Iran's struggle as lessons for middle powers
A regional hegemon will deal harshly with middle powers that don’t play by the rules.
Imagine a country, a middle power country, and how it struggles when it is not aligned with the regional hegemon. It is not weak enough to be ignored, nor strong enough to dictate terms. It sits in that uneasy space where autonomy is possible, but costly—where every attempt to assert independence is read not as normal state behavior, but as deviation.
In this story, the middle power begins with a modest ambition: control over its own resources, its own political direction, its own future.
Its leadership does not seek to overturn the international order. It seeks space within it. But the regional hegemon, backed by external great powers, interprets even this limited assertion as a threat. Independence, in such a system, is indistinguishable from defiance.
The response is not immediate war. It is something more precise. Political pressure, covert interference, economic manipulation. The government that does not conform is removed. In its place, one is installed that does. One that is repressive and can control the bubbling desire for change. The middle power is stabilized by the system that surrounds it. Order is restored—an order built on dependency and repression.
For a time, this arrangement holds. The middle power appears integrated, even successful, but beneath the surface, contradictions accumulate. When the system finally breaks—when the installed regime collapses—the middle power re-emerges, but in a different form. It is no longer willing to accept the constraints imposed upon it. It seeks not just autonomy, but insulation.
From that moment, the strategy of the hegemonic powers shifts. Control gives way to constraint.
Sanctions become a permanent feature, not as temporary punishment, but as structural pressure. Constant, crippling sanctions. Conflict with neighbors encouraged, amplified, prolonged, and intensified. Internal divisions are probed and widened. Assassinations remove key figures at critical moments. The language of reform and revolution is selectively deployed, not as principle but as instrument.
The middle power is contained and subdued with the lives of its citizens a daily struggle.
What makes its position particularly difficult is not simply the pressure from the hegemon, but the weakness or disinterest of its potential great power sponsors. There are moments of rhetorical support, occasional gestures of alignment, but little that fundamentally alters the balance. The middle power is left to absorb pressure largely on its own. It adapts—building resilience, developing asymmetric tools, learning to operate under constraint—but it does so at significant cost.
It is here that the limits of “middle power” status become clear. Without consistent backing from stronger partners, autonomy becomes a burden. Independence is paid for in isolation, economic strain, and perpetual insecurity.
Only when the broader structure begins to shift does the equation change.
As alternative great powers grow stronger—and more willing to engage—the middle power’s position improves. Sanctions become harder to enforce. Isolation becomes more difficult to sustain. Strategic partnerships, once symbolic, begin to carry weight. The middle power does not suddenly become dominant, but it becomes less vulnerable. It gains room to maneuver, not because it has changed, but because the system around it has.
Strength, in other words, arrives not only from within, but from alignment with power that is itself rising.
This is of course the story of Iran. But Iran’s story should give pause to other middle powers across the globe that at this very moment, seem to be fitting themselves into similar predicaments.
Soon, we will enter a more formal multipolar system. China will demand dominance within its region, in much the same way that the U.S. demands dominance in the Western Hemisphere, and Russia demands dominance (or at least clear influence) within Central Asia and its near neighbors.
It is natural that a regional hegemon will deal harshly with middle powers that don’t play by their rules. The U.K./U.S. did this with Iran.
In August 1953, the U.S. and U.K. orchestrated a coup to remove Mohammad Mosaddegh from power after he attempted to assert national control over Iran’s oil resources. They installed a repressive government, which led to the 1979 revolution, from which point in time the US and Israel led an inter-generational effort to contain and weaken Iran. A campaign which is of course still in process as this is written.
Does the same await states that don’t tow the line when China is dominant in East Asia?
A middle power backed by weak or disinterested great powers will struggle, no matter how determined it is. A middle power whose partners are strong, engaged, and rising will find its position correspondingly strengthened.
This is not a moral argument. It is a structural one.
And it leads to an uncomfortable question for countries like Australia and South Korea, as they look out over an Indo-Pacific increasingly defined by Chinese weight and uncertain American resolve.
Is it better to seek absolute sovereignty and have to wait for a distant partner to recover their strength and focus, or is it better to accept limited sovereignty and be on the dominant side? At the moment, only the people of Iran could answer this question.