In January, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney warned leaders gathered at the World Economic Forum in Davos that states caught between Washington and Beijing needed to stop negotiating alone. “If we’re not at the table,” he said, “we’re on the menu.” The line captured the mood of the moment. Across capitals and conferences, middle powers are suddenly back in fashion. Think tank reports and newspaper columns describe India as a pivotal swing state; hold up Brazil, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey as models of successful hedging; and urge Australia, Canada, Europe, Japan, and South Korea to coordinate more and rely less on the United States. A new vocabulary has followed: strategic autonomy, multialignment, minilateralism, variable geometry.

The usual interpretation is that all this activity marks the arrival of a multipolar world. The United States is losing its grip. The rise of the rest has created alternatives to the Western-dominated order. The old hierarchy is giving way to a looser system in which states in the middle can bargain, broker, and play the great powers off one another.

But this reading mistakes anxiety for strength. 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.

The danger is that middle powers will respond to this new reality with symbolism instead of strategy. Summits and partnerships can create the appearance of autonomy, but they cannot substitute for raw power, which increasingly depends on the ability to finance, build, and command large systems of technology, industry, intelligence, logistics, and force. Nor can most states simply float between the United States and China, buying security from one, goods from the other, and market access from both. As rivalry hardens, hedging will start to look like betrayal. Washington and Beijing will make states show where they stand by restricting technology, rerouting supply chains, withholding intelligence, blocking investment, raising tariffs, or threatening military reprisals. In an increasingly hierarchical world, the middle is not an open marketplace. It is a minefield.

Middle powers still have cards to play. Many control assets the United States and China need: resources, military bases, ports, factories, technologies, armies. But these niches do not guarantee autonomy. They generate security and prosperity only when plugged into larger systems of protection, technology, finance, and markets. The path forward, then, is not endless coalition shopping to route around Washington and Beijing. It is alignment: choosing the great-power system that offers the best shelter from a country’s gravest threat, building national strength, and using that strength to bargain for influence inside the coalition. This rules out the fantasy of free agency. But it preserves something more valuable: the ability to survive and thrive in a more dangerous world.

For most of recorded history, middle powers were endangered species. From roughly 200 BCE to 1800 CE, at any given moment, more than half of humanity lived under the domain of just three to five empires. Midsize polities existed but were repeatedly chewed up and spat out as imperial centers waxed and waned.

Europe was the great exception. After the Western Roman Empire collapsed in the fifth century, no ruler ever again controlled more than about a fifth of the continent’s population. But fragmentation did not make Europe safe for middle powers. It produced a brutal arena in which war made states and states made war. Competition culled the weak, hardened the strong, and eventually produced industrialized predators. By 1900, the roughly 500 European polities that existed around 1500 had been winnowed to about 20, and those powers established empires that covered roughly 85 percent of the earth’s land surface.

Middle powers are becoming more visible because they are more exposed.

Only after the two world wars shattered this imperial order did middle powers flourish. The wars weakened and discredited the great powers while helping transform once-subject peoples into sovereign nations. Industrialization had already begun knitting societies together through railroads, telegraphs, education, mass production, and expanding bureaucracies. The world wars accelerated that process by mobilizing millions, including colonial subjects, into mass armies, national economies, and centralized administrations. After 1945, many societies turned the organization and nationalist consciousness forged by war against imperial rule. The result was a historic reversal: instead of states being absorbed into empires, empires splintered into states. The number of sovereign countries surged and eventually quadrupled, creating dozens of potential middle powers.

The Cold War turned decolonization into a sustained middle-power moment. Locked in a global ideological rivalry, both superpowers had incentives to recognize new states, protect weaker partners, and compete for influence among them. The United States extended a security and economic umbrella over North America, Western Europe, and the first island chain in East Asia, stretching from Japan through Taiwan to the Philippines. Washington stationed forces abroad, opened its market, and supplied allies with capital and technology. The U.S.-led order was hardly benign everywhere: Washington helped topple governments in Chile, Guatemala, and Iran, and turned Indochina into a battlefield during the Vietnam War. But for allies such as Australia, Canada, Japan, and West Germany, U.S. hegemony provided shelter. It gave them room to grow rich, secure, and influential without becoming great powers themselves.

Soviet hegemony was harsher and poorer. It smothered autonomy in Eastern Europe and fueled revolutionary violence across parts of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Yet it, too, helped create a world of middle powers. Moscow backed decolonization, armed and subsidized friendly regimes, and built industrial capacity in Eastern Europe. Rather than absorbing midsize states outright, the Soviet Union often ruled them indirectly, through satellite regimes in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, and Poland, and subsidized clients outside Europe, such as Cuba and Vietnam. Many Soviet partners had little real independence, but they retained borders, bureaucracies, armies, industrial bases, and seats in international institutions.

Together, these rival hegemonies provided the security foundation for a middle-power moment. Before 1945, states were regularly wiped off the map. After 1945, state death became rare, falling from roughly one country every three years to about one every 30. For many states, the risk of conquest dropped to historically unprecedented lows.

WHEN IT RAINS, IT POURS

Survival was only the first condition of the middle-power moment. What turned protected states into prosperous and influential ones was the greatest global growth surge in history, as industrialization spread far beyond its original Western core. For millennia, most societies had lived close to subsistence, held back by scarce energy supply, low agricultural productivity, poor health, and short lifespans. Industrialization broke that ceiling by harnessing fossil fuels, machinery, and modern infrastructure. By the Cold War, late-developing countries no longer had to build the modern economy from scratch. They could borrow technologies invented elsewhere, import machinery, copy proven production methods, shift workers from farms to factories, and reap the gains from electrification, sanitation, urbanization, and mass manufacturing. For emerging powers, this created an industrial escalator.

The U.S.-led order made that escalator easier to ride. With American protection, dozens of countries could prosper without seizing colonies, building blue-water navies, or fully defending their own supply chains. The United States kept sea lanes open, anchored the dollar-based financial system, and underwrote a world in which capital, goods, energy, and technology moved with unusual ease, especially as the introduction of shipping containers and digital coordination allowed global production to expand.

Countries that might once have been trapped by small markets, dangerous neighborhoods, or limited resources could plug into a global economy they........

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