to “teach” Korea. This could not be further from the truth.

At the end of the night, the consensus was that moving ten million Koreans to Australia, and ten million Australians to Korea, would improve both countries. Australia would speed up, and Korea would slow down. The last remark, though, made me particularly proud to be living here—the coffee in Seoul, now beats the coffee in Melbourne.

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One of the weirdest takes in recent strategic debates is the idea that middle powers can protect global trade routes. The argument is everywhere: South Korea’s nervous talks on energy and a blue-water navy, Australia’s near idiotic debate on AUKUS, and Canada’s dithering on submarine procurement.

The middle power baloney spiel goes like this: the international order is less stable, so middle powers must step up. They must protect shipping. They must defend sea lanes. They must uphold the rules-based order. They’re trading states and must preserve global trade routes through determination, sufficient investment, and of course, a sprinkle of middle power magic: cooperation and coalition-building. Absolute baloney.

The problem is, the moment a middle power or coalition of middle powers secures and maintains global trade routes, they are no longer middle powers, by definition. They’ve reached the pinnacle of the international hierarchy.

There is a reason that historians speak of the Pax Britannica, Pax Americana, or hesitatingly about Pax Sinica. The ability to guarantee access to global trade routes is not a middle-power activity. It’s a defining function of great powers.

Maintaining open sea lanes requires far more than a collection of warships. It demands global logistics networks, overseas bases, intelligence systems, repair facilities, replenishment vessels, surveillance assets, and the capacity to sustain operations across multiple oceans simultaneously. This is not merely expensive. It is a task that requires the resources of a great power.

Consider what’s required for a trading state to guarantee the uninterrupted flow of commerce from the Middle East to East Asia. Forces would need to be present around the Strait of Hormuz, across the Indian Ocean, the Strait of Malacca, throughout the South China Sea, and around home waters.

Naval vessels spend substantial time in maintenance, training, and transit, maintaining a single ship on station requires three or four vessels in total. What begins as a seemingly modest commitment quickly expands into dozens of major warships, submarines, support vessels, maritime patrol aircraft, and overseas facilities. The numbers rapidly well exceed the capabilities of middle powers.

This reality exposes a deeper problem in contemporary debate. Much of the discussion assumes that if American maritime dominance declines, a coalition of middle powers can somehow fill the gap. The mathematics suggest otherwise.

A coalition can distribute burdens, but it does not magically create the logistics, command structures, political unity, or economic resources necessary to sustain a global naval order. Collective wishful thinking is not a substitute for capability. Then there’s the risk of defection.

Coalitions of middle powers face a persistent temptation to defect. All members benefit from secure trade routes, but each has an incentive to let others bear the costs of maintaining them. As deployments become more expensive and risks increase, governments naturally seek to conserve resources and prioritize national interests. The result is a classic collective action problem: everyone wants the benefits of maritime security, but not everyone wants to pay for it.

The defection risk increases exponentially when a coalition threatens the interests of a great power—and inherently, any attempt to secure sea lanes would threaten the interests of at least one great power.

On top of all this, technology has transformed the contest for maritime order. As demonstrated in Iran, even great powers face major hurdles to absolute dominance.

Advances in drones, precision-guided munitions, and long-range missile systems have altered the balance between maritime attack and continental defence. As the cost of threatening ships declines and the cost of protecting them rises, middle powers face growing pressure to invest in capabilities that defend territory and deny access rather than project power across vast distances.

That’s what makes Australia’s bungled two-step, sometimes cha-cha towards nuclear powered submarines with AUKUS so feckless. Between the ridiculous amounts of money being wasted, and the ever-decreasing likelihood of securing any subs at all, the ultimate result of securing them will be to decrease national sovereignty and to position Australia in sharp opposition to the dominant regional state.

Forget independence, or even capable partner with shared interests, AUKUS positions Australia as a manipulated middle power patsy in a regional and global contest.

This is the nature of structural realism. Middle powers always exist in a hierarchy. The top layer of that hierarchy determines the rules—including the rules and norms of maritime order. Middle powers can either fight against that order and suffer, or work within that order to strengthen and mold the rules to their liking. They cannot establish a new order! Maritime order has always rested on great powers. Great powers shape it. Others operate within it.

Middle powers like South Korea and Australia enjoyed the benefits of a maritime system they did not have to build and did little to maintain. As that system becomes more contested, the temptation is to believe that enough cooperation, enough rhetoric, and enough strategic optimism can preserve it. That temptation is misplaced.

The challenge facing middle powers is not how to take over the management of global trade routes or to protect their own global shipping routes. The challenge is how to survive and adapt to a world where the rules have changed. Middle powers cannot lead without the acquiescence of great powers. They must adapt.

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The Shangri-la Dialogue is where openness and transparency builds confidence and security. Though… not always. Justin Bassi, the Executive Director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) wrote an aticle in The Strategist, strangely entitled with a full sentence: “Sorry, Mr Carney. At Shangri-La, Indo-Pacific countries backed the rules-based order.”

Now this piece, in its descriptive and somewhat sarcastic title targeted at Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, highlights the author’s perception that most of speeches at the Dialogue supported a rules-based order. As he noted “...the region was rejecting Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Davos declaration that the rules-based order was over.” So the author is pro rules-based-order???

Mark Carney, has been going around the world saying the US-led liberal-international order (a rules based order) ended because of Trump’s actions, such as threatening Greenland, upsetting NATO, attacking allies, and weakening the international trading system. He argues that middle powers must step up and work together to revive the rules-based order. So then, he is also pro rules-based-order???

Hmmm… Confused yet??? Just wait.

Justin Bassi is the Executive Director of the Australia Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI). Well known in the strategic space for being rather pro-American, and attracting Chinese ire. So, accepting the “rules based order” is in his view, being pro-American, and rather anti-Chinese.

Carney on the other hand, believes the rules-based order needs to be revived by middle powers, making it implicit that this can be done without the U.S. It requires European states, ASEAN states, India, Australia, South Korea, Japan—essentially anyone who’ll listen. Based on his closing words, and at the risk of putting words into his mouth, Bassi would likely find this anti-American—maybe even pro-Chinese.

So in sum, the rules based order with America, is pro-American, and anti-Chinese; and the rules-based order without America, is anti-American, and pro-Chinese.

Now, going a step further, a major speaker at the Shangri-La Dialogue was Pete Hegseth. Hegseth praised Indo-Pacific nations for better arming themselves to support ‘peace and prosperity’. More weapons helps peace. He also said that the U.S. was a Pacific nation and wouldn’t be pushed out by China.

Now putting China aside for a moment, Hegseth justified continued U.S. involvement in Asia without having to defend the broader and more contested proposition that the United States is inherently an “Indo-Pacific” nation. That wording is noteworthy. It suggests that even while discussing the Indo-Pacific region, he grounded America’s legitimacy in the older and less controversial identity of being a Pacific nation, not an Indo-Pacific nation. That is a subtle but potentially significant distinction.

So, the rules based order with America, is pro-American, and anti-Chinese; and the rules-based order without America, is anti-American, and pro-Chinese, and you’re either a Pacific nation that’s not getting pushed out of Asia, or an Indo-Pacific nation that needs to better buy more weapons for peace in Asia.

Now turning to China and what Justin Bassi calls the elephant in the room, even though India was also in the room and is often associated with elephants.

America, which is Pacific nation, but by specific exclusive labeling, not necessarily an Indo-Pacific nation, will apparently not be pushed out of Asia by China, which does not call itself a Pacific nation, nor of course does it call itself an Indo-Pacific nation.

Now America is currently being pushed out of West Asia by Iran and not China, but most people know it’s in a global competition with China. Now, the U.S. will soon decide on selling arms to Taiwan, so that America—a Pacific nation—doesn’t get pushed out of Asia. Taiwan, is a middle power, but not a state nor a nation, so can’t be a Pacific or an Indo-Pacific nation, and is inherently part of China.

America can’t defend Taiwan because it’s a small island just under 3000 kms from Guam and 8000 kms from Hawaii, and recent evidence shows that continental defence is much more effective than maritime attack. America doesn’t even have enough armaments to defend Taiwan but does want South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and Australia to buy more armaments, but at the same time, can’t fill it its own needs. Instead, it’s selling second hand submarines to Australia and postponing Tomahawk missile deliveries to Japan, while South Korea is filling its own orders and looking to sell more.

Now, in-between push-ups, Pete Hegseth has previously rejected the rules based order and its accompanying and annoying rule-of-law and international norms. One shouldn’t be distracted by “empty globalist rhetoric about the rules-based international order...” unless you have more guns. If there is a rules based order, he basically doesn’t want America to be part of it—but a rules-based order without America, is anti-American, and pro-Chinese?

According to Bassi “If the US doesn’t sell arms to Taiwan, it will confirm that the old democratic order has been replaced by a new Sino-led order and that we are all playing by Chinese rules.” This would be a rules based order—but a rules based order with America, is pro-American, and anti-Chinese; and the rules-based order without America, is anti-American, and pro-Chinese. So, he sees the future of the rules based order assured, but just which rules based order uncertain and dependent on whether the U.S. sells arms to Taiwan. But if they do sell arms, this would be upholding the rules based order, and Hegseth is opposed to this, unless you have lots of guns, and America can’t sell any guns, meaning it’s anti-American, and pro-Chinese?

This all happened because of the Shangri-La Dialogue. The Shangri-La Dialogue is held at the Shangri-La Hotel, which is a swish place just off Orchard Road in Singapore, named after Shangri-La, a fictional paradise described in the 1933 novel Lost Horizon by James Hilton, but the dialogue is hosted by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), not the Hotel.

The irony, of course, is that the modern Shangri-La Dialogue bears the name of a fictional romantic refuge from geopolitics high in the mountains. In reality, it’s a high-class business hotel a few hundred meters from the seaside island city’s more sordid, infamous hooker tower that was meant to be cleaned up but wasn’t so much if you’re in intelligence. It’s here that military leaders and arms dealers debate the Pacific, the Indo-Pacific, middle powers, arming for peace, the rules-based order, America and China—usually at the former not the latter.

Mr. Carney, who is the evil-incarnate of both Bassi and Hegseth, is clearly similarly anti-American and pro-Chinese. He was not at the Shangri-La Dialogue, but his spiritual presence clearly was because Justin Bassi wrote an article about it.

Any questions? Confused?

Sometimes, I kind of wish strategists could just say what they think in real simple terms. It’d make it a lot easier. Anyways, read the article and see if you can make sense out of it.

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East Asia Forum (EAF) was once a great space for debate on international relations and East Asia. It was open to ideas and encouraged debate. Unfortunately, it’s no longer a place for debate—it’s now an ideological church, and Mark Carney’s ideas that middle powers can restore the liberal-international order are the gospel.

How did this happen? Communities of specialists do sometimes shift from evaluating reality to defending assumptions. When that happens, epistemic communities become echo chambers and analysis becomes advocacy. This is epistemic capture.

It occurs when a community becomes so invested in a particular worldview that alternative interpretations are no longer seriously considered. Certain assumptions become untouchable. Certain conclusions become expected. The role of analysis quietly changes from discovering what is true to reaffirming what is already believed.

Over the years, I’ve submitted many pieces to EAF. Some were accepted, some were rejected. It’s the nature of the academic game and I was never nae too fussed. What one place doesn’t publish, another will. However, never was a piece held with no response - not even a polite “this doesn’t fit our agenda at the moment,” until a recent submission to EAF. It seems the EAF campaign on middle power leadership cannot accept an academic response. No debate will be allowed.

