A sincere thank you to everyone who has subscribed to and followed junotane.com. It’s been a pleasure knowing there are people out there willing to join me on this strange journey through the commentary, criticism, and the occasional cracks at middle powers, foreign policy, international relations, and the region.

Summer, however, means one thing in academia: research! The lectures stop, the committees slow down, and professors retreat into books, archives, and half-finished manuscripts. Without the daily bus ride to campus, I lose the uninterrupted hour that has become my writing studio. No commute means no blog!

The next time I climb aboard that bus will be at the beginning of September. Until then, I’ll be buried in research, trying to produce something that is hopefully a little more enduring than another middle power missive on the crisis of the week.

Have a great summer, stay well, and I’ll see you all in September for more commentary, criticism, and fresh cracks at the wonderful absurdity that is the world of middle powers, foreign policy, international relations, and this peculiar corner of the world I call home.

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What if middle powers don’t actually exist? Not in the sense that there are no states between great and small powers, because clearly there are, but perhaps “middle power” is just simply not a meaningful analytical category.

States can be compared to biological entities, evolving in response to changes in their external environment. The way biologists classify living things offers a useful lesson for international relations.

No biologist would group whales, sharks and dolphins together simply because they all swim. No biologist would group bats, sparrows, bees and flying squirrels simply because they fly. In both cases, the similarities are real, but they tell us surprisingly little about how those organisms evolved or why they behave as they do. Their evolutionary histories, physiology and behavior are completely different.

Did international relations scholars make this mistake? Think about what we use to define middle powers.

One school defines middle powers by capacity. Countries that possess moderate economic and military resources—Australia, South Korea, Canada, Turkey, Indonesia and Iran, among many others—are grouped together because they occupy a similar position in the international hierarchy.

But why should similar capacity produce similar foreign policy? Australia is a maritime ally of the United States. Iran has spent decades resisting it. Switzerland remains neutral. Turkey balances between East and West. Indonesia prizes strategic autonomy. South Korea lives under the shadow of North Korea while remaining deeply embedded in the American alliance system. Their capabilities may be comparable. Their strategic circumstances are not.

Another school defines middle powers by function. States that bridge coalitions, mediate disputes or contribute to regional stability are treated as belonging to the same family. Again, why?

The functions performed by Singapore in Southeast Asia bear little resemblance to those performed by Türkiye in the Black Sea, Brazil in South America or Iran in the Persian Gulf. Similar functions emerge from entirely different historical experiences, regional environments and security challenges. Calling them all middle powers tells us remarkably little about why they behave as they do.

The behavioral school takes this one step further. Middle powers are supposedly countries that support multilateralism, practice good international citizenship and pursue coalition-building. This definition has always suffered from circular logic. States are middle powers because they behave like middle powers. And how do we know they behave like middle powers? Because they are middle powers. It is difficult to think of another concept in international relations that has been defined so thoroughly by its own conclusion.

The result has been decades spent arguing about membership rather than explanation. Does India qualify? Does Saudi Arabia? Does Iran? Does Vietnam? Every new geopolitical development simply produces another debate over whether a country should be admitted to the club. Perhaps, just perhaps, there should not be a category.

Humans are natural classifiers. Faced with an overwhelmingly complex world, the brain instinctively sorts people, objects and ideas into categories that make information easier to process, remember and communicate. Without this mental shortcut, every new encounter would have to be understood from first principles.

Categorization allows us to recognize patterns, make predictions and navigate uncertainty. But it also comes with a danger: categories can become so familiar that we mistake them for reality itself, overlooking important differences between the things we have grouped together.

This danger exists in international relations. States don’t make foreign policy because they belong to a particular class of countries. They respond to the strategic environments in which they exist. Geography, historical experience, culture, economic structure, domestic politics and immediate security threats exert a far greater influence on decision-making.

Two states separated by geography and history but sharing the same “middle power” label may have remarkably little in common, while states placed in entirely different categories may behave in strikingly similar ways because they share cultural and historical similarities, or because they confront comparable strategic circumstances.

