If the midterm elections deliver a heavy blow, a weakened Donald Trump, hemmed in by a Democrat-controlled Congress, may gradually have to accept the indignity of being ignored. He will keep signing off his Truth Social posts with his usual “Thank you for your attention to this matter,” but no one will really be paying attention. His rambling press conferences will no longer be broadcast live by TV networks. The Republican Party will move on to the question of who succeeds him. Trump could announce that he has renamed the Champs-Élysées to Sunset Boulevard, and even Google Maps would struggle to care. He would become the most pitied of political creatures: a lame duck.
Yet this scenario does not quite fit Trump’s personality, the US media landscape, or the recent history of other presidential endings. Just before leaving office, George W. Bush launched the Iraq war “surge,” Bill Clinton brought China into the World Trade Organization, and Ronald Reagan helped end the Cold War. Trump will surely also rage against the dying of the light.
View image in fullscreenDonald Trump speaking at the White House on 30 January 2025 about the mid-air crash between an American Airlines plane and a military helicopter in Washington. Photograph: China News Service/Getty Images
Many observers, including former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton and former UK foreign secretary David Lammy, predict that after November’s midterms Trump will focus even more on his disruptive foreign policy, trying to go further and faster. The thinking goes that potential legislative gridlock in Congress would block him from domestic initiatives, but far less so from foreign policy.
Figures like António Guterres, attending his final UN general assembly as secretary general this week, who have tried to convince Trump that the US could achieve more in alliance with others than alone, are likely to be dismissed. Those hoping for a return from a world without order to one of order, loosely built around a set of recognizable values, are likely to be disappointed. In short, there is more to come.
That assessment is accelerating a global trend of countries forming a complex web of diplomatic, military, and trading alliances designed to shield themselves from an unpredictable and predatory US president. These hedging alliances, born out of fear of entrapment or abandonment, are springing up around the world, changing the matrix of diplomacy, often but not always in favor of the other superpower of the age, China.
John Bew, a foreign policy adviser to four former British prime ministers, describes the process as the creation of “a sub-threshold international order.”
As Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister, urged in a speech at Davos in January, the middle powers are reorganizing. The trend is most obvious among former US allies.
Mark Leonard, the director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, said: “The world is moving from a situation where countries saw themselves within the context of an alliance system – ‘How do we plug and play and make it all about interoperability with American grand strategy?’ – towards one where the primary goal is: ‘How do we hedge and how do we make sure that we can defend ourselves if America isn’t there?'”
Wherever one looks, it is the alliances in which the US does not feature – from Brics to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) – that are thriving and deepening.
The recent Brics summit in Delhi ended with a declaration 140 dense paragraphs long that centered on how sovereign states can insulate their economies, supply lines, and payment infrastructures from weaponized western financial networks. The aim was to show that the “global south” can shape rules without turning into an anti-American alliance. “The operational strategy does not aim to eradicate the dollar overnight,” the Indian commentator Navroop Singh explained, “but to construct a parallel, non-dollar pipeline throughwhich bilateral trade, especially in strategic goods like oil, gas, agriculture, and critical minerals, can flow freely without being blocked by US extraterritorial control.” At this month’s SCO meeting in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, China’s president, Xi Jinping, said: “The vast majority of countries do not accept power politics, do not want conflict and confrontation, and do not wish to be closed off and left behind. Instead, they want to earn an equal place on the world stage through their own development and international cooperation.” Formed to manage border disputes among former Soviet states, the SCO’s activities long ago expanded to include an economic dimension that promotes connectivity, trade, and investment. View image in fullscreen Xi Jinping speaking at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan on 1 September. Photograph: Zhai Jianlan/Xinhua/AP By contrast, in the groups the US dominates, such as the G7 and Nato, the main recent goal has been to shape an agenda that avoids a Trump walkout. Success is measured by whether the West avoids public disintegration. Sometimes these new ad hoc alliances are relatively ordinary. Some operate inside existing institutions, others involve creating specific new cooperation trading mechanisms such as memorandums of understanding on trade in critical minerals or the development of new overlapping institutions. In the case of the UK, the Chatham House thinktank suggests as many as six different mini-alliances could be formed to build submarines and