My piece pointed out that middle powers cannot rebuild the liberal-international order. It gave a reasoned academic argument. I assume this did not fit the baloney-machine belief that middle powers can (a) secure maritime trade routes; (b) set the agenda for the global trading system; or (c) preserve the international order and reinforce rules-based arrangements.

The EAF position is now pretty familiar. The gist of it came out in an editorial, which argued middle powers are “pursuing deeper cooperation to safeguard sovereignty, reinforce rules-based arrangements and reduce dependence on any single power” and that “stronger middle-power coalitions” can “rebuild elements of a more resilient international order.”

It has since been pushed in every-second EAF piece: As American leadership weakens and great-power competition intensifies, countries such as Australia, Canada, South Korea, Japan, and various European states can step forward. Through coalition-building, norm entrepreneurship, diplomatic activism, and multilateral cooperation, these states will preserve the rules-based order and prevent international fragmentation. Yadda, yadda, yadda…

It is an attractive narrative—and let’s be certain, not short on supporters. There’s a whole host of ex-politicians and senior academics willing to spin this shit from the pulpit and lead a southern revival feel-good spiritual sing-a-long.

However, there are three key points that such sermons glide over.

First, if the distribution of power that sustained the order has changed, why should we expect the order itself to remain unchanged? International orders are not self-sustaining entities. They are products of underlying power relationships. The liberal international order emerged during a period of overwhelming American dominance and was maintained by that dominance. If the balance of power has shifted, it would be extraordinary if the order remained untouched. Yet many analyses implicitly assume that institutions, norms, and rules can somehow survive independently of the power structures that created and enforced them.

Second, what makes middle powers able to lead? The liberal international order was not created by middle powers. It was built under the protection of overwhelming American military, economic, technological, and financial dominance. Institutions, norms, and rules mattered, but they mattered because they rested upon a foundation of power. Leadership requires the ability to provide public goods, absorb costs, enforce rules, and shape the strategic calculations of others. Middle powers have historically operated within systems created by great powers. They have often been influential participants, but participation is not the same as leadership. To assume otherwise is to confuse diplomatic activism with systemic influence.

Third, even if you hold a belief in middle powers having the capacity to lead, why would you focus on states whose relative position has long since declined? Australia’s successful middle power initiatives were built through diplomatic specialization, innovative and creative policy facilitated through a close academic-policymaker nexus, steady and well-planned diplomatic groundwork, and an ability to secure the support or at least not outright opposition of great powers. Central to this was the maintenance well-funded and well-trained diplomatic personnel. Australia’s capacity to sustain such action has long passed.

The persistent focus on Australian leadership says less about Australia’s actual capacity to shape systemic outcomes than it does about the assumptions and preferences of those making the argument. It reflects a preference for continuity. It allows policymakers and analysts to imagine a future in which disruption can be managed without difficult choices. It promises agency in a period increasingly defined by structural constraints.

Australia was undoubtedly a player in the formation of the UN and its early institutionalization. It played a large role in steering institutions towards a more inclusive and representative structure—always in self-interest of course. Those days are gone. I said as much in a recent South China Morning Post op-ed.

Australia’s role in APEC emerged at a moment of favourable strategic conditions, strong bureaucratic capacity, expanding economic globalization, and crucially, support from the United States and regional great powers. Every middle power success story from the era has one feature in common - the support or at least acquiescence of the dominant great power.

By contrast, Australia’s efforts with the Asia Pacific Community proposal appeared at a time of historically weakened bureaucratic capacity, within a fractured strategic environment marked by intensifying great power rivalry, weaker regional consensus, and little appetite from major powers for institutional redesign. It failed and was quietly shelved within a year.

More recently, initiatives that Australia participated in, such as MIKTA or the NATO Indo-pacific Four (IP4) were the last gasps of breathe as liberal-international middle power era died a slow death. Carney’s recent missives are the table-rattling incantations of a middle power spiritualist medium.

This is where epistemic capture becomes so visible. At EAF, the assumption that middle powers can and should uphold the liberal international order is no longer treated as a hypothesis requiring evidence. It is treated as a starting point. Every piece begins from the premise that middle powers can take up the slack. The debate revolves around how they should act, not whether the objective itself is realistic.

Alternative possibilities receive no attention. What if middle powers are not system managers but system adapters? What if their primary strategic function is not to preserve an existing order but to adjust to a changing one? What if accommodation, restraint, and risk reduction are more rational responses than ambitious efforts to shape the global balance?

These questions do not receive equal consideration because they challenge the underlying assumptions of the discourse itself.

This is the hallmark of epistemic capture. Certain conclusions become difficult to imagine not because they have been disproven, but because they sit outside the accepted boundaries of discussion spun by a small group of like-minded academics and their sycophant wannabes.

The problem is, epistemic capture produces strategic surprise. When analysts become committed to a particular worldview, they struggle to recognise evidence that contradicts it. They underestimate the possibility of systemic change. They dismiss alternative futures as unlikely or undesirable. Most importantly, they fail to prepare policymakers for outcomes that fall outside established expectations.

The lesson is not that experts should be ignored. It is that expert communities require intellectual competition. Assumptions must be challenged. Consensus should be treated with caution. The more widely accepted an idea becomes, the more important it is to scrutinize its foundations.

What’s really sad is that the most senior academics who created the EAF once played roles in the creation of APEC. They fought and were able to be heard amidst voices that opposed them. Now, the institution they created stymies debate.

Perhaps it’s representative of what Australian universities have become? Shutting down academic departments in favor of institutes serving government and industry, appointing chancellors because they fit into the political circles of power, and letting the student experience turn into Boxing Day Sales at a suburban Westfield Shopping Mall.

The belief that middle powers can lead and restore the liberal international order may ultimately prove correct. Equally, it may just leave a few floundering states clinging to the remnants of a long gone international order. It at least should be openly debated.

It’s said that Australia as a middle power punched above its weight. Well, it’s now more like a punch-drunk boxer on their second come-back from retirement launching a bare-knuckle back-street career with the ability to take head blows as their only strength. Somewhere along the lines, the EAF decided to punt on not only a win but a return to the world championship.

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If you hang around academics in Seoul long enough, sooner or later the idea of Korea becoming a neutral state will materialize. It’s like an academic emergency escape hatch—the kind of eye-catching project that emerges when the grants dry up, the fellowship applications finished, and the next sabbatical still three years away.

It’s usually first discussed sometime after the third round of late-night drinking: “I’ve got a new project. It’s about U.S. troops leaving, unification, and becoming a neutral state”—delivered each time with the wide-eyed sincerity of someone convinced they’re the first person to ever say it.

Personally, I love the idea. Unfortunately, it’s the kind of brain fart that sounds cool because it ignores basic reality—neutrality is not simply declared. It’s permitted. Let me explain.

During the Cold War, neutrality survived because the international system allowed space for it. The bipolar order created buffers, gray zones, and carefully managed ambiguities. States such as Finland, Austria, and Sweden existed between blocs not because they were militarily invulnerable, but because both Washington and Moscow tolerated—and at times even preferred—a degree of strategic ambiguity.

The emerging international order is less tolerant of states sitting comfortably between rival camps. Without going back to Thucydides and questions of neutrality, let’s just say that for a long time, when power shifts, the desire of great powers to allow neutrality decreases.

We’ve seen the willingness of great powers to allow neutrality decline over the last decade. Economic interdependence has been increasingly weaponized. Technology systems have fragmented. Supply chains are now becoming strategic assets. Security guarantees are being tied to ideological expectations. States are now pressured to choose sides not only militarily, but economically, technologically, diplomatically, and even culturally.

This is what makes Sweden and Finland’s entry into NATO historically significant. These were not merely policy shifts. They were the erosion of deeply institutionalized neutrality identities that had survived for generations.

If even Sweden and Finland concluded that strategic ambiguity was no longer sustainable, smaller and more vulnerable middle powers must pay attention.

So what about Korea becoming a neutral state? The reverse movement—from alliance dependence toward neutrality or armed autonomy—is far rarer and much harder.

It only becomes possible under specific structural conditions: when alliance guarantees begin to look unreliable; when a dominant patron appears overstretched or distracted; when geography offers strategic depth; when great powers tolerate buffer zones; and when a state possesses sufficient military capacity to make neutrality credible rather than symbolic. Arguably, the Korea case is heading in this direction. This is probably why we’re talking about it again.

Quiet discussions surrounding “armed neutrality,” “strategic autonomy,” and even “Finlandization” are quietly re-emerging.

Strangely enough, these debates are routinely dismissed as naïve, defeatist, or morally suspect. This misunderstands the issue entirely. Neutrality is not fundamentally a moral position. It’s not a moral choice. It’s about interests. It’s about pursuing national interests within the emerging international order.

The real question then is not whether neutrality is desirable. The real question is whether under the international system, it is permissible.

An international system permits neutrality when the major powers see restraint as less costly than confrontation. Neutrality becomes viable when great powers are secure enough to tolerate buffer states rather than absorb them into rigid alliance structures. This occurs when rival powers fear escalation, accept spheres of influence informally, or recognize that forcing alignment may destabilize strategically important regions.

Neutral states survive when they are perceived not as prizes to be seized, but as stabilizing cushions that reduce friction between competing blocs. In this sense, neutrality is not simply a decision made by small states. It is a condition granted—however reluctantly—by the wider balance of power.

For Korea, this would require a profound transformation in the regional balance of power. The Korean Peninsula has historically been viewed not as a buffer to be left alone, but as strategic terrain to be controlled.

A neutral Korea would only become viable if both Washington and Beijing concluded that forcing Seoul fully into their respective camps was more dangerous than tolerating strategic ambiguity.

To achieve this, it would likely require several conditions simultaneously: a reduced probability of major war over Taiwan; mutual recognition by the United States and China that the peninsula should not become a frontline military platform; a South Korea capable of sustaining credible independent defense capabilities; and a regional order in which both great powers preferred stability over competitive encirclement. Most importantly, neutrality would require external acceptance.

South Korea cannot simply declare itself neutral if the surrounding powers continue to view it as a pivotal strategic asset in the balance of power. Like Cold War Finland or Austria, Korean neutrality can only exist if the major powers collectively permit the space for it to exist.

Oh, and then there’s that last little question that pops the bubble at the beginning of the fourth round: “What about North Korea?” That’s when you move on to talking about the World Cup.

—

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Korea was in the China-led “tributary order” and today, South Korea is in the U.S.-led “liberal-international order.” The power of language and the lessons we’re taught make these two seem so different, but when we dig deeper, there’s some pretty awkward similarities when thinking about middle power - great power relationships.

“Tributary” versus “Liberal-international” - it’s positive and negative. One relationship is routinely described in the West as domination and subordination; the other is celebrated as a partnership between sovereign equals. The scoffs and slights directed at anyone suggesting they’re not entirely different reveal how deeply these assumptions are embedded.

“Tributary state” is one of the most misleading terms in international relations history. In the modern Western imagination, the word immediately evokes submission, exploitation, and dependency. Tributaries sound weak and timid. They sound like they’ve been conquered. They sound like they’re politically inferior. The language carries all the baggage of imperial extraction and colonial domination.

Yet, a tributary state in East Asian history was not necessarily negative. It was more like the non-political meaning - like a smaller river flowing into a larger river. Just a simple physical fact of hierarchical position.

The East Asian tributary system was not colonialism in the European sense.

