Greenland is safe, for now. But it’s no overstatement to say the rest of the world has come to see the United States in a new light, even after President Donald Trump backed down from his threats to seize the territory.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney spoke clearest about the “rupture” in the old rules-based system at Davos last week — and he also gave his fellow world leaders an assignment. It was time, he argued, for “middle powers” to band together to establish a new world order. For good measure, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy added that Europe must stop being “lost” and start building military capacity independent of the United States.

So, what should the “middle powers” do as Trump continues to tear up the transatlantic alliance and puts the future of NATO in doubt? If you are a country other than the United States, China or Russia, what should you be thinking or doing right now?

We asked political analysts, diplomats and scholars who specialize in a host of countries, from Canada and Ukraine to India, Turkey and more for their solutions.

Here’s what they said.

‘European states, individually and collectively, must learn to stand on their own two feet’

BY ALIONA HLIVCO

Aliona Hlivco is founder and CEO of St. James’s Foreign Policy Group and a former Ukrainian politician.

Across Europe there remains little practical framework for navigating the emergence of a new world order. Europe, as a geopolitical entity, urgently needs a coherent strategy for how to move forward. Instead of pearl-clutching at the unpredictability of its once most reliable ally, it is time to take concrete steps toward strategic autonomy — economic, security and energy — and to strengthen overall resilience. European states, individually and collectively, must learn to stand on their own two feet, particularly when it comes to security.

This also requires avoiding the temptation to place sole blame on the United States or its current leadership for the erosion of the Western alliance. While I often disagree — particularly as a Ukrainian — with the form and consequences of the current U.S. administration’s actions, we must understand the structural drivers behind them if we want genuine agency in shaping the new order. For decades, European defense spending declined as priorities shifted toward the dividends of peace, while repeated U.S. calls for greater burden-sharing were largely ignored. Meanwhile, Washington sustained a global security umbrella at enormous cost.

It took a disruptive presidency for Europe to begin adjusting its course. Now, Europeans must demonstrate where their power lies — calmly, pragmatically and without overreaction. Hedging against overreliance on the U.S. is sensible, but not at the expense of the shared liberal values — freedom, human rights and rule of law — that bound Western democracies together after World War II. Those values must once again anchor the emerging world order, however chaotic the moment.

‘There is little reason to expect much middle power cooperation’

BY JUSTIN LOGAN

Justin Logan is the director of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute.

The options of middle powers are limited. To take one example, Canada cannot get too crosswise with the United States, or they risk discovering what the Monroe Doctrine really means. Other middle powers — like Poland, Japan or Brazil — have fundamentally different interests based on their geography and economies. Trying to fold these countries into a coherent bloc has been a fool’s errand since before an analyst at Goldman Sachs coined the term “BRICS.” Among them, middle powers have different interests and capabilities just like great powers do, and their behavior varies as well.

Now, as ever, middle powers should consider what flexibility their power position and geography confer on them and what threats they need to hedge against. This could involve aligning with a great power, or not. (India is an example of that latter category.) China’s adherence to its mantra of “hiding capabilities and biding time” helped vault it to the top of the international political heap. But it is difficult for any country to make this leap.

It should be no surprise that middle powers want to talk about the options available to middle powers. But the blunt reality of international politics is that there is little reason to expect much middle power cooperation, and lots of reasons to expect their options will remain severely constrained by their relations with the great powers.

‘To dispense with higher strategic interests for the sake of immediate gain would be an embrace of Trumpism’

BY DANIEL FRIED

Daniel Fried is a former assistant secretary of State for Europe, a former U.S. ambassador to Poland and served as a special assistant to Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at Davos was powerful and grounded in understandable frustration and more with the apparent course of President Donald Trump’s foreign policy. He laid out a challenge to middle powers — including Canada, Europe, and Asia’s leading democracies — to step up, and in this I agree with him. Europe (and Canada) needs greater military capability but also needs to start thinking in strategic terms, not simply reacting to (and complaining about) what the United States does.

Carney’s recent outreach to China, however, was not the best example of such action. Is Canada going to become transactional, calculating its potential short-term gain from dealing with the autocratic or predatory powers, China and perhaps soon Russia among them? For middle powers to dispense with higher strategic interests for the sake of immediate gain would be an embrace of Trumpism, not its alternative.

