Iran War Shows European Countries Are Middle Powers

It’s been an unusual year for middle powers. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s powerful Davos speech, in which he called on middle powers to band together, brought them to the forefront of the global policy debate. Now, the Iran war has served as a reality check. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby’s recent social media posts dismissed the very idea of a “‘middle powers’ strategy” as a costly distraction. Yet beyond binary, simplistic success-or-failure narratives, the war has shed light on both the limitations of middle powers and the crucial roles they play in the global order.

Middle powers may have learned they can’t reshuffle the overarching edifice of the global order, but they can do more than Colby suggests. They can change its security-centric agenda, priorities, and language—a precious and vital contribution—but to do so, they must all work together.

Middle powers may have learned they can’t reshuffle the overarching edifice of the global order, but they can do more than Colby suggests. They can change its security-centric agenda, priorities, and language—a precious and vital contribution—but to do so, they must all work together.

The United States’ war against Iran has also laid bare the inherent tension between middle powers’ much-coveted quest for autonomy and the need for and cost of alliances. Their alliance with the United States made Gulf middle powers such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates targets of Iranian attacks. This alliance cost them breaches of their security and sovereignty. On the other hand, the war itself made these states more dependent on the United States, at least in the short term, as their need for stronger security guarantees and partnerships has grown, and insecurity regarding Iran has deepened.

Consequently, middle powers have learned that they need to strengthen and diversify their own defense industries and security partnerships. Though still indispensable, the United States is too unreliable and unpredictable to be fully dependent on for security partnerships and defense industry cooperation. The Gulf states will probably seek deeper security ties and defense industry cooperation with countries that will not trigger U.S. wrath. Some of the countries they may turn to include Pakistan, Turkey, the European powers (such as France, the United Kingdom, and Italy), Ukraine, and South Korea—all of them middle powers.

The war also highlighted the limits of individual country-level autonomy and agency. That many Gulf countries have been attacked by Iran should prompt not only country-level adjustments to the new reality but also collective responses. The new era requires better security coordination and cooperation among the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states and pooling agency and autonomy at the GCC level. This should be a stepping stone toward more regional-level coordination and cooperation. The European Union and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations exemplify regional-level agency and autonomy, albeit with varying degrees of success.

As a corollary, the war has underscored the unavoidable reality of geography. Policymakers ignore geography at their own peril. The GCC states simply can’t afford to adopt the same policy approach to Iran as the United States and Israel do. Given their locations, the GCC states will always remain vulnerable to Iran. But this kind of dilemma is not confined to the Middle East; it also applies to the Asia-Pacific region, Southeast Asian nations’ approach to China, and Central Asian states’ approach to Russia. Geographic proximity magnifies the cost of adversarial relations for middle powers.

Although a country’s geography is static, its meaning can change dynamically. States or regions can reimagine and redesign their geographies to reduce dependencies. By weaponizing its geography through the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, Iran, as another middle power, has acquired immense strategic leverage in the short term. This strategy is likely to backfire in the medium to long term, however, as other regional states will seek to reimagine and reroute their geographies; the strategic value of Hormuz will likely experience a relative decline. Iran may have won the psychological war, but it could still lose the strategic one.

Indeed, the Hormuz crisis gave additional impetus and urgency to the Hejaz Railway project, which will connect the Gulf to Turkey and Europe via a land route. Under U.S. supervision, Iraq and Syria signed a deal to revive a crude oil pipeline project that will allow Iraqi oil to reach the Mediterranean via Syria, thereby partially reducing the impact of the closure of Hormuz. Similar initiatives aimed at rerouting trade and connectivity are likely to materialize.