Under the tributary order, Joseon Korea acknowledged the symbolic centrality of imperial China through rituals, diplomatic ceremonies, and tribute missions. In return, it received trade access, diplomatic legitimacy, strategic stability, and relative security within a predictable regional hierarchy.

The arrangement reflected geopolitical realism more than national humiliation. Korea sat beside one of the largest and most powerful civilizations on earth. Acknowledging Chinese centrality symbolically was often a rational price to pay for preserving domestic autonomy and avoiding catastrophic conflict. The tributary system effectively created strategic space for Korean survival.

Importantly, and what is rarely recognized when people bring up the term, is the fact that Korea materially benefited from its tributary relationship.

Tribute missions doubled as commercial exchanges, and heavily favored the tributary states economically. Korean elites gained access to Chinese markets. They were essentially regulated commercial exchanges that gave smaller states privileged access to the largest economy in the region.

In many cases, the gifts and goods bestowed by the Chinese court exceeded the value of the tribute presented and even gave permission for continued and future shipments. Korean envoys returned with silk, books, porcelain, medicines, luxury goods, and access to cultural and scholarly learning.

The system operated less like colonial extraction and more like a controlled economic order in which participation in the diplomatic hierarchy brought material rewards.

For states such as Joseon Korea, tributary relations were not simply about acknowledging Chinese centrality; they were also about securing economic opportunity, stable commercial access, and integration into the dominant regional economy.

Korean rulers also secured domestic legitimacy. To be recognized as the legitimate ruler in Joseon era was just as important as going on a State Visit to the White House. The relationship also sometimes produced military assistance, as seen during the Japanese invasions of Korea in the 1590s when Ming China intervened against Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s forces.

Through all this, Korea still retained control over its internal affairs.

Chinese officials did not administer the Korean state. Korea maintained its own monarchy, bureaucracy, military, laws, and social system. The Korean court governed Korea. The tributary relationship was hierarchical, but it was also remarkably non-intrusive by premodern standards.

This was not a relationship of equals. But neither was it simple domination.

The modern alliance relationship between South Korea and the United States is described very differently. The language is far softer: alliance, partnership, cooperation, shared values, collective security. Unlike the tributary relationship, the alliance is framed as voluntary and egalitarian. Yet, modern alliances possess their own hierarchies.

South Korea today hosts American troops on its territory. Its military planning is deeply integrated with U.S. strategic doctrine. Its procurement decisions, missile defense architecture, intelligence systems, and wartime operational structures are heavily shaped by alliance requirements. South Korean foreign policy debates are constantly influenced by concerns regarding Washington’s expectations and regional grand strategy.

Increasingly, Seoul also faces pressure to align itself with broader U.S. strategic competition against China — economically, diplomatically, technologically, and militarily.

In practical terms, this creates forms of dependency and constraint that are rarely acknowledged openly because they exist under the language of “alliance.”

The tributary system, by contrast, was at least honest about hierarchy. Modern alliances often obscure hierarchy beneath the rhetoric of equality. But the power imbalance remains real. The dominant power establishes the broader strategic framework; the smaller state adapts to it. This is not unique to South Korea. It is the structural reality of most alliances involving middle powers and superpowers.

The crucial difference lies in the nature of the obligations. Under the tributary system, Korea’s primary responsibility was symbolic recognition of Chinese superiority. The arrangement demanded ritual deference, not ideological conformity. Korea was not expected to integrate itself into a continent-wide military coalition designed to contain China’s rivals. It was not required to participate in distant geopolitical struggles unrelated to the peninsula.

Modern alliance structures are more expansive. South Korea now finds itself drawn into discussions surrounding Taiwan contingencies, Indo-Pacific strategy, semiconductor restrictions, freedom of navigation operations, missile defense integration, and broader balancing coalitions directed at Beijing. The alliance relationship increasingly extends beyond the direct defense of Korea itself and into the architecture of great power competition.

This creates a profound historical irony. The “tributary” relationship with China often asked less of Korea strategically than the modern alliance relationship with the United States.

Now, this seems like a stretch, and it is hard to contrast relationships between differing time periods. The modern international system is fundamentally different from the older East Asian order, but it still reveals something important about how international order functions.

Great powers demand hierarchy regardless of era. Middle powers survive by adapting to it. What changes is the vocabulary used to describe the arrangement.

When hierarchy is wrapped in Confucian ritual, the we call it subordination. When hierarchy is wrapped in liberal language, we call it partnership. When you dig a bit deeper, Korea’s historical experience suggests the distinction is less clear than political narratives like to admit.

—

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South Korea and Australia are pursuing nuclear-powered submarines at roughly the same historical moment, yet they are doing so with very different philosophical and strategic approaches.

For Seoul, the nuclear submarine program has become a symbol of strategic adulthood. It’s described as a “symbol of commitment to self-reliant defense,” and is central to the long-term commitment for “self-reliant national defense.” Seoul is not standing still amid growing uncertainty in the international system. The South Korean vision is not alliance rejection, but it is alliance hedging. The objective is to ensure that if the alliance weakens, changes, or becomes distracted, South Korea can still survive independently.

This is why there is no debate in South Korea for a Plan B, Plan C, or Plan D. The submarine itself is the plan: indigenous capability, domestic shipbuilding, domestic nuclear expertise, and an increasingly autonomous defense posture. Seoul aims to build the boats domestically and fuel them using low-enriched uranium while leveraging its own advanced industrial base. Even negotiations with Washington are framed around expanding Korean capability rather than embedding Korea permanently into an American command structure.

Strategically, this reflects a classical realist logic. South Korea increasingly assumes that great powers become unreliable under systemic stress. Extended deterrence will weaken. American priorities may shift. The threats of Trump or a similar Trump-like future president upping and leaving will always be there. Alliances are conditional. Survival depends upon retaining national agency.

Australia, by contrast, has gone in the opposite direction with AUKUS.

Canberra is not building a pathway toward autonomy. It is institutionalizing dependency. The entire AUKUS structure rests on deep integration with American strategy, American industrial timelines, American technology controls, American operational doctrine, and ultimately American geopolitical priorities. Even advocates openly frame AUKUS as part of a broader coalition designed to preserve U.S. primacy in the Indo-Pacific.

This is why Australia constantly requires backup plans. AUKUS was in the first instance - a backup plan. Virginia-class submarines - another backup plan. Collins-class extensions - another backup plan. Add to that alternative basing arrangements, industrial bottlenecks, and submarine shortfalls and the debate itself reveals the deeper structural reality: Australia’s submarine future is not sovereign. Australia is not seeking to control its strategic future. It has handed it over to Washington at a point which any sane person would clearly say is the worst time in history.

The difference in the national debates demonstrates the difference between the Korean and Australian philosophical approaches and strategic trajectories. South Korea’s submarine debate is about independence, self-reliance, and strategic self-strengthening. Australia’s submarine debate demonstrates a lack of confidence, a desire to be a junior partner, and ultimately about strategic alliance management.

South Korea is ensuring it can act alone if necessary. Australia is constructing a future in which acting alone is impossible.

One approach seeks autonomy within an alliance. The other sacrifices autonomy to preserve an alliance. Therein lies the real difference between the two submarine programs. South Korea sees nuclear submarines as insurance against dependency. Australia sees nuclear submarines as a way to lock itself into dependency.

The contrast also reflects two different understandings of middle-power survival.

Seoul behaves like a state that assumes the international order can fracture and that alliances can be unreliable. Its response is to maximize national resilience, indigenous capability, and strategic flexibility. It is preparing itself to dynamically fit within whichever international order prevails in the future.

Canberra behaves like a state that assumes survival will always occur inside an American-led system. Its response is to bind itself so deeply into U.S. military architecture that disentanglement becomes politically, economically, technologically, and strategically impossible. It is preparing itself to be a holdout to an international order that has passed.

In the end, only one of them will actually get their submarines. Australia’s marched through Australian-built, French built, Japanese-built, and now US-UK sort of, we’ll see how we go -built submarines. Seoul will stick to its schedule and will have submarines in the water in the 2030s. Australia currently aims for a hop-potch, mix ‘n’ match of refurbished Collins Class submarines, some borrowed but not completely sovereign Virginia Class submarines, and then maybe, just maybe, some time in 2040s, an AUKUS Class submarine. My bet is, Australia will end up buying South Korean nuclear subs.

—

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The year is 2046. China has not conquered the world militarily - it didn’t need to. It became the gravitational center of global commerce, infrastructure, manufacturing, finance, technology, and ultimately culture, politics, and diplomacy. The American century has long passed and with it, NATO, AUKUS, the Quad, and the Indo-Pacific.

Ten years earlier, Southeast Asian states had concluded that balancing China was futile. Economic integration with Beijing would simply be too deep. Supply chains, digital infrastructure, rare earth processing, AI ecosystems, green energy systems, and maritime commerce started orbiting Chinese standards and Chinese markets.

Even longtime U.S. partners, like South Korea and Japan, quietly reduced security dependence on Washington as American power projection became less reliable and ever more expensive. The gravitational center of Beijing was just too strong.

Australia - the ever dependent and ever desperate host of the last overseas bases of the United States, still clings to its alliance - and still waits for submarines promised a quarter of a century, and another age, ago.

What does it mean to be a middle power and what type of middle power would Australia be in this speculative future?

Well, you can be sure Australian think-tanks and universities still wheel out ex-politicians and aged academics (sometimes in AI holographic projections) to talk about restoring the global maritime order, the global trading system, and the liberal international order. By 2046, dreaming about turning back time to the 1990s has been an obsession for about 20 years. They do the same in Canada too.

Now the 1990s were grand, to be fair, but in 2046, trade and commerce still flows. Just probably not so easily to Australia. You see, Australia is an outlier.

Australia is to the China dominated world what Iran was to the U.S.-dominated order: a stubborn regional dissenter refusing accommodation with the hegemon while most surrounding states quietly adapt.

Australia would still trade, just as Iran still traded under sanctions. But the terms would worsen. Chinese-led financial systems could bypass Australian institutions. Universities that once depended on Asian student flows would probably wither as regional academic ecosystems consolidate elsewhere. Australian firms would increasingly find themselves excluded from preferred infrastructure, digital, and energy arrangements across Asia. At best, the country would survive, but would be peripheral to the new centers of decision-making.

Its banks cut off, its trade sanctioned, its sometimes violent opposition supported by outside forces. Canberra still rules but only thanks to the support of distant America.

Now this comparison would horrify many Australians. Iran was the “evil empire”. Iran was sanctioned, isolated, strategically contained, culturally demonized, and viewed as ideologically rigid for a reason.

Yet the structural parallels are difficult to ignore. Iran was a middle power that spent decades resisting integration into a U.S.-led regional system dominated by American alliances, military basing networks, and economic leverage. By 2046, Australia could be the same in a China-led order.

The irony is profound. For decades, Australian strategists spoke as though “rules-based order” was universal and permanent. In reality, it was a particular order backed by American naval supremacy and Western financial dominance. Once that structure weakens, the moral language attached to it begins to fade as well. Most states do not die for abstractions. They adapt to power.

Like Iran after 1979, Australia’s political identity would become defined by resistance itself. Strategic self-perception hardens. Domestic politics reward defiance. Every Chinese investment becomes viewed as infiltration (not much different to today). Every regional compromise becomes appeasement. Every neighboring state that adjusts to the new reality becomes morally suspect. The end result is not heroic independence. It is strategic loneliness.