The better course would be for democratic middle powers to stand for the principles that they have claimed as their own, pushing back against the U.S. when necessary, as they did on Greenland, until the day when the U.S. returns from its current fall to its founding principles, as it is likely to do.

Countries that have championed the free world order from 1945, enlarged after 1989, should maintain their commitment to it. That does not mean taking President Trump’s language about unwilling allies or demands for annexation without resistance. The episode with Greenland suggests that counterpressure against an aggressive-sounding U.S. can be effective. But Trump’s decision to quickly de-escalate on Greenland came through his meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, who has cultivated a close relationship with Trump and put it to good use in Davos. Counter pressure plus outreach proved to be useful tactics.

More broadly, democratic middle powers should keep working, or trying to work, with the U.S. whenever possible and pushing back when necessary. U.S. policy toward Ukraine has wavered and can justly be criticized, but the outlines of Trump’s approach to ending the war — a ceasefire in place and security for Ukraine — is a useful blueprint. What is needed is to close the deal on Ukraine’s security and turn to putting pressure on Russia, including by seizing Russian ghost fleet tankers.

‘Diversify their diplomatic portfolios’

BY STEWART PATRICK

Stewart Patrick is a senior fellow and director of the Global Order and Institutions Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

While it may not go down in history on a par with Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech in 1946, Mark Carney’s address at Davos did something similar. It marked an end to illusions and signaled the beginning of a new era of global politics. The world order we once knew is now dead, and the Trump administration is both its assassin and its undertaker. Even longstanding allies are coming to terms with the reality that the United States has become a predatory hegemon: It no longer invests in the world order but is intent on upending it, exploiting coercive power to its own benefit and others’ detriment.

For individual middle powers — a catch-all category that could include most members of the G20 other than the United States and China — America’s imperialistic turn creates a dilemma, but also an opportunity. Individual middle powers cannot hope to confront the United States on their own, but they also have no desire to replace American with Chinese hegemony. Their only realistic strategic option, as Carney suggests, is to band together in defending international law, safeguarding national sovereignty and spearheading international cooperation. They must do so not only in major international bodies like the United Nations but in flexible, ad hoc coalitions, groupings of “variable geometry” designed for specific purposes, such as trade liberalization, climate action and energy security.

Forging middle power multilateralism will not be easy — middle powers are a diverse lot, often at odds on matters like climate financing, the reform of international financial institutions, alliance structures or even democratic commitments.

Middle powers are not starting from scratch, however. Following Donald Trump’s first election in November 2016, countries in both the North and South began hedging their bets. Much like investors in the market, they began to diversify their diplomatic portfolios, making side wagers and engaging in self-insurance to reduce their exposure to volatility and risk. As Trump begins the second year of his second term, those efforts are moving into overdrive.

They will take time to reach fruition, however. Trump has generated a geopolitical earthquake, but the most powerful tremors may be yet to come. As longstanding institutions are shaken to their foundations, middle powers will have to agree on how much of the old order they wish to preserve, and where it is better to clear the rubble and start anew.

Back in 2019, during Trump’s first term, the French and German governments announced the creation of an “Alliance for Multilateralism,” open to all other nations. It was conceived as a reaffirmation of the UN Charter, as well as a flexible platform for issue-specific policy coordination. It never went anywhere because it was conceived as a “Northern” project and because potential members worried about antagonizing the United States. One could imagine something similar today, but more encompassing. Call it a Partnership for Multilateralism, comprising middle powers of the Global North and South who remain dedicated to international law and amenable to practical cooperation on shared global interests.

‘The most urgent task… is to reduce their vulnerability to coercion by predatory great powers’

BY ROLAND PARIS

Roland Paris is a professor of international affairs at the University of Ottawa and a former senior adviser on foreign policy to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

The most urgent task for middle powers like Canada is to reduce their vulnerability to coercion by predatory great powers — including the United States and China, both of which have increasingly weaponized economic policy — while carefully managing these relationships to limit destabilizing confrontations.

