Tokyo Report | Diplomacy | East Asia

Is Japan a Model Middle Power?

Japan has earned rising acclaim from U.S. observers as a middle power that complements, rather than threatens, the United States. Yet Japan is not deepening its ties with Washington out of charity. 

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at the World Economic Forum brought the concept of the “middle power” back into the spotlight. Delivered amid U.S. President Donald Trump’s hints of seizing Greenland and an ongoing tariff war with Canada, the speech was suffused, in its every turn of phrase, with cautious jabs at the United States.

Carney argued that over recent decades of globalization, “great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons.” In order to counter this risk, he said, middle powers should band together – even with countries that do not share their values – to strengthen their strategic autonomy. As a first step, he urged the world to confront the fact that the “rules-based international order” the United States had taken the lead in building was, in truth, a fiction. Without naming the United States outright, Carney declared that his country would “stand firmly with Greenland and Denmark” and voiced strong opposition to tariff measures targeting Greenland – a clear, if indirect, rebuke of Trump.

Carney’s speech, which drew considerable attention in Japan as well, was received as something of a tonic against the perceived values-free domestic and foreign policy the United States has pursued since the start of the second Trump administration. But is middle-power diplomacy actually viable? And if it were such a rational choice, why has this concept only now suddenly resurfaced?

According to Michael Beckley of the American Enterprise Institute, the recent surge of attention toward “middle powers” is not a reflection of rising relative power among self-styled middle powers like Canada, but rather the result of fierce China-U.S. economic competition that has “exposed” their vulnerability. Beckley further noted that there have been few periods in history when middle powers could actually survive as such, observing that for much of recorded human history, “more than half of humanity lived under the domain of just three to five empires.” It was only with the onset of the Cold War, he argued bluntly, that small and medium-sized states were able to behave as “middle powers” at all – and only by pledging allegiance to either the American or Soviet camp.

Beckley is not alone: a broadening swath of mainstream American security experts has grown critical of Carney-style middle-power theorizing, which presumes that countries can somehow rise above the logic of great power politics. Manjari Chatterjee Miller of the Council on Foreign Relations, for instance, characterized Carney’s speech as a “call to arms” and warned that if countries heed that call, the result will be “the fragmentation of the international order, the possibility of multiple new competing orders, and the emergence of a more dangerous world.”

Imran Bayoumi of the Atlantic Council went further. He argued that a coalition of middle powers, far from being capable of creating a new order, in fact lacks any capacity to construct order in the first place. According to Bayoumi, even China........

© The Diplomat