This is the real tragedy of middle powers. Great powers shape international order. Middle powers must survive within it.

Survival often requires ideological flexibility, selective silence, and sometimes strategic “forgettability”. Finland understood this during the Cold War. Austria understood it. Many Southeast Asian states understand it instinctively today. The states that survive systemic transitions are often not the loudest, bravest, or most principled. They are the ones that recognize structural reality before their rivals do.

The ultimate threat will be irrelevance and slow economic strangulation born from strategic nostalgia. At worst, Australia would not become a battlefield, but a fractured strategic marketplace where competing domestic factions, backed by different external powers, bargain over bases, ports, resources, and infrastructure in exchange for security and survival. Western Australia’s minerals and northern Australia’s bases would cease to be sovereign assets and instead become chips in a geopolitical auction.

Here lies the final irony. For decades, Australian policymakers warned about the dangers of becoming dependent on China or the dangers of a Chinese invasion. Yet the greatest danger was never invasion at all. It was strategic nostalgia — the inability of a middle power to accept structural change and adapt to a transformed international order.

The real threat was not conquest by a foreign power, but the slow self-ruin brought about by clinging to the assumptions, alliances, and strategic fantasies of a vanished era. The real threat was from within (and from souped up Toranas).

—

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For decades, middle powers have comforted themselves with the illusion that history grants them endless strategic flexibility. They speak of “hedging,” “balancing,” “strategic ambiguity,” and “middle power diplomacy” as though clever positioning can somehow exempt them from geography and power politics. It cannot.

In the end, middle powers facing the rise or pressure of great powers have only a handful of choices. None are painless. But one choice is consistently catastrophic: becoming the ground upon which great powers settle their disputes.

A middle power can resist. If geography favors it, if mountains, seas, climate, distance, or fortifications complicate invasion, it can impose enormous costs on a stronger adversary. History is full of states that survived not because they could win outright, but because complete conquest or control becomes too costly.

Ukraine today demonstrates that a determined state can bleed a vastly larger opponent under the right geographic and logistical conditions with the support of another great power. Iran demonstrates the same. Yet resistance comes at an immense price—an inter-generational price of war and trauma. The state may survive, but will do so in mutilated and munted form.

Another option is alignment. A middle power can attach itself firmly to a great power and effectively become part of a larger strategic machine. Sovereignty is constrained, foreign policy autonomy shrinks, and domestic politics gradually bend around alliance management. Yet there are rewards. Influence grows through proximity to power. Access to markets, security guarantees, technology, intelligence, and diplomatic backing can elevate a state far beyond what it could achieve alone.

Throughout history, many states accepted subordinate roles because they understood that being a favored lieutenant inside an empire was safer than standing outside it. There is little romance in this path, but there is often stability and prosperity. Think Australia and Canada in the post-war and post-Cold War international order.

The third option is accommodation through harmlessness. A middle power can deliberately present itself as non-threatening, strategically neutral, commercially useful, and politically restrained. It lowers its profile, avoids confrontation, and co-exists beside stronger powers by convincing them it poses no challenge to their interests.

This path preserves peace but often at the cost of influence. Such states cannot shape international order. They adapt to it. Their diplomacy becomes cautious, their military modest, and their strategic horizons narrow. They survive by being forgettable. Think Finland and Austria in the Cold War.

Each of these choices involves sacrifice. Resistance sacrifices blood. Alignment sacrifices autonomy. Accommodation sacrifices influence.

But there is one option worse than all three: fragmentation between competing great powers. This is the fate middle powers should fear most. Not defeat. Not dependence. Not irrelevance. But becoming the strategic fault line where rival powers collide.

When a middle power becomes internally divided between external camps, it ceases to act as a coherent state. Its politics become internationalized. Elections become proxy struggles. Economic policy becomes securitized. Domestic factions appeal to outside patrons. Strategic decisions become impossible because every choice risks retaliation from one side or the other. The country slowly transforms into contested terrain before a single shot is fired.

History offers endless warnings. Poland was partitioned repeatedly because it became the corridor through which empires confronted one another. Korea suffered the same fate when caught between Imperial Japan, Qing China, Tsarist Russia, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Victims of their own geography, much of Central Europe spent centuries less as sovereign actors than as buffers, corridors, and battlegrounds.

The tragedy is that middle powers often drift into this condition while convincing themselves they are preserving flexibility. Leaders celebrate “keeping options open” while external powers entrench influence inside their institutions, economies, media systems, and security structures. Strategic ambiguity sounds sophisticated in peacetime. In crisis, it often becomes paralysis.

Great powers, after all, do not tolerate ambiguity indefinitely in regions they consider strategically vital. Hedging works so well that it effectively becomes a default strategy. Yet hedging is time limited. Eventually great powers demand clarity, access, alignment, or obedience. If a middle power cannot or is unwilling to provide a coherent answer, competing powers will attempt to impose one.

This is why the fantasy that middle powers can indefinitely maneuver between rival great powers without consequence is so dangerous. Hedging is time limited. Geography eventually forces decisions and proximity in particular, eventually imposes limits. Power clarifies relationships.

The uncomfortable truth is that middle powers do not get to choose whether they live in a world shaped by great powers. They only choose how they survive within it.

They can fight and suffer, they can align and subordinate themselves, they can accommodate and diminish themselves, but above all, they must avoid becoming the battlefield itself. Once a middle power becomes the arena of great power competition rather than an actor within it, the discussion is no longer about influence, autonomy, or diplomacy—it’s about survival.

—

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There are three regions of strategic interest to Washington: Europe, West Asia, and East Asia. The first and the second are in the ring with blows being traded, the third is in the locker room wrapping and strapping. During the election, there was hope that Trump would break the mold and throw in the towel on the first, not enter the ring on the second, and walk away on the third. Unfortunately, Trump’s a dodgy promoter with money on every fight.

As the second Trump administration finally turns to the Korean Peninsula, something uncomfortable is becoming obvious: U.S. policy hasn’t changed at all. South Korea is being prepped to join in the ring.

The rhetoric changes. The personalities change. The slogans change. But the strategic direction remains remarkably consistent. South Korea is still being repositioned inside a larger American confrontation with China. The peninsula is still viewed less as a unique political and historical problem than as a strategic node within a wider Indo-Pacific contest. North Korea remains frozen in managed hostility. And Seoul is still expected to carry more of the burden while aligning ever more tightly with Washington’s regional agenda. This continuity is becoming difficult to ignore.

Trump came into office promising disruption. Instead, he has largely inherited and continued the same structural foreign policy trajectory visible under Biden. Ukraine policy remains fundamentally unchanged: sustain the conflict, weaken Russia, maintain pressure, avoid direct American costs wherever possible. Iran policy also followed the same escalatory logic of coercion, containment, and strategic confrontation. If a Democrat had won, we’d be in the exact same position.

The implication is unsettling because it turns conspiracy into reality. Whichever party gets in, you have the foreign policy of John McCain. Cynicism is at an all time high. For many, the problem is no longer Russia, Iran, or China. It is America.

Call it the “deep state,” the national security establishment, the permanent bureaucracy, the foreign policy blob, or simply institutional inertia. The label matters less than the pattern. Presidents come and go, but the strategic machine continues moving in roughly the same direction. Cabinet members rotate. Think tanks recycle personnel. Generals retire into consultancy firms. Intelligence officials become television commentators. The deep rot state.

The assumptions from the Biden Admin have carried into the Trump Admin. China must be contained. Allies must be mobilized. Strategic pivots must continue.
Peripheral regions must be integrated into the larger contest. The Korean Peninsula is no different. It is contestable geopolitical terrain.

That is the real lesson emerging from the Trump administration’s approach to Korea. The peninsula is no longer primarily about reunification, reconciliation, denuclearization, or even stability. It is about positioning. Logistics. Strategic depth. Missile reach. Supply chains. Naval access. Regional balancing.

In short, Korea is being prepared as another frontline in a broader conflict.

Washington’s language now openly reflects this shift. American strategic documents increasingly frame South Korea not simply as a state requiring protection from North Korea, but as part of a larger regional architecture aimed at managing China. The alliance is evolving from a peninsula-focused defense arrangement into a component of Indo-Pacific strategy.

This should alarm South Koreans far more than another round of Trump theatrics.

Because history suggests what happens next for states caught inside great power confrontations is rarely pleasant. Ukraine became the battleground where strategic pressure against Russia could be applied. Iran became the arena through which Middle Eastern order is contested. Neither country enjoys stability. Neither controls escalation. Both exist inside larger geopolitical struggles driven by outside powers.

South Korea exists as a divided nation because it was the very first state to be contested in the post-war era. Now, it risks drifting toward the same condition: not abandoned by the United States, but absorbed into American strategic competition.

For years, South Korean conservatives warned of abandonment while progressives warned of entrapment. Increasingly, both are occurring simultaneously. Washington expects Seoul to shoulder more military responsibility while also demanding tighter integration into anti-China strategy. South Korea is being asked to become more autonomous operationally while becoming less autonomous strategically.

The future, quite frankly, does not look bright.

The space for genuinely Korean solutions is rapidly shrinking. Inter-Korean diplomacy has collapsed. Reunification discourse is fading into irrelevance. North and South now either openly or quietly consider permanent separation as the solution. Meanwhile, the United States and China view the peninsula less through the lens of Korean aspirations and more through the lens of regional competition.

This is how middle powers disappear into history: not through dramatic conquest, but through gradual strategic absorption into conflicts designed by others.

Trump was supposed to change everything. Instead, he’s just revealed that the machine underneath American foreign policy hasn’t slowed down. South Korea is being prepped to join in the ring and Trump will profit from the outcome—win or lose.

—

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It was a strange suspended state—a carnival packed up for winter, with the tents folded, the trucks loaded, but the carnies still skulking round leering at people as they walked by. Then, with little warning Trump told the world that he and Xi talked about North Korea. With that brusque aside by a man who lies for a living, the stage is again lighting up the liminal—the North Korea carnival is back.

The think tank spruikers, sanctions specialists, defector whisperers, the intel gurus, missile trajectory enthusiasts, and the collapse prophets now sense a change in the air. The first tent is off the truck, the first carnie sweat has broken, the turning clowns are being oiled.

Somewhere in Washington, a Korea specialist has updated their conference proposal. Somewhere else, an NGO quietly dusted off a funding application on humanitarian engagement. Editors who have not commissioned a Korea piece in two years are answering emails again. Never hesitating, the ringmasters at Foreign Affairs anticipated this, and called forward the clowns. The North Korea carnival, dormant but never dead, is again stirring.

Why now? Because Trump’s interest in North Korea was never a diplomatic issue. It was never a desire to solve the enduring diplomatic conundrum. Trump did not try to end the stalemate because ending it would have required preparation, patience, and policy discipline — the very things he avoided. There were summits, photo opportunities, and theatrical gestures, but no serious diplomatic machinery behind them. The optics mattered more than outcomes. The spectacle mattered more than strategy. It was a farcical fumbling clown show from beginning to end, and it fueled an economic stimulus package for an entire class of analysts, commentators, consultants, and institutions.

The first Trump administration transformed Korea watching from a niche specialty into a global media spectacle. While North Korea watching had always been a pretty whack, weird, liminal space, Trump turned it into an industry.

Cable news panels multiplied. Endless explainers appeared. Every handshake, insult, missile test, and summit photograph generated another round of commentary. “Fire and Fury” became both foreign policy and content strategy. He brought us closer to war and absolute annihilation, but also, according to the live-to-air CNN panels, it was different and could indeed be everlasting peace.