The strategy should rest on three pillars. First, the orphans of the U.S.-led liberal order — Canada, the European Union and the UK, and key partners in Asia and Oceania — should pursue hedging strategies aimed at diversifying their trade relationships and supply chains, including through deeper cross-investment in one another’s economies. Second, they must make sustained, long-term investments to expand their own military capacities, particularly in specialized enablers — such as intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance — where dependence on the U.S. remains acute. Third, they must develop durable habits of coordinating policy, sharing risk and acting collectively to resist threats to their sovereignty and to their vital economic and security interests.

These are daunting tasks, requiring political will, resources and patience over many years. But they are no longer optional. In a world where great powers are using economic and military leverage as tools of coercion, middle powers that fail to act collectively will find themselves increasingly exposed to threats and intimidation — or worse.

‘The world of overwhelming Western power is over’

BY ATTILA DEMKÓ

Attila Demkó is a security policy analyst and writer based in Hungary.

The future of NATO and the broader transatlantic relationship is not in doubt. At least not more than in 2003, when most European allies were against the U.S. invasion of Iraq that truly upended the rules-based global order, far more than anything Donald Trump has done so far. France and the U.S. clashed particularly fiercely: At the time, the French fries got renamed freedom fries — who remembers that today? Yes, nowadays there is a deeper clash, a culture war within the West. But that is within Europe and within the United States, not only between Europe and the U.S.

The real issue is that the world of overwhelming Western power is over. China alone produces more industrial goods than all NATO members combined. That means they can produce more weapons, too. So yes, Europeans and Canadians should grow muscle, but because of this fact, not because of Trump. They should not fool themselves; it will take a long time. Rearmament is not a 17-minute speech in Davos. Canada may have soft power, but compared to its size, it lacks hard power: It today has 74 main battle tanks, negligible artillery and 22,500 active personnel in its land forces. That is approximately the size of the Hungarian land forces, with Canada having less, and in many cases, more obsolete equipment. Meanwhile, the U.S. accumulated its current capabilities and experience over decades. Even with banding together, medium-sized NATO powers could only catch up to the U.S. in long, long years. If ever.

As we have seen in Davos, Trump is loud but not irrational: The Greenland issue will go away with a compromise. We can solve all transatlantic debates, so stop headlines like “the end of NATO” is near. The West should settle its internal culture war and hang together. Or we will hang separately.

‘India may offer a template for middle powers trying to protect their interests’

BY C. RAJA MOHAN

C. Raja Mohan is a Korea Foundation Chair in Asian Geopolitics at the Council on Strategic and Defense Studies, Delhi, and a non-resident distinguished fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute, New York.

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s call on the middle powers to “act together” is easy to say but hard to realize because the pressures to find accommodation with the U.S. and its expansive power are likely to outweigh the imperative of building a coalition of middle powers. When Donald Trump overturned the rules of the World Trade Organization last year, most middle powers sought bilateral deals with the U.S. rather than start a joint offensive to save the trading order. And many middle powers like Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Vietnam have joined Trump’s Board of Peace, it being a part of the U.S. president’s brazen attempt to undermine the UN Security Council as the custodian of global peace and security.

This does not mean the middle powers have no options in the changing global commercial order dominated by the U.S. and China. Without confronting Washington and Beijing, they can diversify their commercial partnerships with each other as part of de-risking their growing economic vulnerabilities. On the security front, some of the middle powers like South Korea will look to build their own nuclear deterrent capabilities amid the growing reluctance of the U.S. to extend its nuclear umbrella. With the U.S. demanding that its allies and partners take on a larger security role in their own regions, the middle powers must necessarily look at building their conventional military capabilities. As new technologies change modern warfare, there is also a strong incentive for the middle powers to develop asymmetric defense strategies to counter the military preponderance of Russia and China in Eurasia.

On both the economic and military fronts, the middle powers have good reasons not to frame their strategic diversification in opposition to the U.S., but as a response to Trump’s calls for greater burden-sharing. Already, even as they pool their own resources, the middle powers are recognizing the importance of keeping the U.S. engaged while managing the Eurasian balance of power: India is largely following this strategy, maintaining the dialogue on trade and security with the U.S., while deepening its economic partnerships with Canada, Britain, Europe, the Gulf States, Australia, ASEAN, South Korea and Australia. New Delhi is also trying to stabilise its relations with China, a country that poses the greatest challenge to India’s economic and security policies. If this strategy holds, India may offer a template for middle powers trying to protect their interests without attracting the ire of the world’s superpowers.