Middle powers, often share only one characteristic—one that which is selected by the international relations scholar, often without the area studies scholar’s insight into what drives the nation’s decision-making.

This raises an uncomfortable possibility. The middle power category as it currently is, explains nothing!

Rather than asking whether Australia and Iran are both middle powers, we should ask whether their diplomats actually work in similar ways: whether they cultivate the same networks, use the same negotiating habits, rely on the same institutional channels, write the same kinds of cables, frame problems in the same language, and pursue influence through similar day-to-day practices. Clearly they do not.

Yet, if we contrast Australia with Sweden, similarities in diplomatic practice begin to emerge. Their diplomats often operate within a shared diplomatic culture: careful language, consensus-building, multilateral negotiation, committee work, briefing papers, coalition management and a preference for influence through procedure rather than coercion. These similarities matter, but they do not necessarily prove that both are “middle powers.” They may simply show that diplomats trained in broadly similar professional traditions often work in broadly similar ways.

In other words, scholars have taken a convenient label used by diplomats to secure greater influence in the mid-1940s and twisted it into analytical concept for the sole purpose of impressing other academics—and seventy years later it still says nothing about the states themselves!

The middle power concept is at a defining moment. Scholars know it’s broken, have tried to repair it, and have failed. The “middle power” is no more a coherent analytical category than “animals that swim” or “animals that fly.” Is it time to give up? No way.

Governments won’t stop calling themselves middle powers cos that identity puts them in a special club. Now if governments won’t stop calling themselves middle powers, they’ll keep funding the conferences and the 1.5 track dialogues—and that in turn will keep the scholars turning out pointless shite about middle powers. This my friends, is the perpetual motion machine that is international relations academia—but exposing that can wait till next time.

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At this year’s ASPI Defence Conference, the Chief of the Australian Army discussed the three enduring pillars of Australia’s defense: “alliance with the maritime power of the day,” “collective defense and security,” and “ensuring that we are net contributors to those alliances.”

It is a neat framework. Three “enduring pillars”. Only, are they really enduring?

The first pillar—that Australia should align itself with the dominant maritime power—has failed before, and will fail again. First Britain. Then the United States. Sure, it can be presented as an “enduring pillar”, but that kind of hides the panic that went into make it seem so “enduring.”

Britain’s collapse in Asia, above all the fall of Singapore, shattered the assumption that loyalty guaranteed imperial defense. Australia did not slowly drift toward the United States or make a planned strategic decision, it panicked like a possum in the torchlight. Its alliance failed at the very moment it was needed most. We’ve obviously forgotten about that part of the “enduring pillar.”

Let’s assume that “an alliance with the maritime power of the day” can be enduring. Great. Only being “the maritime power of the day” is no longer anything like the uncontested dominance once exercised by the Royal Navy or the post-Cold War US Navy.

For two centuries maritime strategy assumed that command of the sea translated into the capacity to exert power across the globe. That assumption no longer holds in an age of precision missiles, drones, satellites and long-range strike. Oceans are no longer the protective moat they once were. Naval forces themselves increasingly operate under the shadow of inexpensive weapons capable of threatening billion-dollar platforms hundreds or even thousands of kilometers away.

Meanwhile, the technologies that make maritime power more vulnerable often make continental defense relatively cheaper. Defending one’s own territory has always been easier than conquering someone else’s. Today that advantage is growing. Long-range missiles, autonomous systems, distributed sensors and resilient logistics increasingly favor states seeking to deny access rather than dominate entire regions. Middle powers no longer require aircraft carrier fleets to impose meaningful costs on an aggressor.

That’s the first enduring pillar crumbling.

Which brings us to the second pillar: collective defense. Collective defense has become almost sacred in Australian strategic thinking. Yet, history is considerably less reassuring than official speeches suggest.

Alliances are political agreements, not laws of physics. They endure while interests align and dissolve when they do not. Every alliance ultimately depends on one uncomfortable question: will another government ask its own citizens to die for yours? Sometimes the answer is yes. Quite often it is no.

