Mark Carney, Canada’s prime minister, didn’t mince words when he took the stage at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos earlier this year. In Carney’s estimation, the rules-based international order was experiencing a “rupture.” Great powers like the U.S. and China were “using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, and supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.” His message to middle powers was blunt: “If we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.”
But middle powers are a “motley group,” says Eswar Prasad, the Tolani senior professor of trade policy at Cornell University, including basically everyone outside of the U.S. and China. “They’re large and small, rich and poor, and so they’re not going to have perfectly aligned interests.”