‘Focus on building a regional-based order’

BY RIZAL SUKMA

Rizal Sukma is a senior fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, Jakarta. Previously, he was Indonesia’s ambassador to the United Kingdom.

As the United States continues to dismantle the existing, rules-based international order, middle powers have no choice but to start the conversation, and efforts, to construct a new order. The problem is that middle powers are too diverse, both in terms of interests and capability. In fact, the category is also arbitrary and remains unclear. All countries have a stake in international order, regardless of their size and political status. Seen within this context, it would be difficult to imagine a manifestation of international order outside the existing United Nations framework, with all its weaknesses and problems.

Therefore, middle powers, or all powers outside the U.S., should do two things. First, they should try to form a coalition of champions within the UN system to advance a good and critical global agenda of common concerns such as education, health, food security, disaster response and management, and climate change. Second, at the same time, they can also focus on building a regional-based order. Within the Asia-Pacific, ASEAN has started this undertaking with its partners such as China, Australia, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand.

‘America and Europe are better together’

BY KAY BAILEY HUTCHISON

Kay Bailey Hutchison is a former U.S. ambassador to NATO and U.S. senator from Texas.

Canadian Prime Minister Carney’s speech in Davos suggests President Donald Trump continues to upend the old rules-based global order. But I suggest that the rules-based order is meant to assure free and fair trade — and many trading partners, including the EU, have not, in recent years, practiced free and fair trade with many U.S. companies. An example, before the current Trump administration took office, was the added tax levied only on America’s largest tech companies, not on European or even Chinese competitors. So, while it is fair to say that President Trump has upended civility in trade negotiations, his stated goal is to achieve reciprocity with our trading partners.

My advice to the “middle powers” would be to try to separate their disdain for President Trump’s tactics and think creatively about how they can partner with each other and the U.S., where each one’s strength is used for the good of the whole. In recent weeks, because of President Trump’s bold suggestion that the U.S. would go to great lengths to own Greenland, including possible military invasion, leaders of the EU and Canada rightly erupted. But was it wise to retaliate by reaching out to China to reinforce trade relations? Is that in their best interests, when the NATO Alliance has designated China as the potential adversary of importance over the next decade?

The present and immediate past leaders of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg and Mark Rutte, have shown leadership in response to some of President Trump’s rants. They both put the interests of the alliance as their highest priority and have had positive relations with President Trump. And by making changes requested by the U.S., they have achieved results that make the alliance stronger. The fact is, America and Europe are better together.

To oversimplify, America puts security as its first priority, while Europe puts its economy first. So, Europeans can expect the U.S. to be the first to assess a strategic security risk to all of us and to begin preparing for deterrence against a resulting conflict. America can expect Europeans, when they agree to the assessment, to contribute to structuring the plan and providing troops and equipment for the potential mission. The U.S. will always do the most, but the Europeans will make significant and valuable contributions.

Though there are serious divisions between the U.S. and Europe, much of the tensions today are tactic-driven. But, if we look at both the historic past and the long-term future, our common interests are most closely served when we are united to protect our shared values: freedom and democracy.

‘The longer-term play is building resilience’

BY IAN BREMMER

Ian Bremmer is the president and founder of Eurasia Group.

Generally, it’s “defense first, hedge second.” The much greater economic and military power of the United States, coupled with the unpredictability of President Donald Trump, means you really don’t want to get into a big fight if you can avoid it. Hence, the efforts of most leaders doing what they can not to antagonize the U.S. president. It’s why they’ve acquiesced to asymmetric trade deal outcomes and are “studying” the Board of Peace.

But the longer-term play is building resilience so that you’re not in a position of such vulnerability to an ally you’ve suddenly found unreliable and adversarial. And that means diversifying and strengthening relations with other countries — trade deals, supply chains, defense integration — and improving domestic resilience through increasing competitiveness, defense spending and the like.

‘De-risking rather than decoupling U.S. ties’

BY TANVI MADAN

Tanvi Madan is a senior fellow at the Center for Asia Policy Studies in the Brookings Institution.