Recent years have reminded us how selective international responses can be. States support partners when they judge the costs acceptable and their interests sufficiently engaged. Geography, domestic politics, economics and escalation risks all shape those decisions. There is nothing automatic about solidarity. Ask the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, if you can get a word in while they reluctantly renegotiate their relationship with Iran in the face of the U.S. failure to defend them.

That’s the second enduring pillar crumbling.

The third pillar—that Australia should always be a net contributor to alliances—is perhaps the most curious of all. Contributing to allies is sensible. Building influence through capability is sensible. But contributing should be a means, not an objective in itself. The question should not be whether Australia contributes enough to alliances. It should be whether every contribution actually makes Australia safer. These are not necessarily the same thing.

A defense force optimized for coalition operations will less likely be optimized for defending the Australian continent. A procurement decision that earns praise in Washington may not represent the most effective investment for Australia’s own security (see nuclear submarines). Strategy becomes distorted whenever alliance management begins driving force structure rather than the defense of Australia itself.

Perhaps the most striking feature of today’s strategic environment is not simply the relative decline of American primacy but the growing capability of middle powers themselves.

Countries once expected merely to support great-power coalitions are developing sophisticated indigenous defense industries, missile forces, drones, cyber capabilities and increasingly self-reliant military strategies. Ukraine has demonstrated remarkable adaptation under extreme conditions. Israel has repeatedly shown the value of indigenous defense technology. South Korea has become one of the world’s leading arms exporters. Turkey has transformed itself into a major drone producer. Poland is rapidly expanding its own military capacity. Finland and Sweden have long invested heavily in territorial defense. Then there’s Iran.

Iran has challenged one of the central assumptions underpinning Australian defense policy: that only great powers can meaningfully resist great powers. Whatever one thinks of Tehran, its military performance demonstrated that a determined, technologically adaptive middle power can impose significant costs on even the world’s most capable military powers.

Rather than collapsing after an initial wave of strikes, Iran continued to absorb attacks, and retaliated with missiles and drones, and sustained a credible deterrent, ultimately contributing to an outcome that all but Fox News calls a victory. Iran defeated the U.S! Something unimaginable before it happened. For middle powers, that may be one of the most strategically significant developments of the twenty-first century.

The lesson is not that alliances no longer matter. The lesson is that capable states increasingly complement strategic procurement and intelligence alliances with genuine self-reliance rather than treating alliances as substitutes for it.

That’s the third enduring pillar crumbling.

There we go, three enduring pillars crumbled on the floor in a useless rubble pile of outdated 20th century strategic thought ready to be swept up and discarded. Maybe it’s time to recognize that with changed strategic circumstances, Australia’s “enduring pillars of defense” have become Australia’s “outdated pillars of defense.”

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Twenty years from now Australia will have gotten over the nuclear subs problem. It’ll have a complete complement of strike aircraft, advanced drones, long-range precision strike missiles, and maybe even nuclear subs. Sadly though, it’ll be like a medieval knight putting on armor to fight diarrhea—externally an elaborate defense, internally, just a pile of shit.

It makes you wonder, what are they thinking? With their heads in the Canberra bubble (or up somewhere much darker) debating deterrence, gray zones, and China threats, Australia’s defense planners, strategists, and foreign policy folk have missed the broader picture.

As they spend more and more tax money on subs instead of housing, education, healthcare, aged-care, infrastructure, employment, law and order, public transport, and regional development, there’s three things to think about.

First, Gen-Z won’t fight. There’s a simple truth: people will only fight for a country when it belongs to them. The point is not military but social. Citizens who have a stake in their society—secure jobs, affordable housing, functioning public institutions, and confidence that the system treats them fairly—will defend it. Conversely, if they’ve been priced out of home ownership, burdened with insecure work, and left with declining public services, appeals to patriotism ring hollow.

