Recent criticism by Elbridge Colby, the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development, whose work has significantly shaped recent American defense thinking, of the emerging debate on middle-power autonomy deserves serious attention. Colby is right on one important point: no single middle power, and probably no loose coalition of middle powers, can militarily match the United States. Nor is there a coherent “middle-powers movement” united by a common ideology, threat perception or geopolitical project. Türkiye, India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, South Korea and the major European states do not view the world in the same way. Their interests often diverge and, at times, directly collide.
Yet, Colby draws the wrong conclusion from these realities. The absence of military parity does not make autonomy meaningless, and the difficulty of building a unified bloc does not eliminate the strategic significance of middle powers. The real question is not whether they can replace the U.S. They cannot. The question is whether the U.S. can achieve its own strategic objectives without them. Increasingly, it cannot.
This is the central contradiction in Colby’s argument. Washington wants its allies and partners to spend more, produce more, assume greater regional responsibility and reduce the burden on the U.S. But once these states acquire greater military, industrial and diplomatic capacity, Washington becomes uncomfortable with the political autonomy that follows. It wants stronger partners, but not more independent ones; more burden-sharing, but not more power-sharing; greater defense production, but continued dependence on the American defense industrial base.
Colby’s argument rests on an excessively narrow understanding of power in international politics. He treats the ability to reproduce the scale and quality of the American defense industrial base as the decisive test of whether middle-power autonomy is viable. But strategic autonomy does not require another state to become a smaller version of the U.S.
Autonomy means possessing enough national and collective capacity to preserve political choice under conditions of pressure, including in situations marked by conflicts of interest within alliances, a dynamic that has become increasingly salient with the rise of transactional and pragmatic foreign policy approaches. It means reducing critical vulnerabilities, diversifying defense and economic relations, shaping regional outcomes and preventing dependence on one external actor from determining every strategic decision.
In practice, middle powers do not seek global dominance; they need enough capability to impose costs, shape outcomes and make their cooperation indispensable. Türkiye’s use of domestically produced drones in Ukraine and Libya illustrates this, as does South Korea’s growing role as a key supplier of advanced defense systems to Europe, both enhancing their strategic leverage without requiring great-power status.
Contemporary power is also increasingly distributed across different domains. Military strength remains essential, but geography, industrial specialization, energy, logistics, technology, markets, supply chains and diplomatic networks matter as well.
South Korea has become indispensable in defense manufacturing. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states influence energy, investment and regional diplomacy. Indonesia occupies a critical position in the Indo-Pacific. Brazil carries weight in food security, the environment and the politics of the Global South, while also increasingly positioning itself as a diplomatic interlocutor in global crises. Türkiye combines military capacity, defense production, strategic geography and a multidirectional diplomatic network, and has emerged as a key mediation actor in regional conflicts. More broadly, middle powers are increasingly stepping into mediation roles, as seen in recent tensions involving Iran, where countries such as Pakistan and Türkiye have leveraged their diplomatic channels to de-escalate crises and facilitate dialogue between rival actors.
None of these countries can rival the U.S. in aggregate power. But each can shape the environment in which American, Chinese, Russian and European strategies succeed or fail.
This is why middle-power cooperation does not require the creation of a single bloc. Colby is correct that such states lack a common basis for permanent alignment. But he is wrong to assume that cooperation must be universal and institutionalized to matter. The emerging model is more flexible. Middle powers form issue-based coalitions around trade, energy, defense production, critical minerals, maritime security, technology and diplomatic mediation. Their partnerships are selective, temporary and interest-driven.
Colby’s most serious mistake is to infer omnipotence from American primacy. The U.S. remains the most powerful military actor and retains unmatched alliance networks, technological depth and global reach. But it cannot do everything, everywhere, at the same time.
Washington wants to prioritize China in the Indo-Pacific while sustaining deterrence in Europe, managing instability in the Middle East, protecting global maritime routes and replenishing increasingly strained weapons inventories. It cannot carry out that agenda without allies and partners. A credible balance against China requires Japan, South Korea, Australia, India and Southeast Asian states. It also requires European economic weight, technological coordination and political support. Even Türkiye and the Gulf countries matter because Washington’s ability to concentrate on Asia depends partly on whether adjacent theaters remain manageable.
