This text was originally published as a Policy Brief (PB-05/25) of the Policy Center for the New South, in January 2025.
The Author, Hung Tran, is a senior fellow at the Policy Center for the New South, Rabat, and nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Geoeconomics Center, Washington DC; a former senior official at the International Institute of Finance and International Monetary Fund. In his words:
"As geopolitical competition among superpowers intensifies, leading to a fragmentation of the global economy and financial system, the role of middle powers has attracted much attention from policy makers and analysts. While there is no generally agreed list of middle powers, the term is intuitively understandable and has been used widely—basically referring to countries ranked below a handful of great powers but significant enough to be able to act in response to external stimuli with some agency and having some impact, especially regionally. This group of countries will likely be put under pressure by the twin shocks of Trump 2.0 and China’s ever growing manufacturing prowess. The twin shocks have been well documented in the case of Association of South-East Asian (ASEAN) countries in a recent Hinrich Foundation report, but the pressure would also be on middle powers in general, especially those aspiring to promote their own manufacturing sector to spur growth.
With Donald Trump beginning his second term as US President, facing much less constraints than in his first term on his unilateral and transactional approach to promote his “America First” agenda, the already strained international situation is likely to become more uncertain, unpredictable and divisive. Moreover the incoming US Administration would likely be more assertive in dealing with countries seen as taking advantage of the US. These developments would incentivize countries in a position to do so to take measures to limit their vulnerability and sustain their economic development, while navigating the geopolitical contention. Their efforts would turn a spotlight on them.
Areas to monitor middle powers’ reactions include efforts to reconfigure trade and investment flows to manage the impacts of tariffs while dealing with China’s growing manufacturing exports; measures to benefit from the great powers’ race to secure access to critical minerals; navigating the intensified geopolitical contention potentially at higher costs; and more ad hoc coalition building among middle powers and other countries to deal with the challenges."