This is the uncomfortable question Australia should be asking about Gen-Z. It is not whether they are brave enough to fight, but whether they feel they have enough worth defending—no jobs, f@cked public transport, rental queues around the block, machete gang wars in the suburbs, and no chance of ever owning a house. As Singapore’s leaders repeatedly argued, national defence ultimately rests not on weapons or military spending, but on citizens believing the nation is theirs and that its future is worth sacrificing for. Somehow Australia’s leaders have forgotten that.

Second, Australia’s politicians are seeking to defend a country that has already disappeared. Australia in twenty years more will not be the Australia imagined by today’s strategic class. The America-focused baby boomers who grew up during the Cold War will have largely left public life, replaced by younger Australians who have no memory of the Soviet Union, ANZUS triumphalism, or Washington as the unquestioned center of the world. Boomers grew up with Captain Cook, ANZACs, and Ned Kelly nationalism. Gen-Z has grown up with division, self-hatred, and displacement.

At the same time, immigration has reshaped the country’s demographics, making Australia more Asian, more globally connected, and less emotionally invested in the geopolitical assumptions of previous generations. For many of these Australians, China will not simply be a military problem discussed in think-tank reports. It will also be a place of business, opportunity, family, tourism, education and culture. Beijing will be a place in the Australian imagination similar to that once held by New York or London: a distant global metropolis where ambitious young people go to build careers.

Even Australia’s strategic studies, defense and foreign policy folk will change. The next generation of analysts will not have grown up on Fulbright fellowships, Washington internships, ANU national security seminars and think-tank trips to DC. Increasingly, funding and fellowship opportunities, networking opportunities, and young leaders networks will be in Beijing, Shanghai or Shenzhen. The better paying jobs, the better study opportunities, and the better conferences will be in China. Narratives built around the permanent, all-consuming “China threat” will no longer resonate.

Finally, China won’t invade. China is not going to invade Australia because it does not need to. Why send soldiers when Australia already ships out its iron ore, coal, gas and other raw materials at bargain rates, then politely fails to tax the profits properly? Invasion is expensive, risky and politically disastrous. Buying the place’s dirt and gas under friendly commercial terms is cleaner, cheaper and already working. The only real risk, is Australia being dragged into a conflict it didn’t want. For Beijing, Australia is less a fortress to storm than a feckless poorly managed quarry to buy and improve—and one that will be less and less relevant as time goes on.

Australia’s housing, education, healthcare, aged-care, infrastructure, employment, law and order, public transport, and regional development are broken. Australia will eventually get its submarines—but without fixing what’s broken, it’ll be a proud shiny medieval knight with a foul case of diarrhea. A banana republic with nuclear subs.

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The protests following South Korea’s recent ballot mix-up are still going. Sure, you’ve seen similar protests before, talked to a few protesters, tried to work out what it’s all about, and know that generally, they're loopier than a bowl of Froot Loops. The difference this time is that the bowl is bigger, the colors are brighter, and the loops are absolutely furious.

As always, it’s the extreme views that most interest me.

On the political far right, the ballot mix-up was immediately interpreted as evidence of election fraud. For the more committed believers, it was not simply an isolated mistake but proof of preparations for manipulation during the next presidential election coupled with Chinese influence. The incident fitted neatly into an existing narrative that South Korean democracy has already been compromised by hidden actors operating behind the scenes.

On the political far left, an equally dramatic interpretation emerged. The protests themselves—and particularly their persistence—were presented as evidence that something much larger is underway. Suspicious foreign funding, outside influence, and the slow construction of a future “color revolution” organized by the U.S. deep state. In this telling, the demonstrations were not primarily about ballots but setting the stage for the destabilization the political system itself.

The details differ, but the underlying extreme logic is remarkably similar. At the extremes, both sides increasingly view political opponents not as fellow citizens who happen to hold different opinions, but as participants in a foreign conspiracy. The assumption is no longer that mistakes occur, institutions fail, or people disagree. The assumption is that hidden forces are always at work.