For journos, it was a ball. There’s no other reporting space that joins together the risk of annihilation and the quirky and absurd, nor is there a better location for passionate screamed street interviews. And so it will be again.

The think-tankers, like carnies with with questionable pasts, have been pacing up and down their imaginary cell. Being thoroughly institutionalized they’ve already put out their fixed set of timed publications on such remarkably innovative ideas, such how Trump can engage Kim Jong-un or how re-labelling diplomatic efforts can transform the entire entrenched f$#k up. For journos, they’re an easy call, and will be ready to give their advice—in fact, most will have a think-tank press release already prepared for your use.

Then there’s the academics. They’re a surly lot: grumpy, arrogant, pompous and petulant. Like carnies who found a lost wallet, they’re both excited and nervously uncertain about unfolding events. During the break they’ve been writing ever-unfinished books and pointless academic papers nobody will ever read. For journos, if you can find one that doesn’t mumble or respond in endless equivocations, they’re also pretty easy.

Next are the fly-by-nighters. Like carnies on the run from the law, they’ve got something to hide but they’re loud enough and confident enough to hide it well. Every new North Korea carnival season will bring out a few. One season, it was the 1000 op-eds guy; another season, it was the interesting accent guy; and in yet another, it was the ‘I was in Pyongyang’ guy. The responses don’t vary, but for journos, these guys are worth their weight in buffalo dung… because that is after all, what they’re selling.

Then there’s the journos who because they once set foot in Pyongyang or reported on the country for more than a few months, end up becoming a member of the carnival themselves. They’ve got a book, they’ve got a cable news profile, and they urgently need attention. That’s the carnie equivalent of a kneaded newspaper, a rent-a-loo, and a bowel full of carnival hot-dogs. For journos, don’t call them, they’ll call you.

North Korea is one of the few geopolitical issues where permanent unresolved tension sustains an entire professional ecosystem. True normalization would put them out of business because their knowledge of Korea is in the end is distant and delusional. Total collapse would do the same. The ideal condition for the industry is endless semi-crisis: enough danger to justify conferences and commentary, but not enough to fundamentally alter the status quo.

Trump understands this dynamic better than most. He instinctively grasps that North Korea is not merely a security problem but political theater. His summits with Kim Jong-un were geopolitical reality television—dramatic, personalized, visual, and unpredictable. Every shocking Trump statement generated another policy panel, another television appearance, another op-ed, another urgent funding round.

For some carnies, it gets boring. There are rumors of competitions between them—who can say “salmon” and “hardworking” on CNN or Fox gets drinks bought all night, ending in statements like “Trump is a salmon swimming against the political stream in his hardworking pursuit of peace.” It livens up the rat-ass boredom of rehashing what’s been said a thousand times before. They’re the ones to watch.

This begs a question: aren’t the public not yet tired of the carnival? I mean, after Ukraine and Iraq, do we really need another war or near-war followed by promised but remote agreements? With the High Street empty and the economy four times more f%^#d than the last time the carnival was in town, you’d think not.

Then, in all truth, one last show before the carnival packs up for good and goes home forever, might just be fun. I just hope one carnie can take up the challenge and tell the world that the whole show is f%^#d and should’ve been solved years ago if it weren’t for the clowns in Washington.

—

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Three international relations (IR) scholars go into a bar. One works in China, one in America, and one in South Korea. Although it sounds like the start of a bad joke, it was a serious night with each of us discovering that the field of international relations (IR) has changed - and it’s a lot easier to see it from Seoul than from Washington.

Like any gathering of academics we first complained about the imaginary heavy burdens that we face and how administration is ruining our lives. We then discussed what we’re researching and what funding opportunities we were pursuing.

A few drinks in, and we started to turn a corner. After a few more, we sped down the straight to reach a broad agreement on three issues: First, the opportunities available in the United States are decreasing; second, the opportunities in China are increasing; and third, the very field and how its institutionalized, is rapidly changing. Let’s explore these in more detail.

From South Korea the centrality of America to international relations has always been overwhelming. Look at the make up of the faculty at any university, and the vast majority of professors completed their postgraduate studies and often started their careers in the U.S. Until a decade or two ago, it was weird to even find somebody with a degree from outside the U.S.

For generations of Korean scholars, intellectual advancement meant moving through the U.S. system—studying, working, taking sabbaticals or pursuing visiting fellowships in Washington, Boston, New York, California, or the Midwest, before returning home carrying with them the assumptions, frameworks, and professional habits of the American academy.

Part of this was economic. Opportunities to advance were in the United States. The major grants, the highest-ranked journals, the most influential conferences, and the strongest institutional networks were concentrated there. A publication accepted in an American journal carried disproportionate prestige. A fellowship at an American university could transform a career. Hiring committees across Asia treated American credentials as shorthand for quality and legitimacy.

The United States was not simply one academic center among many; for much of the post-Cold War era, it functioned as the gravitational core around which the discipline revolved. Over the last decade, this changed.

Tenure-track positions shrank, universities faced financial and freedom of speech pressures, and younger scholars increasingly saw precarious employment rather than stable careers.

Even worse, and felt sorely in Seoul, international scholars faced growing uncertainty surrounding visas, political tensions, and institutional hostility. Even attending conferences started to become stressful when entry into the country itself felt unpredictable.

At the same time, China has changed. Chinese universities now offer generous funding packages, large research institutes, international partnerships, housing support, and ambitious recruitment drives.

For Korean scholars in particular, the attraction is obvious. China is geographically close, financially ambitious, and increasingly central to the very regional order many Asian scholars now study over their seniors’ preferences for U.S. security and alliances.

China is today rapidly producing clusters of globally competitive universities across engineering, science, technology, and increasingly social sciences. Peking University, Tsinghua University, Fudan University, and Renmin University of China have globally competitive international relations programs with enormous funding, expanding research institutes, and aggressive international recruitment.

Twenty years ago, the idea that Korean scholars might seriously weigh Beijing or Shanghai alongside Washington or Boston as centers of academic prestige would have sounded improbable. Today, it increasingly feels like part of a broader structural shift in the geography of global intellectual life.

This in turn is transforming the institutional setting of the field. For decades, the United States sat unquestionably at the center of the IR discipline. If you wanted a serious academic career in international relations, you went through American universities, American conferences, American publishers, and American networks.

The most telling demonstration of this was the International Studies Association (ISA) Annual Convention. The ISA Annual Convention was not just another conference; it was effectively the central marketplace of the profession. You built networks there, you undertook job interviews there, you met publishers there. The ISA Annual Convention was the unquestionable institutional heart of the discipline—and it was always in America (except for the once in a decade Canadian locale). Now that centrality has become less certain.

An “international” association depends on international mobility. If scholars from the rest of the world begin finding it difficult, expensive, politically risky, or administratively exhausting to enter the U.S., pressure will inevitably grow to diversify conference locations - and the U.S. restrictions on academic mobility and freedom of speech now restrict the capacity of scholars to participate in ISA Annual Conventions.

It used to be that questions about censorship, surveillance, academic freedom, and political pressure would dominate the discussion about conferences in China. Now they do just as much in the U.S.

Have you criticized Donald Trump in your social media? Have you criticized U.S. policy in your media commentary? Are you from the global South? Are you from one of the ever-increasing number of countries under U.S. sanctions? You’re probably not going to an ISA Annual Convention until it’s next held in Canada.

Are you South Korean and want to go to the U.S. for an ISA Annual Convention? Show your social media accounts, your passwords, your email, your financial statements, your evidence of employment, submit it all at least three months in advance, attend an interview at the embassy, and make sure that you’ve never criticized Donald Trump.

Want to go to China for an alternative conference? You don’t need a visa, buy a ticket that’s considerably cheaper, use the infrastructure that actually works, and forget about those fears of getting mugged or shot. Already, more and more South Korean academics are limiting themselves to regional ISA conferences.

Sooner or later, the ISA will need to move permanently to Canada, South Korea or even China, or an alternative and rival body will be set up. Just as manufacturing, finance, technology, and research networks gradually shifted toward China over the last two decades, the institutional center of gravity in international studies may eventually shift there as well.

So what began as a setup for a bad joke ended up revealing something serious about the changing structure of the international relations discipline. It’s hard to ignore that the trend in IR is much the same as in every other field. the center is moving. It’s still hard for Americans to see, and it’s still easy to refute, but from South Korea, it certainly no longer sounds like a joke.

—

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Now I often ramble on about middle powers. That’s because my writing is based upon a life working in the fields of diplomacy and foreign policy with a focus on the Korean Peninsula. I try my best to be creative and innovative when thinking about middle powers because there’s a lot of baloney out there—and nobody needs more middle power baloney.

Middle power baloney is the industrial and uniform, low-quality, filler sausage of liberal-international order scraps and leftovers that comes out in op-eds, think-tank reports, and sometimes academic papers. It’s usually put together by politicians, ex-politicians, and senior (or fresh to the topic) academics, and its prime ingredients are the hopes and dreams that middle powers can join together and restore the liberal international order.

For middle powers, like Australia, Canada, and South Korea, the end of the liberal international order was not simply the decline of American primacy. It was the collapse of a particular historical environment in which they became comfortable, wealthy, and strategically predictable.

These middle powers existed inside a hegemonic structure. The post-Cold War order allowed states such as Australia, Canada, South Korea, and many European states to behave as though geopolitics had been partially suspended. Security was outsourced upward to the United States—one dominant maritime hegemon stabilizing the system.

Trade flowed through relatively open maritime systems. Rules, institutions, and norms were put in place by the hegemon and middle powers spread them throughout the system. This reduced the costs of strategic calculation and middle powers could therefore focus on prosperity, branding, values diplomacy, and niche international roles. Those good times have well ended.

What’s replacing it? Most put it down as multipolarity. Less like a coherent and clean replacement and more a return to what it once was.

Middle powers will once again become exposed to geography, dependence, industrial weakness, demographic decline, energy vulnerability, and military limits.

The first major shift is that middle powers will no longer be able to treat values as the foundation of foreign policy. Values language flourished under U.S. dominance because the strategic environment was already secure. In a fragmented multipolar environment, survival pressures return.

This is why much of the baloney currently smeared across the kitchen table about middle powers working together to restore liberal-international order is just that—baloney.

Middle powers themselves will increasingly speak the language of sovereignty, resilience, economic security, industrial policy, and strategic autonomy rather than liberal values.

The second shift is psychological. During the liberal era, middle powers adopted the worldview of great powers. Their academic institutions, diplomatic language, think tanks, and media ecosystems absorbed American strategic assumptions. They spoke constantly of “global leadership,” “rules-based order,” “deterrence,” and “democratic solidarity,” often forgetting that middle powers fundamentally lack the capacity to independently shape global order.

A multipolar era forces middle powers to think like the middle powers of old.

That means accepting limitation. It means understanding that survival depends less on moral clarity than strategic adaptability. Historically, successful middle powers survived not by mimicking great powers, but by carefully balancing relationships, avoiding unnecessary ideological rigidity, diversifying economic exposure, and maintaining maneuverability between stronger states.

For states geographically adjacent to major powers it meant maximum adaptability. For South Korea, the fantasy of existing purely inside a maritime liberal order was always somewhat artificial. Geography never disappeared. China remained next door. Russia remained nearby. Japan remained historically central. The liberal-international order and the U.S. alliance temporarily suppressed these realities, but did not eliminate them.