The dangers of spheres-of-influence logic for middle powers have been laid bare. Iran, both implicitly and explicitly, regards the Gulf as its sphere of influence and seeks to rewrite the rules of the game in this region—with drastic implications for the security, defense, and economy of the GCC states. Such individual pursuit of sphere-of-influence logic by middle powers will only lead to greater regional fragmentation, counterbalancing strategies, and invite greater external intervention, which, in turn, will diminish the region’s agency and autonomy in global politics. Moreover, sphere-of-influence geopolitics is not only about the geopolitical reconfiguration of the specific sphere but also about its normative reconfiguration in the image of that sphere’s hegemon. This further erodes the agency and autonomy of small and middle powers.

The war has also highlighted the crucial role that middle powers play in diplomacy, mediation, and peacemaking. For small or middle powers, international law and norms are not luxury goods. Yet European middle powers have been absent from diplomatic efforts to resolve the war in Iran, as well as from Gaza and Ukraine. Indeed, the changing landscape of diplomacy serves as a microcosm of a global restructuring as Western actors and multilateral organizations retreat from the field of mediation and peacemaking. Geneva, once the center of international diplomacy, now barely features in contemporary diplomacy and mediation efforts to settle wars or conflicts.

The countries that sought active diplomatic resolution to the Iran war have instead been non-Western: Pakistan, Turkey, Qatar, and Oman. Given that the E3 (the United Kingdom, France, and Germany) initiated diplomacy to resolve Iran’s nuclear issue in 2003, which led to the signing of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2015—one of the signature achievements of European diplomacy—the absence of European actors this time around was glaring.

Addressing this gap requires disentangling discussion of middle powers from those about the global south—and shifting European state psychology toward middle-power cooperation and multilateralism.

Colby’s disparagement of middle-power strategy was largely directed at Canada and Europe, not at those middle powers in the non-Western world. It reflects a belated but growing realization among many European states that they are middle powers and that the trans-Atlantic world premised on U.S. hegemony is probably a thing of the past.

As with individuals, states possess what can be called “state psychology.” Although often overlooked, this psychology is a powerful factor shaping states’ behavior and, consequently, international politics. Today, European countries must adopt a psychology that allows them to navigate global disorder and engage in cross-regional cooperation with other middle powers.

For countries in the global south, most of which are post-colonial states, becoming a middle power suggests increased agency, a greater appetite for activism, and a higher status in international politics. Conversely, for the global north—particularly post-imperial nations such as the United Kingdom and France, both of which are veto-wielding members of the United Nations Security Council—becoming middle powers can be seen as a decline in status and agency in global affairs.

Most of the time, European middle powers invite global south actors to join or endorse frameworks or platforms they have already developed.

European Union leaders pose with United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres for a family picture in Brussels on March 19 during the EU Summit where leaders met in the context of the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran. Nicolas Tucat/AFP via Getty Images

This format is increasingly anathema to actors in the global south. The European approach partly stems from the belief that it has the most developed regulatory standards and universal norms, and it seeks to maintain its regulatory or normative power and status as a reference point. But for many global south countries, this approach reflects hierarchy rather than equality with global north actors. In a world moving toward multi-ordering, not merely multipolarity, Europe needs to adopt the approach that the only way to achieve shared global norms, standards, and regulations is through their mutual creation, not by merely exporting European standards to the global south.

Similar asymmetry is evident in middle powers’ psychological adaptation to the current global reordering and in their perceptions of the future. Many middle powers in the global north are largely fearful of the emerging world and the future, while those in the global south are more hopeful. Middle powers in the global south generally view great-power rivalry or multipolarity positively. This rivalry signals the presence of multiple centers of power, which provides greater flexibility for maneuvering and increases opportunities for hedging and balancing. Although still asymmetrical, these states regard a multipolar world as the only way to influence international politics, thereby gaining agency and autonomy on the global stage and de-Westernizing or -globalizing the “global order.”

As recent wars illustrated, middle powers could not stop the militarism of great powers, but they can play a vital role in trying to bring these wars to an end. Similarly, they can’t remake the world, but they can redefine it through cross-regional cooperation between the middle powers of the global south and those of the global north. Before this norm- and law-informed middle-power multilateralism can be reached, however, European middle powers must adopt a new political psychology.