Writing in 1882, the American author William Elliot Griffis asserted that Korea ‘cannot long remain a hermit nation. The near future will see her open to the world’. That same year, the then-united Korea would sign a treaty with Qing China – the Sino-Korean Regulations for Maritime and Overland Trade – wherein China would become suzerain over the country in all but name. These enhanced ties benefited China more than Korea, with the former gaining favourable trade terms with the latter, as well as the right to deploy its troops at will to the then-unified Korean peninsula. In pursuing this path, Qing China had an ultimate goal: to resist growing Japanese and western influence, and to fortify a weakening order in the face of a rapidly modernising Japan and a resurgent imperial Russia.

Nearly a century and a half later, South Korea and Japan are open to the world in ways their 19th-century counterparts could hardly have imagined. Yet the dilemmas facing Joseon Korea in the 1880s, surrounded as it was by the great powers of its time, have only grown more acute. Both countries now wrestle increasingly between competing relationships with the United States and China.

While no two middle powers are the same, the term has been unhelpfully defined as ‘influential countries that sit below superpowers and great powers’. The notion of piccola grande potenza (the least of the great powers), often applied by and to Italy, underscores how middle powers occupy the ambiguous space within the hierarchy of powers. While they lack the diplomatic, economic, political and military clout of their great-power counterparts, they are still able to influence global politics, albeit not to the same degree. Whether through participating in multilateral initiatives – such as the Quadrilateral Dialogue (involving India, the United States, Australia and Japan), NATO, or the G7 – or serving as facilitators of interstate cooperation (as is the case with Sweden and Norway), middle powers have sought to navigate the tumultuous waters of great-power politics in several ways. First, they have engaged in the precarious task of ‘hedging’. By positioning themselves between two or more competing larger powers through a combination of co-operative and competitive measures, risks can be managed and benefits accrued. Second, they have also crafted ambitions of their own.

Contemporary South Korea offers a useful example of the difficulties of juggling these two tasks. Its president, Lee Jae-myung, has repeated how as part of his ‘pragmatic’ foreign policy, South Korea will avoid ‘choosing sides’ between Washington and Beijing, whether amid the shifting sands of US-China competition or in regional disputes, such as between Beijing and Tokyo. Doing so, however, is easier said than done. Since the turn of the century, East Asian states have been subject to competing pressures between Beijing’s coercive economic brawn and Washington’s postwar bilateral security alliances.

When Lee infamously quipped, prior to his election, that South Korea should say xie xie (thank you) to both China and Taiwan, to much consternation, it was a telling sign of the then-presidential contender’s conspicuous desire to avoid being seen to annoy Beijing. The same, too, can be said of South Korea and Japan’s nuclear ambitions. While the latter seems a question of ‘if’ and not ‘when’, it would be the epitome of naïveté to say that fear of sanctions, disruption to alliances with the United States, and threats of economic and political retaliation by China do not feature in Tokyo’s and Seoul’s calculations.

For all these anxieties, East Asian middle powers have demonstrated how the middle powers of today are hardly unambitious. As Ramón Pacheco Pardo and Robyn Klingler-Vidra argue astutely, these countries have manifested their ambitions by adopting strategies of nicheness. By dominating specific industries, they can leverage their resources and capabilities to become attractive partners for great and non-great powers, as evinced by Taiwan and South Korea’s global leadership of the semiconductor market. Nevertheless, such leverage has also extended beyond the material domain. Here, Japan’s championing of a Free and Open Indo-Pacific, pioneered by the late Shinzo Abe, or South Korea’s global cultural diffusion are but two examples. Few countries have earned their own prefix, but whenever any noun is preceded by ‘K-’, Korea instantly springs to mind. Leverage as a middle power, however, requires a foundation of sufficient economic growth. Japan and South Korea are Asia’s second- and fourth-largest economies, respectively.

In his much-publicised address at Davos this year, Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney, called on middle powers to ‘act together’. ‘If we’re not at the table’, he warned, ‘we’re on the menu.’ Having a seat at the table, however, does not mean that one’s desires will – or should – be heard, let alone listened to. Here, the United Kingdom offers a reminder of the need to include another aspect to the definition of a middle power: reliability. Beyond its myriad domestic problems, the current fracas surrounding the Starmer government’s foreign policy has anything but assured London’s allies and partners of its reliability and trustworthiness, in Europe and further afield. Whether it is ceding sovereignty over strategically valuable territory, as exemplified in the Chagos Islands deal, or cosying up to China, demonstrated by the prime minister’s disastrous visit to Beijing, contemporary Britain is fast becoming a poster-child of how not to be a middle power. Carney himself underscored how middle powers should take an active role in ‘naming reality’. Britain, however, is unwilling to name reality when it comes to the ever-increasing challenges from China, a stance which will hardly be in London’s favour in the longer term. 

With an international order underpinned by the tragedy of great-power politics, a further tragedy is that little can be done to militate against it. The only way to do so, according to John Mearsheimer, is to avoid being a Bambi and instead become Godzilla. Yet the gap between the two is stark. Some middle powers – of which South Korea and Japan are just two examples – are neither shrimps nor whales but small dolphins. Although middle powers, akin to dolphins, can grow, the fundamental constraints of great-power politics must be borne in mind.

In 1962, at a lecture at the US Military Academy at West Point, the former US Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, poignantly noted that ‘Great Britain has lost its Empire and has not yet found a role.’ Over six decades later, Britain once again faces a struggle to find its global role, in no small part owing to self-inflicted wounds. Indeed, to be an effective middle power means to be open to the world and to find one’s role within it. At the same time, it requires being realistic in one’s ambitions and expectations, and reliable in one’s actions.