Several reactions in India to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech were a variant of “welcome to the club” and “we told you so.” India has long had the concerns Carney outlined about the rhetoric-reality gap on the rules-based order, the weaponization of integration and the unreliability of partners. And its foreign policy approach has long included many of the prescriptions that Ottawa has come to realize are important: developing independent capabilities — in India’s case, that includes its own nuclear weapons program — and a diversified portfolio of partnerships and issue-based coalitions to ensure some degree of strategic autonomy.

Setting aside the question of whether India is a middle power (many within the country would argue that it is a major power, albeit not in the U.S. and China category), this broad strategy is one India will continue to pursue while adapting to the headwinds it is facing. Recent events have reminded India of the need to enhance its own military, economic and technology capabilities, and to double down on its diversification strategy — the latter is now being facilitated by other countries also looking to diversify. This has been visible in the deepening of various partnerships (including with the European Union and the United Arab Emirates), the bolstering of its relations with the Global South, the repairing of ruptured ties with Canada and the persistence of its partnership with Russia. New Delhi has also sought to stabilize its relations with China, even as their structural rivalry persists.

But India won’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. That will mean de-risking rather than decoupling U.S. ties, which remain important for India. This is why it is continuing to cooperate with the U.S. — including in the defense, economic and technology domains, especially in the Indo-Pacific. And it will mean trying to preserve key elements of the old international order that have benefited India, even as New Delhi seeks to be present at the creation of the evolving new order.

‘A call for overtly rejecting great power influence’

BY MEGHAN L. O’SULLIVAN

Meghan L. O’Sullivan is a former deputy national security adviser on Iraq and Afghanistan and the director of Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, which launched the Middle Powers Project last year.

For years, middle powers have been waging a quiet struggle to secure their places in a more uncertain world, but 2026 has put them on center stage in a prominent — and perhaps uncomfortable — way. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney called on these countries to adopt “variable geometry” to build flexible coalitions. This is not new. Middle powers have been engaged in agile diplomacy to protect and advance their interests amidst rising great power rivalry for years; many have a long history of seeking benefits from both Washington and Beijing. What is new — and untested — are three things: a definition of “middle powers” which includes America’s closest historical allies; a view of the world that equates U.S. and Chinese power as equally disruptive and predatory; and a call for overtly rejecting great power influence rather than working around or with it.

In some areas, such as trade and investment, middle powers will be able to protect their direct interests by working together instead of standing individually in a system of power politics that holds more downsides than upsides for them. But it is less clear if middle powers will be able to leverage collective influence on the global issues that great powers seem to have forsaken. Green shoots of such efforts have been seen at recent international climate gatherings, but their survivability is unclear. The technology space may prove the most impervious to middle power impact, given the near dominance of the United States and China in AI and other frontier realms. In both the climate and technology arenas, middle powers must aspire not only to protecting themselves, but also to shifting the trajectory of U.S.-China relations from competition to cooperation. It is a daunting mission, but a noble and needed one for the newly-inspired middle powers to take on. The question is whether middle powers can move from from tactical coordination to strategic impact, using their collective weight not just to survive great-power rivalry, but to reshape it.

‘Interest-based coalitions of the willing and able”

BY THORSTEN BENNER

Thorsten Benner is co-founder and director of the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin.

In his Davos speech, Mark Carney promised, “From this rupture, we can build something better, stronger, and fairer.” Certainly, some utopian thinking is needed to avoid becoming a cynic. But there is a fine line between motivational ambition and illusion-based messianism. From a Canadian and European perspective, it will be difficult to build a “better and stronger” international order in the shadow of great powers recklessly throwing their weight around. As a priority, a great deal of unglamorous hard work is required to reduce dependencies and vulnerabilities to coercion and blackmail by the great powers. For Germany and Europe, this means working with all we’ve got toward being able to defend Europe without outside help while drastically reducing dependencies on China in supply chains and critical raw materials.

Germany and Europe should follow Carney’s call for middle powers to band together. But that is easier said than done, especially if Beijing and Washington decide to apply the art of divide et rule with greater skill. Taken to its logical conclusion, Carney’s appeal means that middle powers should form an anti-coercion solidarity alliance when individual members are affected by coercive measures from great powers. That is still a work in progress: As an example, Europe and Canada should have shown clear and measurable solidarity with Japan in light of Beijing’s ongoing coercive measures following statements by the Japanese prime minister about Taiwan.

