The “other” middle powers
Sloppy seconds from senior scholars and former politicians recalling the heyday of middle power diplomacy no longer makes good foreign policy
For over three decades, the study of middle powers has been curiously narrow. The canonical cases—Australia, Canada, the Nordic states, and, more recently, countries such as Turkey, Mexico, and South Korea—have dominated both the conceptual framing and empirical focus of the field. These are states embedded, to varying degrees, within a U.S.-led international order. Their strategic behavior has been interpreted through the language of coalition-building, norm entrepreneurship, and institutional engagement. They are the “good citizens” of middle power theory: cooperative, predictable, and legible within Western policy frameworks.
But this is only half the story. There exists another category of middle powers—less studied, less funded, and often treated as outliers rather than subjects of systematic inquiry. These include states such as Iran, Syria, Libya, and North Korea. They occupy positions of regional consequence. They exercise agency. They shape outcomes. Yet they remain largely absent from mainstream middle power scholarship.
This omission is not accidental. It reflects a deeper structural bias within academia itself. Research agendas tend to follow funding streams, and funding streams are rarely neutral. In practice, this has meant privileging states aligned with, or at least adjacent to, the U.S.-led order. These are the countries that host conferences, fund fellowships, and support collaborative research networks. They are accessible to fieldwork, open to interviews, and willing participants in the production of knowledge about themselves.
By contrast, states outside this orbit are harder to study and less attractive to funders. They are politically contentious, diplomatically isolated, or institutionally opaque. Engaging with them often carries reputational or practical risks. The result is a form of selection bias that is rarely acknowledged but deeply consequential: middle power theory has been built on a narrow empirical base that excludes precisely those cases that might challenge its assumptions.
The consequences of this bias are now sickingly apparent. As the U.S.-led international order fragments, the strategic environment in which middle powers operate is changing. The institutional scaffolding that once enabled coalition diplomacy and multilateral engagement is weakening. Great power competition is intensifying, and regional hierarchies are hardening. In this context, the experience of “embedded” middle powers—those operating within a relatively permissive and rule-bound system—may be less instructive than previously assumed.
But what are we treated with instead? Senior scholars and former politicians telling us how middle powers should work together to address the weaknesses in the international order. Dude! It is not the 1990s anymore! The same jelly cake you put together to celebrate the triumphs of APEC, the Cairns Group, the Canberra Group, the non-proliferation regime and R2P (Responsibility to Protect), is now a slippery liquid on the kitchen floor. Sloppy seconds from senior scholars and former politicians recalling the heyday of middle power diplomacy no longer makes good foreign policy! Just ask Carney and Albo as they feck around doing absolutely nothing!
Carney and Albo are fooling no one. You cannot argue for middle power diplomacy (and its constituent faith in international norms and international law) AND then turn around and accuse Iran of wrongdoing. You are part of the problem - not the solution! Take a leaf out of Ireland or Spain’s book, study it, and start to think beyond the quagmire you’ve been led into.
The behavior of middle powers outside hegemonic protection should now be a priority. These are states that long operated under conditions of constraint, pressure, and contestation. They navigate hostile regional environments, resisted coercion, and developed strategies for survival without reliable great power backing. They’re important because their experiences offer insights into how states adapt when the assumptions of liberal order no longer hold - and that’s where we are.
Iran is perhaps the most instructive case. Since the 1990s, it has operated under sustained economic sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and periodic military pressure. It has faced not one but multiple adversaries: the United States, Israel, and a range of regional rivals. Yet it has not only survived but expanded its regional influence. Through a combination of asymmetric warfare, proxy networks, and strategic patience, Iran has carved out a position of considerable leverage across the Middle East.
This is not the behavior typically associated with middle powers in the literature. Iran never built coalitions in the conventional sense. It worked with non-state actors and secured its aims. It did not act as a bridge between great powers or as a champion of multilateral norms. It worked with Russia and China to address their concerns and sought their help. It operated through indirect means, exploiting fissures in the US-led regional orders and leveraged non-state actors to extend its reach. Its strategy is not one of integration and building within an order, but of resistance and adaptation.
To dismiss this as aberrant is to miss the point. Iran’s behavior is not an anomaly; it is a response to structural conditions that are likely to become more common. Yes, middle power scholars in the West, the Death Star blew up, and the Empire is scattered. Get used to it.
As the global order becomes more fragmented, more states will find themselves operating in environments where institutional protections are weak and great power guarantees are uncertain. In such contexts, the tools and strategies developed by states like Iran may prove more relevant than those of their Western-aligned counterparts.
North Korea offers another, more extreme, example. Its pursuit of nuclear weapons is often framed as irrational or uniquely destabilizing. Yet, from a strategic perspective, it reflects a clear logic: in the absence of reliable security guarantees, the development of an independent deterrent becomes a rational response. Syria and pre-2011 Libya, meanwhile, illustrate different trajectories of middle power behavior under pressure—one managing to survive through external support and internal repression, the other collapsing after miscalculating the limits of its autonomy.
What unites these cases is not their ideology or regime type, but the conditions under which they operate. They are middle powers in contested regions, facing stronger adversaries and lacking the institutional buffers enjoyed by states within the U.S.-led order. Their strategies are shaped not by the logic of cooperation, but by the imperatives of survival.
The failure to incorporate these cases into middle power theory has left the field ill-prepared for a changing world. By focusing on a narrow set of “comfortable” examples, scholars have overlooked a broader range of behaviors and strategies. This has produced a body of theory that is hardly elegant and massively incomplete—well-suited to explaining the past three decades from a certain point of view, but feckless for predicting what comes next.
If middle power studies are to remain relevant, they must expand their scope. This means not only including a wider range of cases, but also rethinking the underlying assumptions of the field. It requires moving beyond a normative framework that privileges cooperation and institution-building, and toward a more analytically grounded understanding of how states operate under constraint.
Iran should be at the center of this reorientation. Not because it is representative of all middle powers, but because it exemplifies a set of dynamics that have been systematically overlooked. Its experience forces a reconsideration of what middle power behavior looks like in the absence of hegemonic support. It highlights the importance of resilience, adaptability, and strategic innovation. And it underscores the need to study not only how states cooperate, but how they compete, resist, and endure.