The fate of middle powers in contested zones

What happens to middle powers located in contested zones—those that function not as stabilizers, but as strategic pivots struggling to survive amid great power competition?

Commentary and scholarship on middle powers has long been shaped by the conditions of the American-led liberal international order. The focus was on stability: how middle powers contribute to institutions, reinforce norms, and exercise influence through diplomacy, coalition-building, and rule-making.

In this framing, middle powers were not sites of contestation but agents of order—bridges between great powers, facilitators of cooperation, and beneficiaries of a relatively permissive strategic environment. This literature neglected the harder question: what happens to middle powers located in contested zones—those that function not as stabilizers, but as strategic pivots struggling to survive amid great power competition?

Great powers seek to shape the political and strategic orientation of key spaces—borderlands, chokepoints, and frontier regions where competing systems meet. These are often middle powers.

The first objective is control. This does not always mean annexation or formal sovereignty. Control can be exercised through military presence, political alignment, economic dependence, or institutional integration. The key is not the flag, but the function. Territory matters because it shapes the distribution of power—who can project force, who can secure resources, who can deny access to others.

But control is only the first objective. The second is more subtle, and often more destructive: neutralization.

If a territory cannot be controlled, it must be denied. A rival’s access to it must be degraded, its utility diminished, its stability undermined.

Neutralization rarely presents itself openly. It appears instead as fragmentation—economic weakening, political paralysis, social division. External actors support competing factions, erode central authority, and hollow out institutions. The goal is not necessarily victory in the conventional sense, but denial: ensuring that no coherent, rival-aligned order can take root.

The historical record is replete with such outcomes. Where competing great powers cannot decisively impose control, the result is often a divided or contested space—a buffer zone. These zones are neither fully sovereign nor fully controlled. They exist in a condition of suspended resolution, where influence is exerted from opposing sides, often directly facing one another across hardened lines.

Neutralization sometimes takes the form of promised stability. Putting in place a government that is so threatened with instability that its very existence depends on the external patron is, in effect, a form of control by other means. Corrupt regimes that are stable in appearance but structurally insecure—locked into dependency because the costs of autonomy are existential. Their policies align not out of preference but necessity. In this way, stability becomes a mechanism of denial: the territory is governed, but never independently usable by a rival power.

In this sense, instability is not always a failure of strategy. It is of course its product.

The logic is brutally consistent. When control fails, neutralization takes over. When neutralization stabilizes, division emerges.

The Korean Peninsula remains the most enduring example: a territory split along a line of confrontation, each side embedded within a different strategic system. But it is not unique. Variations of this pattern can be observed across the twentieth century and into the present—Germany during the Cold War, parts of the Middle East, Africa, and regions of Eastern Europe where influence is contested rather than settled.

What is striking is not the diversity of outcomes, but their convergence. Strategic pivots do not tend toward equilibrium or autonomy. They tend toward absorption, fragmentation, or division.

This raises an uncomfortable implication for states that find themselves in such positions. The idea that a pivot can be managed indefinitely—that a state can balance between competing powers without being drawn into their rivalry—rests on a fragile assumption: that great powers will tolerate ambiguity in strategically significant territory. History suggests otherwise.

Much of the commentary and academic scholarship on middle powers obscures this reality. It suggests that smaller or mid-sized states can navigate these pressures through skillful diplomacy alone. That they have “agency”.

When geography places a territory at the intersection of competing strategic logics—agency narrows. Choices disappear or become more constrained. Outcomes become shaped less by preference than by position.

The fate of strategic pivots, then, is not determined by the intentions of the states that inhabit them, but by the interactions of the powers that surround them.

Here we have Iran. It started a long time ago with U.S. (and British) control under an imposed regime. When that failed, it then transformed to neutralization through sanctions, economic pressure, covert action, and proxy conflict—aimed not at control, but at constraining its capacity for autonomous power.

When other great powers (China and Russia) started to gain greater influence, more had to be done. The U.S. (and Israel) pushed further: economic pressure, currency collapse, and social unrest to erode the foundations of political order. Finally, the pursuit of regime change became an option. This failed - the next option was neutralization through destruction.

The cold hard truth is that the U.S. and Israel are seeking to weaken Iran to such a point that it becomes ungovernable. The aim: warring factions, at least some of which the U.S. can work with to ensure the territory remains neutralized.

This strategy has included the bombing of bridges, energy, schools, hospitals, police stations, banks and apartment blocks - something evident from the very first day of the conflict. It may soon even include nuclear weapons.

That’s the more degraded and filthy truth of middle power diplomacy behind the glimmering commentaries about Australia and Canada building, sustaining and restoring global governance. They were always building, sustaining and restoring a system that sought the control or neutralization of other middle powers. They contributed to institutions, reinforced norms, and exercised influence through diplomacy, coalition-building, and rule-making in support of the U.S.

So this is what happens to middle powers in contested zones. They do not balance. They do not hedge indefinitely. And they do not sit comfortably as “bridges” between competing systems. They are fought over. They are controlled or they are neutralized. That is the fate of middle powers in contested zones.