In a multipolar era, middle powers will likely divide into several broad categories.

Some will become hardened bloc states, integrating tightly into either American, Chinese, or even Russian systems in exchange for security and economic guarantees. Others will attempt strategic balancing, maintaining deep relations with multiple centers of power simultaneously. Others still may drift into partial neutrality or highly transactional diplomacy.

The key point is that middle powers will vary widely, but most will increasingly prioritize flexibility over ideological purity.

Diplomatically, institutions will likely become less important. Middle powers will still participate in forums and summits, but the real question becomes: who controls supply chains, semiconductors, shipping routes, industrial inputs, rare earths, AI infrastructure, food security, and capital flows.

Military strategy also changes. Under American primacy, many middle powers could afford relatively small militaries because ultimate escalation dominance rested with Washington. In a fragmented order, middle powers will need to increasingly pursue independent and asymmetric deterrent capabilities, short and long-range strike systems, mobility, cyber capacity, drones, and in some cases even latent or explicit nuclear options.

Most importantly, middle powers will increasingly rediscover that international order is not permanent. The liberal international order encouraged the belief that history had stabilized into rules, institutions, and managed competition. There were of course those who believed that it would not end. Multipolarity reminds middle powers that order is historically contingent and temporary.

For middle powers, then, the coming world is not fundamentally about choosing between Washington and Beijing. It is about relearning how to survive in a world where nobody can permanently guarantee their security, prosperity, or strategic future. How to do this is the debate that needs to replace the baloney of restoring the liberal-international order.

—

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During Trump’s visit to Beijing, Xi Jinping brought up the “Thucydides Trap.” Media outlets reported that Xi raised the concept directly in discussions about U.S.-China rivalry and Taiwan. Now there ain’t nobody going to explain this from the middle power point of view, so let’s give it a go.

The Thucydides Trap is the idea that rising powers and dominant powers drift toward conflict through fear, rivalry, alliance pressures, and repeated crises. Graham Allison popularized it in his 2017 book Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? He applied the ancient Athens–Sparta dynamic to modern U.S.–China relations, and warned that structural tensions between a rising China and an established United States could produce conflict unless carefully managed.

What is rarely discussed is the fact that the real genius of Thucydides was not simply his description of great powers but rather his understanding of how great-power tension spreads through middle powers. Alliances, dependencies, fears, ambitions, and local calculations transform rivalry into systemic conflict.

If we’re willing to let our imaginations stretch for just a few moments, it’s not too difficult to see middle powers in U.S.-China rivalry as strange allusions to those states between Athens and Sparta in Thucydides accounts.

Australia could be Corinth; South Korea could be Corcyra; and Canada could be Syracuse.

Corinth was not the strongest power, but it was one of the loudest advocates for confrontation with Athens. A proud maritime-commercial state deeply tied to Spartan power, Corinth constantly pressured Sparta to act more aggressively against Athenian expansion. It feared economic displacement, strategic encirclement, and declining status within the Greek order.

Australia increasingly plays a similar role inside the American alliance system. No U.S. ally has embraced the language of strategic confrontation with China more enthusiastically. Canberra speaks of existential struggle, democratic values, regional balancing, and strategic deterrence with almost missionary zeal. It has tied itself tightly to Anglo-American military integration through arrangements like AUKUS, expanded basing access, intelligence cooperation, and long-range strike capabilities.

Like Corinth, Australia is both anxious and energetic. It fears abandonment by the hegemon, yet simultaneously pushes the hegemon toward firmer confrontation. The irony is that Corinth itself eventually suffered enormously from the war it helped intensify.

South Korea, meanwhile, increasingly resembles Corcyra — trapped between systems.

In Thucydides’ account, Corcyra was strategically valuable not because it was dominant, but because both sides feared what its alignment might mean. Its internal divisions and external balancing became entangled in the larger rivalry between Athens and Sparta.

South Korea today sits in a remarkably similar position between the U.S.-led maritime alliance system and the increasingly China-centered economic order emerging in Asia. Seoul depends upon the United States for security guarantees, intelligence, and strategic protection. Yet its economy remains deeply integrated with China-centered supply chains, markets, and industrial ecosystems.

Like Corcyra, South Korea’s greatest challenge is not choosing sides once and for all. It is surviving prolonged systemic rivalry without becoming the battleground upon which others resolve their disputes.

This is why South Korean foreign policy often appears contradictory to outside observers. Seoul simultaneously deepens trilateral security cooperation with the U.S. and Japan while attempting to stabilize relations with Beijing. It participates in alliance structures while hesitating to fully ideologize the rivalry. Critics call this ambiguity. In reality, it is strategic survival.

Then there is Canada—increasingly resembling Syracuse.

Syracuse entered the Peloponnesian War later, after years of relative insulation from the core Greek rivalry. Wealthy, distant, and somewhat protected by geography, it initially avoided the direct pressures consuming mainland Greece. But when Athens eventually turned westward during the disastrous Sicilian Expedition, Syracuse suddenly found itself at the center of systemic conflict.

For decades, Canada similarly benefited from distance, insulation, and the assumption that geography itself provided security. Protected by the continental shield of American power, Ottawa could afford to treat hard geopolitics as secondary to trade, norms, institutions, and domestic social management.

But geography is becoming less protective in an age of Arctic competition, continental missile vulnerability, technological fragmentation, and deteriorating U.S. political stability. Canada increasingly finds itself drawn into a harsher strategic environment it spent decades assuming it could avoid. The danger for Syracuse was not simply external attack. It was complacency. It mistook temporary distance from the center of rivalry for permanent immunity from it.

So how did the ‘Thucydides Trap’ impact Corinth, Corcyra, and Syracuse? Corinth and Corcyra were central to the chain of crises that dragged Athens and Sparta into war, while Syracuse helped turn the conflict decisively against Athens.

Corinth was one of Sparta’s key allies and played a major role in escalating tensions with Athens. Corinth feared Athenian expansion and growing naval influence would undermine its own commercial and regional power. Angry at what it saw as Athenian interference in its affairs, Corinth pressured Sparta to act more aggressively, helping transform a series of local disputes into a wider systemic confrontation between Athens and Sparta.

Corcyra (modern Corfu) became trapped between larger powers during a dispute with Corinth, its colonial parent city. Corcyra sought Athenian protection against Corinthian pressure, while Athens saw strategic value in Corcyra’s powerful navy. The resulting alliance deepened Spartan fears that Athens was expanding uncontrollably. What began as a quarrel between smaller states thus became entangled in the broader rivalry that led to the Peloponnesian War.

Syracuse became central later in the war when Athens launched the disastrous Sicilian Expedition. Athens hoped conquering Syracuse would expand its empire and cut Spartan influence in the west. Instead, Syracuse resisted fiercely, received Spartan support, and destroyed the Athenian expeditionary force. The defeat crippled Athens militarily and financially, marking a turning point in Sparta’s eventual victory.

Corinth set the trap, Corcyra sprang it, and Syracuse sealed Athens’ fate.

This is the central lesson of Thucydides for middle powers. The real danger in periods of hegemonic transition is not merely choosing the wrong side. It is misunderstanding your own role in the system itself.

Some middle powers become enthusiastic advocates for confrontation. Some attempt delicate balancing between rival systems. Some assume distance will protect them indefinitely. But all are ultimately shaped by the structural tensions flowing through the international order.

Now, we’ve only covered three middle powers. If we start thinking about Iran, Mongolia, Poland, Indonesia, Ukraine, and Vietnam, we have an array that makes the Peloponnesian War collection of Megara, Miletus, Rhodes, Chios, Lesbos, Epidamnus, Potidaea, Boetotia, Thasos, Byzantium, Cyzicus, Ephesus, and Aegina look simple.

Thucydides understood something many modern international relations theorists still struggle to grasp: great-power competition is not experienced most intensely by the great powers themselves—it is experienced most intently by the middle powers between them.

—

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The U.S.-South Korea alliance is now an old Wild West standoff. Two gunfighters stand in the street at high noon, each with a hand hovering near the holster, each wondering who will draw first.

The question is no longer whether the alliance will change, but who will make the first move: Washington pulling back from Korea, or Seoul asking the Americans to leave.

Alternative media is not a reliable source, but it’s sure more on the money than mainstream media—and with OPCON transfer hitting mainstream news, alternative media pundits seem to have caught on.

I’ve said this was coming for some time. As a younger man, I got articles highlighting the trends rejected by Foreign Affairs (back then I thought they actually did analysis rather than just promotion). Now it’s just a matter time, and on the ground here in Seoul, you knew was for some time.

To be fair, to outsiders this possibility probably seemed absurd. South Korea was the frontier state of the Cold War, dependent on American protection against North Korea and sheltered beneath U.S. military power. The alliance was permanent and almost sacred. Though, reflecting their complete ineptitude, most of those folk also thought South Korea was the same as it was straight outta the Korean War!

The language coming from parts of the American strategic community has well changed. In the discussion surrounding operational control transfer and U.S. military commitments, former officials and analysts increasingly describe South Korea not as an indispensable ally, but as an increasingly capable state that should assume full sovereignty and responsibility for its own defense.

Some now go so far to argue that South Korea remains a “military colony” so long as wartime operational control remains in American hands, and that Koreans are tired of being treated as a “vassal state.”

What makes this moment unusual is that there’s increasingly consensus. What makes it interesting to me is that both increasingly suspect the other wants out first.

Washington worries Seoul no longer shares American strategic priorities. South Korea does not want to fight a U.S.-China war over Taiwan. It does not want to become a forward operating platform in a larger confrontation with Beijing. American officials speak openly about expanding the alliance beyond the peninsula, but accuse Koreans of calling that mission creep.

Meanwhile, many in Seoul suspect the United States itself is losing interest in the costs of maintaining alliances. Donald Trump’s repeated complaints about allies “free riding,” demands for larger burden-sharing payments, and transactional approach to foreign policy have left a lasting scar. Koreans increasingly wonder whether America’s security guarantee is still rooted in strategy, or merely in temporary political convenience.

Even worse, after Iran, they openly worry that the U.S. is incompetent—wholly unable to defend South Korea against its neighbors to the North, let alone China, and increasingly likely to drag South Korea into a messy and unwinnable conflict, as is the fate of the Gulf states in the Iran conflict.

The result is a peculiar psychological duel. Neither side wants to appear disloyal. Neither wants to be blamed for ending one of the most important alliances of the postwar era. So both continue smiling publicly while quietly edging toward the exit.

Like gunfighters in an old Western, both are waiting for the other to twitch first.

South Korea’s dilemma is particularly acute. Publicly asking the United States to leave would be politically and historically seismic.

Even talking about the topic would trigger panic in financial markets, outrage among conservatives, and fury in parts of Washington. It would also force Seoul to confront difficult questions about nuclear weapons, defense spending, and its long-term relationship with China and Japan. Even if many Koreans increasingly desire greater autonomy, directly demanding an American withdrawal would still feel reckless.

So Seoul prefers ambiguity. It quietly builds longer-range missiles, expands naval power, debates nuclear armament, and increases diplomatic engagement with China. The language is cautious because Korea understands the danger of being seen as the side that drew first.

Washington has similar incentives. An outright withdrawal from Korea would be interpreted globally as another sign of American retreat. It would alarm Japan, Taiwan, Australia, and others who still depend on U.S. power. American officials therefore continue speaking the language of “ironclad alliances” even as growing numbers privately question the costs and strategic logic of permanent military commitments on the Asian mainland.