Korean history tells us where this logic can lead. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Korean Peninsula became the object of intense competition among foreign powers, including China, Japan, Russia, and later the United States. These powers did not merely compete from afar. They cultivated allies, clients, and sympathizers within Korea itself. Reformers, conservatives, nationalists, royalists, and collaborators often aligned with different external actors, convinced that foreign support offered the best path to protecting their vision of the country’s future.

The end result was not national unity but deep internal division that ultimately weakened Korea’s ability to resist external pressure and contributed to the loss of its independence. The lesson is not that foreign influence is imaginary. It is that societies become most vulnerable when political rivals are assumed to be agents of foreign powers rather than fellow citizens with competing ideas about the national interest.

It is a scary thought. Modern history says so. It not too long ago, let’s say two decades or at least a comb-over ago, people around the world have seen foreign governments, international organizations, media outlets, NGOs, intelligence agencies, and transnational activist networks accused—sometimes plausibly, sometimes implausibly—of influencing domestic politics. The color revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine, the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt and elsewhere, and the NATO intervention in Libya all became symbols in a broader global debate about sovereignty, regime change, and external influence.

Ukraine provides the clearest modern example of how domestic politics can become entangled with great-power competition. Russia on one side, the United States and Europe on the other, have sought to influence Ukraine’s political direction. To some, it’s legitimate diplomatic engagement and support for democratic development. To others, it’s evidence of external interference in a sovereign state’s affairs. Whatever interpretation, the result is that Ukraine’s internal political divisions ultimately led to war. Why? Because it was a contested strategic pivot and neither Russia nor the West wanted to lose their control.

And Korea? Suddenly the outside interference schtick don’t seem so implausible. For a country like South Korea, situated at the intersection of competing great powers, the lesson is an uncomfortable one.

South Korea’s political crisis did not begin with a ballot mix-up, nor did it end with the impeachment and prosecution of former president Yoon. The events surrounding martial law were interpreted overseas as evidence of democratic resilience. The military did not take power. The constitutional system functioned. Political leaders were held accountable. From a procedural perspective, democracy appeared to work. This interpretation confuses the resolution of the crisis with the resolution of its causes.

The political division, extremism, and mutual suspicion that helped create the conditions for the crisis remain firmly embedded within South Korean society. Public trust is low. Political identities are increasingly tribal.

Conspiracy theories that once occupied the fringe now circulate openly within mainstream political communities. Every controversy is rapidly absorbed into larger narratives of betrayal, subversion, and existential threat.

The ballot controversy is less significant for what it reveals about election administration than for what it reveals about South Korean politics. It shows that the polarization visible during the martial law crisis has not disappeared. If anything, it has become further entrenched.

For outside observers, the temptation is to view South Korea’s recent turmoil as a completed chapter—a stress test that ultimately demonstrated democratic strength. The reality is less reassuring. The institutions survived, but many of the social and political forces that pushed the country toward that crisis are still present.

Sooner or later, they will find a new issue, a new controversy, and a new opportunity to emerge once again. The risk of escalation remains.

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Junotane is now open to guest posts!

The only real requirements are creativity, open-mindedness, and a willingness to say shite on regional or international affairs that can’t be said elsewhere.

If you’re tired of reading repetitive dribble on Foreign Affairs and they rejected your last submission because you didn’t toe the line, then all the better. If you’re tired of hearing the speaking-head claptrap on CNN and know they’re spinning shite, then all the better. Be daring, upset people, and challenge the mainstream.

Your post will reach a bevy of eager subscribers and also at least two very angry readers—one who will accuse you of being too pro-American and the other who will accuse you of being too pro-Chinese—no matter what you write. Middle power life!

All that it requires is around 800 words and a short bio intro with any links you want put down. If you’re keen, don’t hesitate to contact me!

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A writing guide…

The writing on this site is pretty weird cos it sits somewhere between an op-ed, an essay, and a conversation. It is not a newspaper column adhering to standards, a think tank report seeking bureaucratic approval, or an academic article written for specialists. It borrows from all three, but ultimately is something very different.

The purpose is not simply to express an opinion. Everyone has opinions. The challenge is to help readers see something differently.

