By all accounts, the world we have inhabited is being disrupted, turned on its head, and set to its side. In all the think-tank and university-led discussions I have recently attended, it has become customary to acknowledge and lament the inexorable breakdown of the international system, in which conflict is on the march and cooperation is on the wane. The ensuing gap between conflict and cooperation amid global disruption and "rupture" has given rise to what Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has called a "middle powers" strategy. Whether it can materialise, in my view, depends on the extent to which middle powers.
Speaking in January at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Prime Minister Carney has set the global geostrategic tone since. It also lays out a vision of how the international system could still function even when the great powers -- the United States, in this case -- shirk their traditional global leadership. The middle powers, such as Canada and more broadly the democratic nations, can stick together in a kind of minilateralism with "variable geometry" to seek strategic autonomy in trade, energy, supply chains, and other forms of geoeconomic cooperation.
When I first heard and read Mr Carney's speech, my first impulse was to think about how the world would be better off with more leaders like him. Yet my second reaction about his call for middle powers' collectivism and activism is "a great geostrategic idea but who goes first?" That is, who leads among the middle powers? Any global leadership would also have to put up with "free riders", or smaller countries that benefit greatly but don't contribute as much. Even if some middle powers -- say, the larger European economies alongside Japan, South Korea and Australia -- are able to band together, the third challenge is how to prevent the great powers -- that is, the US or China -- from spoiling the resulting cooperative efforts.