Beneath the rhetoric, the structural foundations of the alliance are eroding.

The original alliance was built on three assumptions: that South Korea was weak, that North Korea posed a serious conventional threat, and that the United States wanted indefinite primacy in Northeast Asia. All three assumptions are now under strain.

South Korea is no longer poor or militarily dependent. North Korea is a contained nuclear nuisance rather than a conquering army—and has demonstrated its intent in constitutional amendments. The United States itself is increasingly overstretched, internally divided, and focused on managing decline rather than expanding order.

That is why the alliance increasingly feels less like a loving marriage and more like a marriage of convenience to fool grandmothers that their grandchildren are not who they always thought they were.

The irony is that both Washington and Seoul may ultimately prefer the same outcome: a gradual loosening of the alliance without the humiliation of openly ending it.

Operational control transfer, substantially reduced troop levels, steadily expanded Korean defense autonomy, and a steadily quieter American footprint could provide a face-saving middle path.

This way, the alliance would change fundamentally in substance, but could survive formally. Alliances “in reserve” can change dramatically and serve important roles in emergencies. But neocons strategize less than a grandma in a Pachinko parlor. They won’t stand for that. Remember “you’re with us or against us?”

So, the Wild West standoff will continue until someone reaches for their gun.

Will a frustrated Trump unable to completely f$%k over NATO go for the low-hanging fruit and pull U.S. forces out of Korea? Will an ambitious Korean leader decry the risk of having more than seventy solid targets for Chinese forces on the Peninsula?

Either way, the Wild West standoff is well underway and its close to high noon.

—

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I’ve been accused of being anti-American and I’ve been accused of being anti-Chinese. I’ve also been accused of being a self-serving, greedy, pizza hog. I can’t really defend the last, so instead I’ll add fuel to the fire on the first two with the question: do middle powers prosper with values-based or interests-based relationships?

Values-based relationships seem natural for the middle powers of liberal international order. During the post-Cold War period they were pushed to describe alliances primarily in moral language—“shared democratic values,” “rules-based order,” “like-minded partners.” It became natural to think of alliances as building blocs for shared political systems, economic models, civilizational identities, and even social values.

For many Australians and Canadians in particular, describing alliances primarily in values-based language, is natural. With a relatively short and easy transition between accepting British and then American dominance, values were an easy narrative foundation on which to build a lasting relationship.

For others, it has been somewhat harder, and a more recent and sometimes difficult step. South Korea under Park Chung-hee and later military governments was authoritarian, developmentalist, and heavily state-directed economically. The U.S. alliance was then driven primarily by anti-communism and deterrence against North Korea—not liberal democratic convergence. “Shared democratic values,” “rules-based order,” “like-minded partners” have been a relatively recent addition.

The momentous growth in values-based narratives reflected an inherent recognition that interests-based narratives no longer cut it.

First, values-based narratives started to be more prominent in the post-Cold War period when the threats upon which interest-based narrative were built, essentially disappeared. Second, the realization that China had emerged as a competitor to the United States, and an important customer to its allies, necessitated something to define, distinguish, and ultimately distance China from U.S. alliance partners. Lastly, in strategic terms, value-based narratives allow a broader net to draw in less dedicated partners, such as the efforts to draw in India to support an Indo-Pacific collective of “democratic” states.

It’s fair to say this all changed with the Trump transaction. Values became more cynically frame and interests came to the fore.

Interests-based relationships possess advantages that values-based relationships lack: clarity, flexibility, and strategic honesty. They acknowledge openly that states cooperate because they derive tangible benefits from doing so, whether security guarantees, market access, technology transfers, intelligence sharing, or diplomatic support.

Interests-based relationships can survive enormous cultural and ideological differences precisely because they are not dependent on emotional narratives of civilizational unity. They provide middle powers with greater room to maneuver. A state operating through interests can deepen security cooperation with one power while maintaining economic engagement with another without constantly needing to frame every interaction in moral terms.

Historically, many successful middle powers prospered through precisely this form of pragmatic balancing. Their diplomacy was transactional, adaptive, and often ambiguous. The danger, of course, is that interests-based relationships can feel colder and less stable. Great powers pursuing interests may rapidly reassess commitments when costs rise or strategic priorities shift. Yet this may simply reflect the reality of international politics more honestly than the comforting but often fragile language of shared values.

A telling contemporary example is of course Iran and its relationship China and Russia. Though not alliances, the highly impactful relationship between Iran and China, and between Iran and Russia, or even between China and Russia, require absolutely no justification with shared political systems, economic models, civilizational identities, and even social values.

Have you ever seen or heard Russian, Chinese, or Iranian media talk about the relationship, let alone talk about it in terms of shared values? No! Because there is no need. It’s a practical, immediately important, and utilitarian relationship based squarely on a convergence of interests.

So where does this leave the likes of Australia, Canada and South Korea?

For Australia, the challenge is deeply psychological. Its strategic culture has long assumed that security and identity flow together. Britain was once the civilizational parent; the United States became the broader Anglosphere protector. Yet Australia’s economic future naturally lies in Asia, especially China. The stronger Canberra leans into values-based rhetoric, the narrower its room for pragmatic maneuver. It simply risks ending up on the wrong side of history pushing outdated, disowned values as others around it turn to interests.

Canada faces a similar but different dilemma. Geography ties it tightly to the United States in trade, defense, and prosperity. Values-based narratives therefore come naturally because alternatives are limited. Yet as American politics becomes more transactional and unpredictable, it becomes harder to justify the relationship purely through claims of shared democratic virtue. Ottawa currently finds itself speaking the language of values while Washington speaks the language of leverage and interests. Much like Australia, it risks ending up on the wrong side of history pushing outdated, disowned values as others around it turn to interests.

South Korea is the middle power least suited to a purely values-based worldview. Its history was shaped by survival among competing great powers, not civilizational comfort. Seoul prospered through adaptation, ambiguity, and strategic flexibility: relying on the United States for security while integrating economically with China. The danger for South Korea is not simply entrapment between Washington and Beijing, but losing the pragmatic mindset that historically allowed it to survive systemic change. Leaning into values now (as many conservative protesters do) risks ending up on the wrong side of history pushing outdated, disowned values as others around it turn to interests.

So all three have one thing in common. They bought into the values-based rhetoric, but are now facing a challenge in letting it go—and they must let it go because it’s increasingly hollow as the U.S. itself reverts to interests-based relationships.

Values-based relationships were a luxury of a brief historical moment rather than a permanent feature of international politics.

When hegemony is stable, values are easy to proclaim. When power shifts, interests quickly return to the surface. Values still matter, but middle powers that confuse the rhetoric of international order with the mechanics of survival risk strategic paralysis. Historically, prosperity came less from moral absolutism than from adaptability and a clear understanding of national interests.

This brings us back to pizza. Values-based relationship are like arguing endlessly over which toppings are correct, authentic, or civilized. Interests-based relationships are much simpler: who’s hungry, who’s paying, and who’s still open.

In stability, middle powers can fluff on about values-based relationships like a stuffed academic debating pizza toppings. In harsher and more transactional world, middle powers have to focus on interests like a hungry academic writing late into the night—the soul interest is who still delivers.

—

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The Melian Dialogue is routinely taught in international relations (IR) classes as a morality play about power and justice. Small states are told to admire the doomed courage of Melos while recoiling at the cold brutality of Athens. IR Professors will often add the line that captures the lesson, and for them, the crux of realist thought: “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

Yet, for students in middle power countries, that traditional teaching of the Melian Dialogue doesn’t quite capture reality. In fact, it pretty much distorts it.

On the one hand, they are taught to think like Athens. They learn the language of power maximization, coercion, deterrence, credibility, escalation dominance, and systemic hierarchy. IR theory, particularly in its realist forms, trains students to view the world from the vantage point of great powers managing an anarchic system.

But on the other hand, their own states are not Athens. They are Melos.

This creates an intellectual dislocation at the heart of IR education in many middle power states. Students are encouraged to internalize the worldview of hegemonic actors while living within states that possess neither the military reach, economic insulation, nor strategic autonomy necessary to behave like them.

That traditional teaching encourages two equally dangerous instincts.

The first is romanticism: the belief that moral courage, declaratory principles, or ideological alignment can compensate for structural weakness.

The second is mimicry: the tendency for middle powers to imitate the strategic language and assumptions of hegemons, even when their own interests may require ambiguity, flexibility, or adaptation instead.

What IR students in middle power states are rarely taught is that their strategic problem is fundamentally different from that of great powers. Great powers ask: “How do we shape the system?” but middle powers have to ask: “How do we survive the system (or survive change in the system) without being crushed by it?”

That requires a very different intellectual framework. It requires studying adaptation rather than dominance, flexibility rather than primacy, endurance rather than expansion, and strategic ambiguity rather than ideological absolutism.

In that sense, the traditional reading of the Melian Dialogue doesn’t train middle power elites. It misleads them into accepting the wrong role. It teaches them how empires think, but not necessarily how smaller states survive empires.

As a result, many middle power elites end up rhetorically performing great power politics without possessing great power capabilities. They speak in the language of universal values, regional order, deterrence credibility, and strategic resolve (listen to any Australian politician for examples), often without confronting the brutal structural question the Melian Dialogue actually raises for weaker states: how does one survive proximity to and the pressure from, an overwhelming power?

The Melians argued like a state that believed principle could offset power. They appealed to justice, neutrality, morality, and hope. They believed their refusal to submit possessed intrinsic strategic value. They hoped others would rescue them. They assumed that because their position was morally defensible, it was therefore strategically sustainable.

They were annihilated! If it was today, it may have been three generations of sanctions, covert operations, occasional assassinations, and then school bombings and war—the end result is the same.

From the perspective of an adaptive middle power, the Melian position as taught in IR classrooms appears less noble than catastrophically rigid.

Small and middle powers do not survive by confusing sovereignty with absolute autonomy. Nor do they survive by emotionally resisting geopolitical gravity. They survive by adapting to structures larger than themselves while preserving enough flexibility to maneuver when those structures eventually change.

Athens was not negotiating with Melos in 416 BCE. It was clarifying hierarchy. The issue was not morality. The issue was whether Melos understood the distribution of power well enough to survive within it!

A structural realist middle power would have recognized this immediately!

It would not have interpreted the situation as a binary choice between glorious resistance and humiliating surrender. Instead, it would have pursued strategic accommodation without psychological submission. It would have accepted Athenian predominance while quietly preserving internal autonomy, elite continuity, economic functionality, and long-term flexibility.

Such a state would have offered symbolic compliance where necessary, practical cooperation where useful, and ideological silence where prudent. It would not have wasted energy proclaiming abstract principles to an empire that had already demonstrated indifference to them.

Of course, presenting such an approach to a domestic audience is extraordinarily difficult, particularly in political systems where foreign interests, ideological networks, media ecosystems, academic institutions, and security establishments shape the acceptable boundaries of political discourse.

Strategic adaptation is easily caricatured as appeasement, betrayal, weakness, or capitulation. Domestic audiences are often conditioned to interpret geopolitical realities through moral narratives carefully reinforced over decades by alliance structures, funding relationships, educational exchanges, think tanks, media commentary, and political patronage networks. Under such conditions, even discussing acquiescence can become politically dangerous. Leaders may therefore continue publicly performing ideological loyalty long after private elites recognize structural realities have shifted.

Most importantly, the adaptive middle power would have recognized something the Melians failed to grasp: hegemonic systems are temporary.