The writing itself should be clear, direct, and conversational. Complex ideas are welcome; complicated language is not. If a sentence sounds like it belongs in a conference paper, change it. Go with the pub test. Engage with difficult ideas but remember the bozo at the bar you’re talking to needs help to understand the idea.

So, don’t write in an institutional voice. Readers should know there’s a person behind the words. Everything in international relations and politics comes down to individuals and the f$%@#d up standards in most academic blogs means that the individual is lost. The whole sh%t show is in the end about humans, so curiosity, humour, scepticism, frustration, cynicism and surprise all have a place.

Personality matters because readers are not simply engaging with information; they are engaging with a perspective. The goal is not to sound authoritative. It is to sound thoughtful. Don’t let your voice disappear. Let it out to serve the argument.

A few general pieces of advice for those not used to op-ed writing:

1. The peg. Begin with a puzzle rather than a thesis. It might be a strange event, a contradictory policy, a historical anecdote, an offhand remark, or something that simply does not seem to fit the conventional explanation. The opening should create curiosity. An article that begins with a puzzle feels like an invitation to read.

2. The argument. You’ve only got 800 words so it makes sense to revolve it around a single central idea. Readers should be able to explain the argument in one sentence after finishing the article. Everything else should support that idea. One of the hardest disciplines in writing is deciding what to leave out. Interesting tangents, secondary arguments, and additional examples often weaken a piece rather than strengthen it. Clarity usually comes from exclusion.

3. The relevance. End by explaining why the argument matters. A conclusion should do more than summarize what has already been said. It should return to the peg (the first paragraph) and widen the lens. If the argument is correct, what follows? What does it suggest about politics, diplomacy, society, or the future? Readers should leave with something to think about rather than simply a recap of the article they have just read.

Now of course, you can go through the blog and find dozens of articles where I deviate from my own advice. That’s cos I mostly write on the bus or subway on an iphone and sometimes I’m not sitting down and I get sweaty and frustrated.

Still, I always try to make articles feel less like lectures and more like conversations. I try to leave readers with the sense that they have not merely been told something, but that they have been shown a different way of looking at the world. Give it a go! Contact me!

If you spend enough time reading articles and commentaries on middle powers, you eventually begin to suspect that the field has produced less a coherent body of scholarship than a highly specialized literary genre—some of it fiction. Like all genres, it contains recurring characters, familiar plot lines, and predictable endings. Most middle power articles fall into one of three categories.

The first type of article is the Messiah article. These pieces are easy to recognize. They begin with a crisis. In the 1990s, it was that human rights and democracy are in trouble; in the 2000s it was multilateralism is failing; in the 2010s it was great power conflict is increasing; and in 2020, it’s the international order is collapsing. Regardless of which crisis it is, middle powers are the savior and all that’s required is a renaissance of middle power cooperation.

Usually, they’ll spin on about something like multilateralism, bridge-building, norm entrepreneurship, coalition-building, or good international citizenship. The reader is then duly informed that middle powers possess a unique ability to save the international system. The details are always less important than the structure. A category of states defined largely by what it is not—neither great power nor small power—is transformed into a near-magical force for global stability.

At the moment of course we’re all enjoying a revival of these types of articles because Canada’s Prime Minister Carney decided to spin sh!t about middle powers at Davos in January this year. Let’s not worry about the fact that every historically successful middle power initiative occurred at a point in time when a skilled, well-led and resourced diplomatic service recognized the ideal time to pick the diplomatic fruit after it was slowly developed through diplomatic-civic sector cooperation; diplomatic-academic interaction; and had already secured tacit support from likely partners—and none of this is true today. Instead, let’s just let loose at Davos without a plan.

It’s a sad fact that middle powers, such as Australia and Canada, are so ensconced in the relatively successful and largely nationalist history of the concept (we punch above our weight!) that whenever there’s a crisis the ex-politicians and academics from that era line up to tell us about middle power diplomacy.