Carney is right to advocate flexible, interest-based coalitions of the willing and able. These can operate outside existing international organizations. But within the UN system as well, Canada and Europe must work together with like-minded partners on a realistic restructuring. Many activities and organizations need to be reorganized in order to operate as effectively as possible with fewer financial resources. In the humanitarian system, for example, this requires the courage to set priorities and to restructure, in order to prevent mere bleeding out and unproductive stagnation.

All of this is worth the sweat of the noble, even if it cannot always be morally embellished. And in the end, this may well generate greater credibility for Canadian and European foreign policy — especially outside the West.

‘The world is bigger than five’

BY SINAN ULGEN

Sinan Ulgen is the director of the Istanbul-based EDAM think tank and a senior fellow at Carnegie Europe.

From a Turkish perspective, the global debate sparked by Mark Carney’s speech in Davos is very relevant: It overlaps to a large extent with the foreign policy vision of the Turkish leadership, which emphasizes the value of strategic autonomy and the need for middle powers to take more responsibility in global affairs. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s popular slogan of “The world is bigger than five” — the five referring to the permanent members of the UN Security Council: China, France, Russia, UK and U.S. — is a testimony to this intent.

And yet, despite this official rhetoric, it is far from clear if such a realignment will be an unambiguously positive development for Ankara at a time when the impact of the proposed concert of middle powers remains largely aspirational. For one, Turkey is in the challenging position of consolidating its security within a U.S.-led NATO and its economy within an EU-led bloc. The stressful dismantling of the transatlantic bond would expose Turkey to the unpalatable option of aligning itself either more closely with the U.S. or the EU, with consequences either for its security umbrella or its economic moorings. The challenge will be even more critical if the EU espouses a much larger role for the continent’s security while continuing to sideline Turkey. And yet, given the largely irreversible weakening of the U.S. security commitment, Ankara has no other realistic option than to maintain its status and influence by siding with the EU — for now.

So theoretically, Carney’s remarks may appeal to Turkish policy makers, but in reality, the lauded transition from an era of global powers’ influence to a more democratized global order is fraught with difficulties that may endanger the ambitions of those middle powers.

‘The creation of a single army under the EU’

BY SUMANTRA MAITRA

Sumantra Maitra is an elected fellow at the Royal Historical Society and founder of Clio Strategic Consulting.

Great powers are engaging in an intense imperial scramble for critical strategic resources. This competition naturally is triggering security spirals and retaliatory moves, such as economic coercion, aggressive investments, bloc formation, spheres of influences, arms races and in some cases, outright territorial conquest. That will only continue to grow. Added to that, the tech and military gap between leading powers and the rest is increasing, and populist movements are intensifying worldwide due to destabilizing migration flows.

Put simply, states like Canada, the UK and others face two issues. They face destabilizing populism within their countries, and along with economic coercion and warfare from predatory great powers. They also face geographic constraints, manpower and resource limitations. Historically, a simple way to go around this is to form alliances with other middle powers, grow or perish. For example, CANZUK, a proposed alliance between Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, is a smart new concept, which brings forth the historic core of a former empire and binds them to a loose federal alliance; it instantly triples the naval power, creates a cosmopolitan and mobile elite and combines the GDP of the constituent nations, giving it enough economic and, if needed, military power to form a bloc. The creation of a single army under the EU, as well as a centralized police force and tech independence, is another idea that is being floated. Whether either will be done is a question of political will.

‘The lesson of Greenland is that in the end, no U.S. ally is safe’

BY RORY MEDCALF

Rory Medcalf is head of the National Security College at the Australian National University.

Australia is a world away from Greenland, but pretending that the Trump-induced trauma in transatlantic security is not our problem would be a grave mistake. In the face of a glaring threat to the very ‘rules-based order’ that Australian governments have long championed, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s public response has been merely that Greenland is part of a sovereign state and that its future ‘is a matter for the people of Greenland and the people of Denmark.’ As European powers and Canada alike step up to advocate the sovereign rights of small and middle powers, diplomatic minimalism from a key democracy in the Indo-Pacific is not sustainable.

After all, Australia has its own intensifying need to build the widest web of solidarity against great-power coercion closer to home. The China challenge has hardly diminished. Indeed, Beijing continues to expand its influence across the Indo-Pacific, from the Taiwan Strait to the waters around Japan to Australia’s near neighborhood of Southeast Asia and the Pacific islands.