air engines, share critical minerals, or promote free trade. View image in fullscreen Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (left), with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (centre) and Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, meeting in Mecca. Photograph: Turkish Presidency Press Office/AFP/Getty Images The biggest and most striking recent example of this new order came in the Middle East on 7 August, when Turkey, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia signed the Mecca pact – a defensive military alliance that for some is about ending dependence on the US military umbrella, and for others about countering Iran. Either way, it is likely to rewrite the Middle East’s security architecture. Trita Parsi, from the US foreign policy thinktank the Quincy Institute For Responsible Statecraft, said: “If you sit in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries right now, you must feel tremendously vulnerable because you have put all your eggs in the American security basket and it turned out not only not to work, but it was supposed to be a guarantee that others would be deterred from attacking you. Instead, the US started a war against the wishes of most Gulf countries and within that war, the entire infrastructure of the US bases turned out not to be a deterrent, but a magnet.” Not only were exposed bases pummelled by Iranian missiles and drones to the point, in the words of Gen David Petraeus, that they became “no longer viable”, the Gulf states also discovered the US was prepared to allow Israel to bomb Qatar’s capital, Doha, in the hope of assassinating the Hamas leadership. It was the first such attack on a GCC state, and changed the GCC’s security calculations as to whether Iran or Israel ultimately was the primary threat in the region. View image in fullscreen A building damaged in Doha, according to an Israeli official, after an Israeli attack on Hamas leaders on 9 September 2025. Photograph: Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters The US insists in public it will reinvest in better-protected bases and will shortly lay out a postwar vision in which the US remains indispensable to the Gulf’s security. But Majed al-Ansari, Qatar’s foreign ministry spokesperson, said: “Gulf nations cannot rely solely on the US and other international alliances for their security. Self-sufficiency when it comes to security is the only way forward.” Parsi admitted it was not clear what kind of tree would grow out of the seed sown in Mecca. “Is it another bloc formaIs it, at its core, a force that divides the region and fuels rivalry and confrontation? Or is it, as the Turks claim, an open grouping that targets no one and is built on collective security?
Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, meanwhile, depends on foreign investment, tourism, and reliable energy routes. Endless wars encouraged by Israel and left unchecked by the US—wars that serve purposes against Saudi Arabia’s long-term interests—are a drag on the Saudi economy.
All of this has serious implications for India, which relies on the Middle East for nearly 60% of its crude oil and about 70% of its liquefied natural gas. India may need to build its own hard-power security partnerships in the region.
Writing in Foreign Affairs magazine, Marc Lynch, a professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, recently asked: “If Washington could not even be counted on to consult its allies, defeat its adversaries, or protect its partners from the fallout of its regional misadventures, then what good were its promises? The fundamental bargain the United States offered has crumbled, and it will not be easily rebuilt.”
The same questions are being asked in Europe, leading to calls for a more Europeanized NATO—often seen as an alliance of its five main military powers. This grouping conveniently sidesteps Brexit and would let Germany, France, Italy, Poland, and the UK work together against the Russian threat, assuming these democracies are still led next year by forces opposed to Putin’s authoritarianism.
Debate about this alliance, promoted at the Munich Security Conference, is driven by two fears: the hybrid war waged by Moscow, and the US plan to leave Europe’s conventional defense to the Europeans. Trump supporters treat Europeans mainly as trade competitors and sometimes as a civilizational threat, not as allies. No one can assume the US would defend Europe if Russia attacked. Not surprisingly, Poland, the Baltics, and Scandinavia have increased their defense spending since 2022 by 71%, 134%, and 126% respectively. Calls to buy European arms are growing.
Concern about where Trump might strike next after his threats toward Greenland is so widespread that some European diplomats privately express relief that the US was unable to repeat Venezuela’s success in Iran. There is no affection for the Iranian government, except that it reminds Europe of the risks of relying on US military and technological supremacy.
The country that faces the American dilemma most acutely is, of course, Canada. Now entering an asymmetric trade war with the world’s largest and most powerful country, it has little doubt about the rupture it faces. Bob Rae, a former Canadian ambassador to the UN, recently wrote: “Canada’s next-door neighbour is a predatory hegemon [that] tears up treaties, makes a mockery of international law and clearly has a different concept of the relationships between might and right, and between law, morality and self-interest.”