The contradiction is obvious. The U.S. needs middle powers to contribute more to the international balance, yet it resists the greater agency that necessarily comes with stronger capabilities. It cannot simultaneously demand that Europe take responsibility for its own defense and insist that European strategy remain subordinate to Washington. Nor can it tell partners that access to the American defense industrial base is a privilege that may be politically restricted while expecting them not to develop alternative supply chains.
Indeed, such language strengthens the case for autonomy. If access to weapons, ammunition, spare parts, software and maintenance can be used as leverage, responsible governments will seek diversification. Defense procurement creates dependencies that last for decades. No state can base its long-term security on the assumption that another government will always remain politically predictable.
Middle-power autonomy is therefore not simply an intellectual fashion. It is an insurance strategy produced by uncertainty in great-power behavior. States hedge because they fear abandonment, coercion, entrapment or abrupt policy change. The more Washington weaponizes interdependence, the more it incentivizes its partners to reduce American leverage.
At the same time, the alignment of middle powers is becoming increasingly important for the future of global governance. If the international system is to preserve or rebuild a rules-based order, middle powers will play a decisive role in sustaining and reforming it. Their cooperation can help reestablish effective governance across critical domains, from climate change and food security to economic stability and trade regulation. While great powers often dominate agenda-setting, it is middle powers that can provide the bridging capacity, legitimacy and practical coordination needed to translate rules into functioning systems. In this sense, their collective engagement is not only about autonomy, but also about ensuring that global governance remains viable in an era of fragmentation.
Türkiye offers a particularly important example because it does not fit Colby’s binary framework. Ankara neither seeks to replace the U.S. nor accepts permanent strategic dependence. It has instead pursued autonomy within an alliance structure.
Türkiye remains a central NATO member, yet it has built national positions on Syria, Iraq, Libya, the Caucasus, the Black Sea, the Eastern Mediterranean and defense procurement. Its expanding defense industry has increased both its military effectiveness and diplomatic leverage. Unmanned systems, missiles, naval platforms, electronic warfare capabilities and armored vehicles have not made Türkiye a great power. They have, however, reduced critical dependencies and expanded Ankara’s capacity to shape regional outcomes.
Türkiye’s relevance also comes from its ability to connect multiple strategic regions. It is simultaneously a Black Sea power, a Middle Eastern actor, a European security partner, a Mediterranean country and a gateway to the Caucasus and Central Asia. This position allows Türkiye to perform functions that no distant great power can easily replicate. It can contribute to NATO deterrence, manage relations with Russia, support regional stabilization and build partnerships across the non-Western world.
The same broader logic applies to other non-Western middle powers. They are not forming a unified anti-Western coalition. Nor are they simply waiting to choose between Washington and Beijing. They are seeking room for maneuver in a system where great powers remain dominant but cannot independently organize every region or solve every crisis.
Colby is therefore right about the limits of middle powers, but wrong about their function. Their strategy is not to catch the U.S. It is to ensure that neither the U.S. nor any other great power can treat their agency as irrelevant. And for Washington, the choice is not between obedient allies and autonomous partners. In the emerging international order, the real choice is between working with increasingly capable middle powers or discovering that American primacy without willing partners is far less effective than it appears. What unites these non-Western middle powers is not a shared threat perception in Colby’s narrow sense but a shared strategic method, the accumulation of enough independent capability that alignment becomes a choice rather than a condition of survival.
Middle power strategy was never primarily about collective counter-balancing against Washington. It is about individual and overlapping efforts to convert structural dependency into structured interdependence. Türkiye’s experience over the past decade, and the broader realignment now visible from Ankara to European capitals, suggests that the middle power moment is not a passing distraction from the serious business of great power competition. It is where the next phase of great-power competition will unfold, whether any great power acknowledges it or not.