Athens appeared invincible at the moment of the dialogue. Yet within decades it was exhausted, strategically overextended, and ultimately defeated. History is littered with hegemonic powers that mistook temporary predominance for permanence.

The objective of the adaptive middle power is therefore not moral victory. It is strategic continuity.

It is strange that in South Korea’s own IR classrooms, the Melian Dialogue is often taught as a morality play about power and justice. Top line professors return from schooling at the best U.S. institutions with a firm understanding of the world - from the U.S. perspective.

It is strange because South Korea’s own history is a living refutation to traditional interpretations of the Melian Dialogue. Korea survived and sustained independence for centuries next to China not through romanticism and mimicry of great powers, but by strategic adaptation. This is the lesson that should be taught in South Korean IR schools!

The world is entering another era in which hegemonic structures are becoming unstable. Great powers are demanding alignment, punishing ambiguity, and narrowing strategic space for smaller states. Under such conditions, the Melian instinct remains deeply seductive. Defiance is emotionally satisfying. It flatters national identity. It creates the illusion of agency.

It is also increasingly tempting as the capacity of middle powers relative to great powers increases. Precision strike systems, drones, cyber capabilities, and advanced industrial bases have narrowed aspects of the gap once separating regional states from global powers. Many middle powers now possess enough capability to believe they can openly resist larger powers. Yet greater capacity does not eliminate structural reality. Middle powers may be stronger than before, but they still operate within systems shaped by others.

Adaptive middle powers understand something more important than emotional satisfaction: survival creates future opportunities. Destruction postpones them.

The weak who survive long enough often outlast the strong.

Athens is gone. So too are countless empires that once demanded obedience as if history itself had ended in their favor. The states that endured were not necessarily the bravest or the purest. Often they were the most adaptive.

That may not make for inspiring mythology. But it is usually how states remain alive long enough to write history instead of merely dying inside it.

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“What’s Washington’s position?” For as long as this old man can remember, strategic debates in Seoul have ended with that one question. Nuclear weapons, operational control, missile ranges, naval expansion, relations with China, intelligence sharing—all carefully brewed and then capped with a single question.

For the first time since the alliance was signed, the answer to that simple question “what’s Washington’s position?” is unusually fluid. This means that now is the easiest moment in the history of the alliance for South Korea to pursue bold strategic change.

Paradoxically, this is not because the international environment is stable. Quite the opposite. The regional order is arguably more dangerous by the year. China is more influential and more assertive. North Korea is a confident nuclear state with strong links to its great power neighbors. Russia has returned as a strategic actor in North Asia. Confidence in the utility of being a U.S. alliance partner has weakened across the Indo-Pacific.

Yet, one factor makes bold strategic change not only possible, but potentially even probable if imposed from outside—that factor is none other than the peculiar character of the perfume selling, mobile phone swindling, commemorative coin and crypto-currency conning, sneaker-selling president and commander-in-chief, Donald Trump.

Trump is not a traditional alliance manager. He does not think in the language of postwar Atlanticism, liberal institutionalism, or shared democratic values. He thinks transactionally, personally, financially, and egoistically. He admires flattery, visible burden-sharing, large purchases, investment announcements, and leaders willing to publicly praise him. He has repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to overturn decades of strategic orthodoxy if he believes it benefits him politically or personally.

That creates an unusual opening for South Korea regardless of which strategic direction it ultimately chooses. Even the wildest options heard while stuffing your pockets with muffins at think-tank conferences, or debated over late night drinks are now open.

If Seoul wanted to pursue an independent nuclear deterrent, the current environment is the least resistant it will ever be. The old American foreign policy establishment that once treated proliferation as an almost theological taboo has fractured. Large sections of the U.S. strategic community now openly discuss allied nuclearization as a burden-sharing mechanism. Trump himself has repeatedly questioned why wealthy allies rely on American protection while contributing insufficiently to their own defense.

A South Korean leadership willing to frame nuclearization not as anti-Americanism, but as relieving the United States of strategic burdens, and even contributing a “thorn in the side” to strategic rivals in much the same way that North Korea sits to the U.S. might find a far more permissive environment than once assumed.

If Seoul wanted to pursue strategic autonomy short of nuclear weapons, conditions are unusually favorable. Seoul is already moving in this direction. Operational control transfer continues to advance. Indigenous missile and aerospace capabilities are growing rapidly. South Korea’s defense industrial base is now globally competitive, exporting tanks, artillery, missiles, and aircraft across Europe and the Middle East. The quiet pursuit of nuclear submarine capabilities reflects a country increasingly unwilling to remain strategically dependent forever. This could easily be accelerated under Trump.

If Seoul instead concluded that the best option is not autonomy but deeper alliance integration, this too may never again be so achievable. Trump’s worldview rewards visible loyalty. A South Korea willing to dramatically increase host-nation support, purchase additional American weapons systems, expand basing access, or publicly align itself with Washington’s China strategy could likely secure extraordinary concessions in return.

Finally, if Seoul, for whatever reason, decided that loosening or even ending the U.S. alliance was the best option, that too may be easier now than at any previous point in the postwar era.

For decades, the alliance was reinforced not only through troops and treaties, but through dense intelligence relationships and informal influence networks that helped keep South Korean political discourse within broadly acceptable boundaries from Washington’s perspective. American-linked security institutions, policy communities, media networks, and intelligence coordination mechanisms all helped shape what was considered strategically “reasonable” in Seoul.

Similarly, the dense human networks: fellowships, exchange programs, think tank funding, visiting scholar programs, military education exchanges, congressional staff visits, young leaders initiatives, university partnerships, and endless people-to-people programs, all cultivated generations of South Korean academics, journalists, bureaucrats, military officers, and politicians who hold the alliance not only as natural but as part of their person.

If Seoul decided that loosening or even ending the U.S. alliance was the best option, Trump’s personalized and transactional style of governance would weaken or disrupt this architecture of intelligence relationships and informal influence networks faster than Big Mac Value Meals are served in Mar-a-Lago.

There lies the irony of the present moment: virtually every strategic pathway is more open than it once was. Twenty years ago, many of these moves would have triggered sharp American resistance. Today, Washington is distracted, internally divided, and openly corruptible.

It’s likely future American administrations will be staffed once again by traditional alliance managers, non-proliferation absolutists, and institutional strategists. The bipartisan American establishment may eventually reassert itself and once again seek to tightly manage allied behavior.

That is why timing matters. There are rare moments in international politics when systems loosen, hierarchies soften, and previously impossible options become negotiable.

The deeper question is therefore not whether South Korea should pursue nuclear weapons, alliance autonomy, or deeper integration with the United States. Reasonable arguments exist for all three. The more important question is whether Seoul recognizes that the time and space for bold strategic moves is very limited.

For South Korea, for better or for worse, that time is now. Failing to act, may end in future strategic questions in Seoul ending with one question “what’s Washington’s position?”, or another “what’s Beijing’s position?”

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For most of the modern era, the distinction between middle powers and great powers was relatively simple. Great powers possessed global reach. Middle powers did not.

Sure, scholars came up with a whole bunch of differences in their functional roles, their capacity, and their behavior. Yet, in the end, the most convincing difference was always their global reach.

Great powers could intervene across multiple regions simultaneously. They could sustain distant military deployments, shape global trade systems, protect sea lanes, impose sanctions, overthrow governments, and force political outcomes far beyond their own neighborhoods.

Middle powers, no matter how wealthy or technologically advanced, remained geographically constrained. Australia might play a role in the Pacific, Canada might wield diplomatic influence, and South Korea may play a critical role in technology and industry, but none could project sustained strategic power across the globe.

Even those states sitting in that “sometimes great power, sometimes middle power, depends who you talk to,” category, are confined to their immediate regions.

Germany dominates economically within Europe but possesses little independent military reach beyond the continent. Japan remains strategically tethered to East Asia and dependent upon American security structures for wider projection.

India’s strategic attention remains overwhelmingly fixed upon South Asia, the Indian Ocean, Pakistan, and China. Brazil, despite its continental scale, exerts influence largely within South America and parts of the South Atlantic.

Such states are undeniably large and important states, but their ability to shape events globally and independently remains limited. The ability to do so was what made a great power “great.”

This is why the Iran conflict has now exposed something uncomfortable. The global reach of the world’s most dominant great power is no longer uncontested.

For decades the United States effectively treated the Middle East as a strategic preserve. Washington invaded Iraq, occupied Afghanistan, enforced sanctions regimes, controlled shipping routes, maintained vast military bases, armed regional allies, and assumed that any hostile regional actor could ultimately be subdued through escalation.

The assumption underpinning all of this was not simply military superiority, but strategic supremacy. The United States could enter the region, shape the region, and remain dominant within the region indefinitely. That assumption no longer holds.

Iran has defeated the United States. Sure, American firepower remains overwhelming. The United States still possesses unmatched naval and air capabilities. But military superiority and strategic control are not the same thing. The critical issue is not whether America can strike Iran. It clearly can. The critical issue is whether America can fully dominate and reorder the region at acceptable political, economic, and military cost. The answer is now clearly “no”.

The Middle East today is no longer part of the American-controlled security architecture but rather is a contested strategic zone where regional actors possess growing capacity to constrain outside powers.

Iran has demonstrated an ability to absorb sanctions, survive isolation, threaten energy routes, strike military infrastructure indirectly and directly, influence multiple theaters simultaneously, and impose sustained strategic costs upon the United States and its allies.

Most importantly, Iran has demonstrated that Washington no longer possesses uncontested escalation dominance in the region. That is an extraordinary transformation.

For most of the post-Cold War period, middle powers adapted themselves to an American-led order. Their prosperity and security depended less on independent geopolitical weight and more on operating successfully within a hegemonic structure created by Washington. The United States guaranteed sea lanes, stabilized regions, secured energy flows, and acted as the final strategic arbiter.

The Iran conflict turned this upside down.

What makes the situation particularly striking is that Iran does not resemble a traditional great power at all. It does not possess a global navy. It lacks the economic scale of China. It does not dominate global finance, advanced manufacturing, or worldwide alliances. Its economy remains heavily constrained and sanctioned.

Yet despite all this, Iran increasingly shapes the calculations of nearly every great power touching the Middle East. This is not ordinary middle-power behavior. Iran’s significance lies not in becoming another United States, but in exposing the limits of American reach itself.

This may be the larger story emerging across the international system - the gap between great powers and middle powers has narrowed.

The old distinction between great powers and middle powers depended upon overwhelming asymmetry. Great powers possessed such vast military, economic, and logistical superiority that regional actors ultimately had limited capacity to resist them over the long term. Modern warfare, missile technology, drones, cyber capabilities, sanctions adaptation, proxy networks, and domestic political fragmentation are steadily eroding those asymmetries.

Global reach itself is becoming more difficult, more expensive, and less decisive.

The United States can still intervene almost anywhere on earth. Yet, sustaining uncontested influence afterward has become vastly harder. Iraq exposed it. Afghanistan exposed it. Now Iran has exposed it again.

This does not mean the United States is collapsing. Nor does it mean Iran has become a full great power. But it does suggest that the strategic distance separating great powers from middle powers may be shrinking.

The narrowing gap between great powers and middle powers raises a question international relations scholars have not fully confronted.

If great powers are increasingly unable to exercise uncontested global reach, while regional middle powers are increasingly capable of resisting and constraining them, then should middle powers be demanding greater influence in emerging structures of global governance?

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