The Middle Power Dilemma?
States are being forced to choose between the United States and China... or are they?
Earlier this year the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World had the good fortune to visit the country of Oman — and very much enjoyed the experience. Oman has a rustic beauty and well-earned reputation for quiet diplomacy and mediation among other players in the Middle East, befitting a middle power in a volatile region.
Despite this reputation, Oman has recently found itself in the crosshairs of the Trump administration, as the New York Times’ Vivian Nereim reports:
When President Trump casually threatened last month to bomb Oman, a longtime American ally, it was so extraordinary that some people assumed he had misspoken. Surely he meant Iran?
Apparently, he did not.
As the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran inflames tensions across the Middle East, the sleepy sultanate of Oman has found itself in the cross hairs of the Trump administration and at odds with its Gulf Arab neighbors — perceived by some as too sympathetic to Iran, according to analysts.
“Sometimes standing in the middle is not easy,” said Abdullah Babood, an Omani academic. “For Washington, it is almost that you are either with us or against us — and Oman doesn’t want to do that.”
Beyond confirming the Orwellian evolution of the MAGA crowd, a “with us or against us” logic suggests ways that middle powers are finding themselves squeezed by both the United States and China.
This is a relatively new development. During the Cold War and much of the post-Cold War era, middle powers had considerably autonomy and flexibility. In some cases, pivotally-located middle powers could play great powers off each other as a means of preserving their freedom of action.
That was then. Now, according to my Tufts University colleague Michael Beckley recently argued in Foreign Affairs middle powers across the world will face the same crunch as Oman:
Middle powers are not becoming more visible because they are more powerful. They are becoming more visible because they are more exposed. The conditions that allowed many of them to flourish in recent decades are eroding. For years, they could shelter under U.S. hegemony, exploit an expanding global economy, and trade with rival powers without choosing among them. They could reap the benefits of scale without possessing it themselves.
That world is disappearing. Growth has slowed, globalization has become a contest over chokepoints, and great powers have grown more predatory. The United States is increasingly willing to use its dominance to extract concessions. China is using subsidies and export gluts to deindustrialize other countries, debt and infrastructure to make them dependent, and military harassment and economic sanctions to narrow their choices. The result is not a flatter world of ascendant middle powers but a harsher one in which the two top powers have more ways to bend others to their will….
Middle powers also can no longer extract great-power favors as easily as they once did. During the Cold War, ideological allegiance had value. Weaker states mattered as symbolic dominoes, military bases, or buffers along the fault lines between the U.S. and Soviet blocs, allowing them to bargain for aid, arms, market access, and diplomatic support. Egypt, India, Pakistan, Yugoslavia, and others played that game. The superpowers also subsidized core allied middle powers. The United States supplied Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and West Germany with capital, technology, and market access while tolerating the protectionist policies those countries enacted to shelter their infant industries. The Soviet Union sustained its bloc with cheap energy, preferential trade, credits, arms, and aid—transfers worth tens of billions of dollars a year.
Today’s U.S.-Chinese rivalry works differently. Washington and Beijing are not building rival worlds separated by an iron curtain; they are fighting for dominance within one global economy. Their goal is not to buy allegiance at any price but to control systems that others depend on: finance, technology, minerals, energy, shipping, and data….
If middle powers cannot stand alone, form a pole, or hide among ad hoc coalitions, they must choose a larger system to lean into.
The thing is, I’m not entirely sure I agree with Beckley’s assessment that the U.S. and China will force everyone else to choose sides. For one thing, even Beckley acknowledges that, “a few large middle powers, such as India, may preserve more room to maneuver than most.” So some middle powers will possess autonomy in any bipolar order.
The more important thing, however, is that the implicit assumption in Beckley’s article is that the U.S. and China are each attempting to maximize their coalition in a fierce global competition for power. And that…. is not what is happening, like, at all.
In some cases, this is due to simple disinterest or laziness. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, Jose Melendez Dan Kobayashi recently examined U.S. policy and concluded, “the U.S. government effectively signed a non-compete agreement in vast swaths of Africa,” leaving the field wide open for China.
Trump administration disinterest in sub-Saharan Africa is one thing. A disinterest in directly competing with China is something else, because it obviates the bipolar competition that drives Beckley’s argument.
The fact is, ever since China’s strategic victory in its trade war with the United States,1 the Trump administration has been awfully docile in its approach towards China. As I noted a few weeks ago, “What is striking over the past week is just how much the current administration has prioritized the bilateral Sino-American economic relationship over everything else. Which is not a terribly hawkish position.”
Earlier this week the New York Times’ Edward Wong provided some confirming evidence for this:
After meeting with China’s top diplomat in Malaysia last summer, Secretary of State Marco Rubio uttered a line that made few waves at the time but would later help pave the way for an abrupt change.
The United States and China, Mr. Rubio said, had an “opportunity here to achieve some strategic stability” and find areas of cooperation. He used the phrase again in February while talking about China in the Caribbean, also to little notice.
Chinese officials picked up on Mr. Rubio’s remarks and suggested to their U.S. counterparts even rosier language to describe ties between the two nations, according to two people with knowledge of the previously unreported diplomacy.
The new phrase — “constructive strategic stability” — was rolled out by both governments during President Trump’s meeting in Beijing last month with the leader of China, Xi Jinping.
Although the language sounds stiff and somewhat vague, such diplomatic terms serve as important guideposts. The new catchphrase signals to agencies in both nations, and to other powers, that the United States and China — the world’s two largest economies and most powerful militaries — are looking to work together or limit hostilities, notably on trade and Taiwan….
Current and former officials in the United States and Asia say the message is clear: Mr. Trump intends to accommodate China, and other countries should fall in line.
It seems clear that East Asian middle powers face a dilemma — but not the kind that Beckley identifies. Their dilemma is how closely they should yoke themselves to the United States as the United States yokes itself to China.
Australia has the opportunity to walk a middle path in the 21st century, and there are many domestic advocates for us being much more non-aligned than we are. However, the CIA has cultivated our politicians to a remarkable degree, and our defence and security elites have been completely suborned by the US military - industrial complex, so we are all the way with DJT from here to eternity. Did you know we've already given you billions of dollars, no strings attached, to prop up your sickly ship-building industry. With some vague hope that one day after we've given you many many billions more, we'll get some nuclear attack subs? Good times!
I believe what you are describing is bipolar DISorder, given our CINC.