My advice: ask them to install an alternative app store on your Android, sideload a password manager app, and enable 2FA. Those analog phone throwing f@cks (you know who I’m talking about) are from a different era. Phones have changed and the world has changed. Their Messianic middle power dreams of savior and renaissance are just that—dreams.

The second category is the Wedgie article. These are the most common because they’re a snug fit. The article can examine trade policy, cyber security, climate diplomacy, public health, artificial intelligence, maritime security, regional cooperation, cultural diplomacy, or almost any other topic. Somewhere in the title, introduction, and text appears the phrase middle power” or “middle power diplomacy.”

The problem is that nothing in the article actually depends on middle-power status. The concept is entirely incidental. Remove the term and the argument survives completely intact: “South Korea’s middle power tech diplomacy” or “Australia’s middle power regional development assistance,” or “Canada’s middle power trade objectives.” The article is really about tech, development assistance, or trade policy.

The term “middle power” provides atmosphere rather than analytical leverage. It functions largely as descriptive scenery and a wedge to get published by some sop editor with a syrupy soft spot for middle powers.

It’s like the term survives because it sounds respectable and familiar—and that’s really weird because you couldn’t get a more imprecise, feckless, and largely useless term.

Speaking of familiar and cosy, I imagine that’s how Carney’s intervention came about. “What are we gonna do, we’re all f*@ked,” said one advisor after the 51st state comments, the NATO threats, and the tariffs. “Well f@ck me, I’ll prepare something about middle power coalitions,” said the speech-writer. From that point on, if you were a commentator or academic, you could get anything published by just sticking “middle power” in front of whatever you want to talk about.

The third type is the Silent Fart Article. These papers begin with a sense that all is not right. They are the wolf in sheep’s clothing, the snake in the grass, or the silent fart in the line at the DMV. They’re written by academics who once loved the topic, practitioners who worked on the topic, or any combination thereof. One day, they realized that the concept was just making less and less sense, and wanted to say something about it.

These articles point out very real facts. After decades of scholarship, nobody seems entirely sure what a middle power is. Definitions multiply rather than converge. States enter and leave the category with remarkable frequency. They know about all the lines of fluff about what makes a middle from functions, capacity, behavior, and role theory, to practice, status, networks, balancing, systemic impacts, and norm entrepreneurship. I could go on. Really, I could. The more closely one examines the concept, the stranger it becomes.

Why are some states included while others are excluded? Why are liberal democratic behavior frequently treated as evidence of middle-power status? Why do some states become middle powers when they support the existing international order but cease to be middle powers when they challenge it? Why do scholars often identify middle powers only after they have already decided what kind of behavior they wish to celebrate?

These articles point out that the field has become conceptually redundant and circular. Middle powers are defined by desirable behaviors and then praised for exhibiting those same behaviors. Unsurprisingly, the result is often less a theory than a collection of normative preferences.

The irony is that this third category may be the healthiest part of the literature. At least it recognizes there’s a problem. But they’re also whingy, whining, and feckless. Sure, sometimes they’re dressed up by some senior academic and appear in a top-flight publication after s/he reads something by middle power scholar Stephen Nagy and feels compelled to criticize the field, but mostly they’re just written by some second-rate tired and near-retired academic like me with two regular blog readers and a host of angry visitors who only read the intros.

That’s it! The articles and commentaries on middle powers in five minutes of reading. Messiahs, Wedgies, and Silent Farts: the first promises a renaissance; the second barely uses the concept at all; and the third makes you wonder what it’s all about.

Now you can read any of these three types of article at any number of international relations sites. Over time, you’ll notice that one or two types become more popular, and another is shunned. For example, over at East Asia Forum (EAF) at the moment there’s be plenty of Messiahs and Wedgies, but look at their archives from ten years ago, and there’s plenty of Silent Farts.

For a field supposedly devoted to explaining a category of states, the breadth of article types should probably be cause for concern, but it’s also an opportunity. Middle powers are important—and signs are, they’re becoming more important. The field really does need more people thinking about their role in breaking and building international orders.

The next time you read anything on middle powers, keep your eyes out for messiahs, wedgies, and silent farts.

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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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