Australia is a relatively lonely democracy with vast territory, rich resources, a small population and insufficient defenses of its own, adrift in the maritime super region China is seeking to dominate. This, of course, is precisely why Canberra is so cautious in calling out the crude self-interest and damaging caprice that has defined the second Trump administration’s behavior towards the likes of Denmark, Canada and Ukraine, democracies with which we should have the deepest affinity. Australia needs the power of the United States, a strategic dependence that has grown alongside Washington’s willingness to balance and deter Beijing. Those in Canberra who see themselves as clear-eyed strategists will feel some relief that the new U.S. National Defense Strategy emphasizes the priority of countering China to prevent its dominance of the Indo-Pacific. But if this does indeed make Australia an indispensable ally for America in the world’s pivotal region, then we can afford to be more forthright and creative in strengthening practical links and declaring more alignment with the threatened democracies of Europe. Whereas if the lesson of Greenland is that in the end, no U.S. ally is safe, then Australia needs to get doubly serious about this diversification of partners and investing properly in its own resilience.

‘A risk Japan cannot afford’

BY MIREYA SOLIS

Mireya Solis is director of the Center for Asia Policy Studies and Philip Knight Chair in Japan Studies at the Brookings Institution.

Post-Davos, the transatlantic bond is running thin: An unbound ‘America First’ foreign policy is reverberating across the Pacific, unsettling key allies like Japan. The U.S.-Japan bilateral agenda has turned more fractious with Tokyo “buying” reduced tariff rates by committing to a whopping $550 billion dollars investment fund (equivalent to 12 percent of Japanese GDP). Nor do recent U.S. strategic documents, pledging deterrence vis-à-vis China in the first island chain, reassure Tokyo.

Donald Trump fantasizes about a G2 world and has prioritized engagement with Beijing, offering no pushback against President Xi Jinping’s campaign to punish Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi for her comment on Japan’s potential involvement in a Taiwan contingency. Japan and the United States are turning into an odd couple: the first a staunch supporter of the liberal international order, the latter an ardent detractor taking actions that undermine Japan’s interests in protecting the rule of law and preserving an open trading system.

Japan is more than a middle power, given its clout as the world’s fourth largest economy, its technological sophistication, robust military capabilities (albeit with constraints on the use of force abroad) and leadership in shaping the regional security and economic architectures. Alliance preservation is a must for Japan, given its geographical proximity to China and the fact that only the United States is treaty-bound to come to its defense.

Therefore, Mark Carney’s open call for middle powers to curb American excesses is a risk Japan cannot afford. Instead, Tokyo will speak softly but be proactive in strengthening its national capabilities, prop up the alliance and build diversified coalitions to enhance resilience. Security reforms — fast forwarding the target of 2 percent of GDP in defense spending, establishing a national intelligence agency and loosening restrictions on military equipment exports — enable Japan to prove its value as a capable U.S. ally, while building a self-help toolkit. The same spirit drives Japan’s economic security turn. The government is making record investments in critical sectors, including the defense industrial base, to build resilience and achieve strategic indispensability. As the only country to have developed a non-Chinese supply chain on heavy rare earths, Japan is a coveted partner in addressing resource vulnerabilities. And Tokyo is exploring new venues to expand rules-based trade by establishing lines of cooperation between the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, EU and ASEAN.

It will be hard pulling off the embrace of the alliance while de-risking from a mercurial American president. Tokyo is seeking alternatives between a fading “Plan A” (a reliable alliance) and a politically unappetizing “Plan B” (going nuclear). Pragmatism will work only to a point because not calling out U.S. transgressions of international law risks normalizing them, to Carney’s point. The U.S. withdrawal from foreign aid and scores of international organizations means Japan will be spread thin in mobilizing economic and diplomatic resources to avoid ceding the field to China. With the Trump-Xi meeting in Beijing approaching, the region is bracing for the possibility that partner interests get sidelined by a great power understanding. The Takaichi administration’s spending push to turn Japan into a technological power has rattled markets for its impact on strained public finances. At the end of the day, domestic politics will seal the deal on choices made. In a few days, during the general election on Feb. 8, Japanese voters will decide whether to endorse the strategic roadmap on offer.