This year has been the year of anxious middle powers. In January, Canadian Prime Minister (PM) Mark Carneytold the World Economic Forum in Davos that the world was going through a rupture rather than a transition, and urged countries like his — essentially, middle powers — to close ranks. On September 21, on the margins of the UN General Assembly, the European Union, Brazil, Canada, Kenya, Australia, Barbados and India launched Partners for Multilateralism (P4M), a platform to defend an order under strain. On October 4, at the Munich Leaders Meeting in Delhi, external affairs minister S Jaishankar spoke about what “emerging and middle powers” might do together. The more the two big powers, or three if you wish, talk to each other warmly but over other States, the more second-rung powers will consult each other. So, expect more middle power talk in the months ahead.
Where does India stand on the middle power conversation? India’s response to the middle power moment has been ambivalent. New Delhi is both tempted by the idea and resists it.
The temptation is easy to understand. What India least wants from any manner of world order is a bipolar world, or worse, a G2 in which Washington and Beijing settle the big questions of the world between themselves. Every Donald Trump-Xi Jinping meeting triggers that worry, and Trump spoke of G2 before meeting Xi in Busan, South Korea, last year. A world run by the two would force uncomfortable choices on India, ones that it has avoided since Independence. In New Delhi, Jaishankar used a Goldilocks formula to describe the kind of US-China relationship India prefers: “You don’t want it to be too hot; you don’t want it to be too good; you want it somewhere in between, at the right temperature.” Many countries would share that preference. A strong and autonomous middle is what keeps the system from settling into two camps.
The resistance in New Delhi towards the middle power idea runs deeper. India’s idea of itself is of a rising major power, a great power in waiting, or as I put it in my new book, a pole. How can such a country be happy with a label it would share with San Marino and Liechtenstein, both of which have signed the P4M declaration? The category stretches from European micro-States to Brazil. Hence, a nuclear-armed country of more than 1.4 billion people is unlikely to see itself as one in that crowd.
{{/usCountry}}The resistance in New Delhi towards the middle power idea runs deeper. India’s idea of itself is of a rising major power, a great power in waiting, or as I put it in my new book, a pole. How can such a country be happy with a label it would share with San Marino and Liechtenstein, both of which have signed the P4M declaration? The category stretches from European micro-States to Brazil. Hence, a nuclear-armed country of more than 1.4 billion people is unlikely to see itself as one in that crowd.
{{/usCountry}}There is a more serious objection. Historically, middle powers have been rule-takers. Canada and Australia, for instance, were good citizens of an order the US designed, policed, and paid for. They primarily sought to improve the rules at the margins and keep the machinery running. Much of New Delhi’s traditional diplomacy, from the UN Security Council campaign to the constant refrain of “reformed multilateralism”, has been about getting more rule-making agency in that order. Accepting the middle power tag looks a lot like joining the club of rule-takers.
Hence Jaishankar was careful about the phrasing. I would expect that extra word — emerging — to underline India’s approach to middle-power diplomacy.
In fact, there is a more useful way to think about all this, and it may help New Delhi make peace with the idea quicker. Middle powers can be considered as the middle class of international society.
Aristotle argued in Politics that cities are best run when the middle class is large and strong. A city with a large middle is the least prone to faction. Where the middle is weak, the city splits into rich and poor, and stability goes with it. In that sense, the interests of the middle and the survival of the system happen to coincide.
Much of what we know about the middle class carries over into the international system. It pays the taxes and has little say on how the budget is made, which was Canada’s complaint at San Francisco in 1945 and has been India’s since Independence. Such States depend on rules more than anyone else does. The rich have money, power and lawyers,the poor seldom reach the courthouse, and it is the people in between, the middle class, who want rules applied fairly.
For a country that wants to be a pole, a strong international middle is a necessary condition. The larger and better organised the middle, the harder it is for two powers to divide the system between them as spheres of influence, and the more room there is for a third to rise.
Admittedly, the analogy has its limits. Two middle powers can be threats to each other. Türkiye and Cyprus have both signed the P4M declaration. Australia’s main security worry is China, while Brazil has no stake or interest in the South China Sea. This is perhaps why middle-power coalitions gather around trade rules, supply chains, critical minerals and technology standards, and have very little to say on security and defence. Jaishankar appeared to indirectly accept this view in New Delhi, saying countries no longer needed to agree on everything and that enough points of contact would do.
So expect New Delhi to sit in the middle power room, use the middle (and emerging) power vocabulary, and sign the declarations. India is a middle power that wants to be a pole, and until it gets there, it will behave like a middle power whenever that is useful.
The bigger worry for New Delhi should be whether the middle class of international society holds together at all. If its members decide that coalition-building is getting them nowhere, many could bandwagon Washington or Beijing. That would lead to a bipolar order New Delhi most fears, with the middle divided between two camps. So if the middle-power coalitions turn into talk shops, New Delhi’s interest will fade fast. If they deliver on trade and technology, India may find the middle a more comfortable place to wait than it expected.
Happymon Jacob is the author of India After Nonalignment (Penguin-Viking and Georgetown University Press, 2026), and editor, INDIA’S WORLD magazine. The views expressed are personal