Middle Powers Cannot Rebuild the Global Order Alone, but They Can Prop One Up

When Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney used his January address at Davos to call on the world's middle powers to jointly renew a fraying international system, the appeal read as a plausible blueprint for a post-American order. Eight months on, Suzanne Nossel argues in Foreign Policy that the vision has stalled, not for lack of will but because Washington's retreat has forced each of these states inward. Countries such as Poland, South Korea, Brazil and Indonesia have had to spend their political capital absorbing the shocks of the old order's collapse — tariffs, security gaps, currency swings — rather than building a new one. Divergent interests compound the problem: a coalition ambitious enough to matter is precisely the one hardest to hold together on any single issue, from trade to Ukraine to Gaza. Nossel's account corrects the easy Davos-era optimism about a middle-power moment without lapsing into fatalism, contending these states can still matter decisively, but as reinforcements for existing frameworks — the WTO, the UN system, ad hoc coalitions — rather than as architects of something entirely new. For a paper written from a European middle power's vantage point, the argument lands close to home: a case for supporting rather than supplanting the crumbling scaffolding of the old order.