Mark Carney is Counting On Cooperation Between Middle Power Countries. Not Going to Happen, says Hal Brands.
Not so long ago, it seemed that the world was becoming more civilized. The end of the Cold War was supposed to bring the triumph of the rules-based order. Enlightened norms and cooperation, buttressed by a broad-minded superpower, would supplant anarchic patterns of the past. It was an inspiring vision—and, alas, an illusion.
Now, all around the world, rules are in retreat. Aggression and conquest are surging; economic coercion and predation are rampant. Respect for international law and organizations is cratering; arms control is in decline. Great powers are reviving dreams of empire; the United States is tempted to seek narrow national aggrandizement at the cost of world order. And as global norms falter, strong leaders are shredding political constraints and institutions at home.
Our world is at risk of becoming a gangster’s paradise, in which rules matter far less than they once did—and raw power matters more . . .
Self-help is vital in a vicious world. There are fewer protections against predation at the hands of revisionists; there’s decreased certainty that a benevolent great power will counteract the malevolent ones. Countries that rely solely on their alliance with Washington are risking disappointment with fatal implications; those that bank on international law, multilateral institutions, or moral principle risk becoming prey for stronger foes. Self-help gets a bad name in the academic literature, where it is associated with lawless, dog-eat-dog behavior. Yet in present conditions, self-help is eminently rational: It’s a matter of developing the sovereign capabilities and alternative coalitions that can extend an exposed state’s life.
Poland and Japan are models: They are making historic defense investments that blow through old fiscal and political barriers. They are cultivating new coalitions as complements to their existing alliances—whether the nascent Intermarium concept, in which Warsaw cooperates more closely with other front-line states in Europe, or the quasi-alliances Japan has built with Australia and the Philippines and the deepening defense relationships it has cultivated with states from India to Vietnam.
This path—preserving as much cooperation as possible with Washington while simultaneously creating stronger hedges against an uncertain future—is the best one available to allies that can’t fully depend on U.S. power but can’t do without it, either. It also buys time to consider whether more radical forms of self-help, such as acquiring nuclear weapons, might one day be necessary.
This self-help surge illustrates a third principle: Don’t bet on cooperation among middle powers to save the old system, even if such cooperation can mitigate the damage caused by the system’s demise. In January, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney made himself a Davos darling by touting a middle-power moment, in which supporters of the rules-based order would come together to sustain it against Beijing and Washington alike.
But that’s a big ask. If middle powers could set the terms of global order, they wouldn’t be middle powers. Power realities are stubborn: There’s no plausible middle-power coalition that can contain China without support from the United States. The Carney concept also exaggerates middle-power unity. Some key players, such as Brazil, India, and Saudi Arabia, see as much opportunity as danger in a fragmented environment; they are ambivalent at best about an order that was built by the West. Efforts to forge a grand middle-power coalition will likely prove a waste of time and energy.
The smarter approach is for smaller, more cohesive groups to find ways of limiting their vulnerability and dependence in a world with fewer guarantees.
It’s eminently reasonable for Europe to gradually reduce its reliance on the U.S. market through deals with India and Mercosur—just as it is reasonable for India, Mercosur, and other developing economies to broaden their commercial options as U.S. tariff barriers rise. It’s prudent for Japan to foster Asian defense supply chains that might one day shore up the front line against China while mitigating technological dependence on Washington. It makes sense for Canada to cooperate more closely on Arctic security with the Scandinavian countries as great-power pressure mounts from several different directions. In a self-help world, resilience at the margin is worth seeking—even if there’s no good near-term substitute to working with the United States . . .
Even allies that need U.S. support won’t want to rely on it too heavily, of course. Events in recent years have made it tougher to argue the idea that U.S. security pacts are rooted in shared values. By making U.S. defense commitments more conditional, Trump has made the specter of abandonment all too real. So the task for Washington and its allies will be to find a more transactional basis for their economic, military, and technological collaboration—for example, pacts that trade allied support in securing and strengthening AI supply chains for privileged access to U.S. computing power and frontier models. The key is to preserve the ability to work together on common interests even as institutions that once anchored the free world become wary partnerships rather than enduring communities of strategic trust.
Hal Brands is the Henry A. Kissinger distinguished professor of global affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and managing director at Macro Advisory Partners. X: @HalBrands The above is an excerpt from Brand’s article in Foreign Policy. Subscribe at Foreignpolicy.com.