But there was an ambiguity deep in Carney’s Davos message. Was he simply seeking new markets blocked by US tariffs, or was he trying to build a network of countries—a third bloc—with like-minded liberal values? Rae argued that for a middle nations alliance to thrive, Carney needed to be clearer about what values Canada stands for, including upholding international law. He wrote: “We can succeed in defeating such aggression only if we are willing to extend economic, political and military support to other countries and jurisdictions facing similar attacks and threats.”
In his speech to the European parliament this week whiIn trying to offer a cure for the harsh realities his Davos speech described, Carney argued that associate membership in the EU would be about more than economics—it would reflect a deep-rooted affinity of shared values that Canada no longer implicitly shares with the US. But the rules-based EU does not grant easy access to its markets, and this grand vision could soon get bogged down in the fine print Brussels loves.
This crisis of the West is sometimes seen as a purely European phenomenon. But South Korea finds itself in a similar position to Canada. Ulchi Freedom Shield, the annual joint military exercise the US and South Korea held to counter the North Korean threat, was abruptly scaled back by Washington just before it was due to begin in August. Trump ordered the drills cut from 11 days to five, citing costs, his desire to improve relations with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, and South Korea’s reluctance to support his war on Iran. The decline in US military stocks due to the Iran war has hardly helped.
The US military takes part in a joint bridging drill near the southern Han River in Yeoju, South Korea. Photograph: NurPhoto/Getty Images
It has intensified a debate in South Korea, and in Japan, about pursuing independent nuclear weapons, especially given the apparent indifference of the US and the international community to North Korea’s program.
The friction has given Xi a golden opportunity to promote China to South Korea and Asia as the more reliable ally.
Optimists such as Kurt Campbell—who, as deputy secretary of state under Joe Biden, did more than anyone to rebuild American alliances across Asia after Trump’s first term—insist his task can be repeated. There is no need to panic, he said, arguing that “by the winter there will be a dramatic resurgence in discussion, debate, hope and, frankly, optimism about what comes next.” The old centrifugal forces, including European aversion to Chinese protectionism and US dominance in artificial intelligence, will resurface.
The counterview is that something fundamental has changed. Once bitten, twice shy: the old transatlantic order will not be restored, and something new—less predictable, more fragmented—is already taking shape.
Frequently Asked Questions
FAQs Middle Powers Caught Off Guard Look for New Alliances as Trump Causes Turmoil
Beginner Questions
What is a middle power
A country that isnt a superpower like the US or China but has enough economic and political clout to matter Think Canada Australia Brazil Turkey or South Korea
Why are middle powers caught off guard right now
They built their foreign policies around US leadership Trumps tariffs threats to allies and unpredictable moves have shaken that assumption
Why is Trump causing turmoil on the world stage
Hes slapped tariffs on friends and rivals alike questioned NATO pulled back from global agreements and pressured allies to follow his line on trade and security
What does looking for new alliances actually mean
It means middle powers are strengthening ties with each other and with other major playerslike the EU China or regional blocsto reduce reliance on Washington
Why cant they just stick with the US
Because US policy now shifts sharply with each election Middle powers want stability not whiplash
What do middle powers want from a new alliance
Predictable trade rules security guarantees and a say in decisionsnot just being told what to do
Intermediate Questions
Which countries are leading this search for new alliances
Canada Australia Brazil South Africa Indonesia Turkey and Mexico are among the most active The EU acts as a bloc with similar concerns
What are the main benefits of forming new alliances
Diversified trade reduced exposure to US pressure more bargaining power and a hedge against superpower conflict
What are the biggest problems they face
Conflicting interests among themselves limited military capacity dependence on US markets and the risk of angering Washington
Are they forming a formal bloc like NATO
No Its more a web of flexible partnershipstrade deals defense pacts and issuebased coalitionsrather than a single alliance
What role does China play in this
China is a major trade partner and an alternative source of investment but many middle powers are wary of swapping US dependence for Chinese dependence
How does this affect ordinary people
It can mean new trade deals shifting prices on imported goods and changes in defense spending or military deployments
Has this happened before
Yes
