About

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From the Editor

On January 20, 2026, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney named a rupture in the rules-based international order. The old world order is dead, he said, but the middle powers have the capacity to build a new one grounded in human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, and the sovereignty and territorial integrity of states. The Middle Powers Monitor tracks the old international order as it evolves into a new one. It publishes every Monday. It is free to read and will remain so.

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Coverage

The Monitor tracks the following 29 countries: There are more middle powers than the Monitor covers. The gaps, sub-Saharan Africa most obviously, are editorial decisions, not oversights, and the list may grow. The 29 on our list were decided by the role and impact each country has had upholding or at least indirectly supporting the liberal international order. Each country is here because its choices — to defend the order, to hedge, or to defect — carry the most consequence for the order’s trajectory. The Monitor covers Europe most closely because that is where the question is being answered in practice, from the states that must replace American defence capacity to the frontline countries whose very existence is at stake. The Indo-Pacific is included because it is where the next test of deterrence is taking shape. The Near East and South Asian countries matter because their hedging collectively determines whether the order contracts into a Western bloc or keeps its global reach. The Americas are covered thinly but deliberately: Canada as the sole committed North American defender, Brazil as the Global South’s leading diplomatic voice, and Mexico and Chile as tests of whether the liberal international order has any hold in Latin America at all. The United States, China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are excluded. So is Israel. Their gravitational pull warps middle-power analysis: hegemons set the field; disruptors break it; unique cases defy the framework. Countries whose trajectories are already settled (Argentina under Milei, for instance) are set aside in favour of those where the question of alignment remains open.

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Analytical Framework

The Monitor assesses each country weekly across five signal categories drawn from how international relations scholarship understands middle-power behavior.

• Diplomatic alignment covers how a country positions itself relative to other states and manages those relationships. It takes in bilateral and multilateral dealings, alliance commitments, and the means a state uses to play competing powers against each other.
• Security and defence looks at a country’s military posture, procurement, force deployment, and intelligence and operational cooperation with allies.
• Economic statecraft examines how a country uses trade policy, sanctions compliance, investment flows and energy strategy to advance its broader aims.
• Institutional engagement tracks how actively a country takes part in international organisations, whether it honours its treaty commitments, and what role it plays in setting norms.
• Domestic constraints captures the internal forces that shape a government’s room to act, e.g., regime stability, public opinion, electoral pressures and the relationship between civilian leaders and the military.

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Methodology

The Monitor’s analysis works in layers. Each country gets a full analysis. Regional synthesis draws out patterns that cut across borders, and a global summary identifies what the country and regional pictures, taken together, reveal. The Monitor uses large language models to read and synthesise the week’s output from dozens of outlets across 29 countries — a task no human reader can do at this scale, and one LLMs can do consistently. A weekly publishing rhythm is frequent enough to stay current but slow enough to find the pattern beneath the noise. The layout borrows from technical documentation rather than news design, because a 29-country analytical brief is reference material. Everything the Monitor produces is grounded in the week’s reported facts, and nothing in it comes from a source the reader cannot check. Where the analysis falls short, we would rather be clearly wrong than vaguely right. Corrections, objections, and tips are welcome at editor@middlepowers.fyi.