Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney told Davos exactly that, in January 2026. He was describing a genuine structural shift: the number of nations with enough economic, diplomatic, or resource weight to shape outcomes without being superpowers has nearly doubled since 1991 — from nine to sixteen. This publication has spent 32 individual profiles studying pieces of this shift. This trajectory is the argument for why they are one force, not thirty-two accidents.
The Institute for Economics and Peace's own Great Fragmentation report puts the structural shift in precise terms: geopolitical fragmentation now exceeds levels last seen since the end of World War II, superpower influence has plateaued since 2015, and the count of genuine middle-power nations has nearly doubled — from nine in 1991 to sixteen today. The Belfer Center's own Middle Powers Project, publishing original case studies through 2025 and 2026, selected thirteen countries for exactly this reason: Brazil, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, Turkey, the UAE, and Vietnam — a list that overlaps directly with roughly a third of this publication's own New Avenues coverage.
The behavioural pattern uniting these countries, per the China-Global South Project's own analysis, is a deliberate refusal to choose sides: Turkey remains a NATO member while openly discussing military cooperation with Russia; Saudi Arabia remains a US security partner while deepening ties with China and BRICS; both are, in the Project's own framing, less interested in taking sides than in "securing concrete benefits" regardless of which great power is offering them. The era of choosing sides, per Vision of Humanity's own 2026 analysis, is simply over for this cohort.
Indonesia is the cleanest single illustration of how this translates into hard economic leverage. The country supplies more than half of the world's nickel mine production and has used that position deliberately — banning raw nickel ore exports specifically to force battery and EV supply chains to localise processing inside Indonesia rather than simply extracting the ore. This is resource nationalism functioning as industrial policy, not protectionism for its own sake, and it is a template other resource-rich middle powers are now studying directly.
If you are not at the table, you are on the menu — the exact phrase Canada's own Prime Minister used at Davos to describe why middle powers must now act together, and the clearest one-line summary of the strategic logic driving this entire trajectory.
Outside The Case's own 2026 Middle East power mapping names Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Turkey directly as "Multipolar Entrepreneurs" who no longer pick a side, hedging between the US, China, and Russia specifically to maximise their own national autonomy. Riyadh and Abu Dhabi have integrated into the expanded BRICS+ framework, conducting some trade in local currencies, while simultaneously maintaining deep US defence relationships — a genuinely dual-track posture this publication has already documented directly in its own Sovereign AI trajectory, where the UAE's G42 secured a formal, audited exception to US chip export controls.
Turkey remains formally embedded in NATO while pursuing what Outside The Case calls a permanent administrative buffer-zone presence across Syria and Iraq — balancing alliance obligations against its own regional expansionist goals. Modern Diplomacy's own 2026 analysis frames this as a genuine post-Cold-War transformation: no longer facing a bordering hostile superpower, Turkey has grown large enough in population, economy, and industry to pursue a far more independent foreign policy than its formal NATO membership alone would suggest.
The Institute for Economics and Peace's own report calls the rise of alternative development financing one of the clearest illustrations of middle-power agency anywhere in the current order — nations no longer petitioning Bretton Woods institutions for better terms, but building parallel financing capacity directly. Indonesia's nickel-export leverage, Turkey's Mediterranean and Caucasus transit corridors offering faster routes with reduced dependence on any single chokepoint, and resource-rich nations' growing use of export controls and domestic-processing requirements are all, structurally, the same instinct: capture more value inside your own borders rather than exporting raw leverage to someone else's supply chain.
This publication's own New Avenues series has profiled 32 economies individually — Guyana's oil boom, Kenya's triple ratings upgrade, Poland's defense-driven growth, Malaysia's AI data-centre buildout. Read individually, each is a discrete national story. Read together, against the Belfer Center's own thirteen-country middle-power list and the Institute for Economics and Peace's sixteen-nation count, the pattern is unmistakable: this publication has been documenting middle-power rise in real time, one country at a time, without naming the aggregate force driving it until now. The WEF's own 2026 Global Risks Report ranks geoeconomic confrontation as the single top global risk for the year — a direct consequence of a world with sixteen genuinely independent power centres instead of two or three, each capable of disrupting a supply chain, a currency peg, or a shipping lane on its own initiative.
"Middle power" is a genuinely loose, contested category, not a precise technical term. The China-Global South Project's own reporting notes the label is being applied more broadly than its traditional Canada/Australia/South Korea usage — worth remembering that inclusion on any given "middle power" list reflects analyst judgment, not a hard economic threshold.
Middle powers hedge for their own benefit, not out of ideological commitment to multipolarity. The China-Global South Project is explicit that these nations "care less about taking sides than about securing concrete benefits" — meaning alliances and partnerships here are transactional and reversible, not the durable blocs Cold War-era bipolarity produced.
Not every middle power is rising at the same speed or for the same reasons. Asia Society's own analysis flags India's position as genuinely more fragile than the aggregate "rise of middle powers" narrative suggests — squeezed simultaneously by US tariff pressure over Russian energy imports and by the practical fallout of US-Israeli military action against Iran, a reminder that hedging strategies can be tested and strained in real time, not merely theorised about.
This trajectory is the connective layer for this publication's entire New Avenues series going forward. New country profiles added to that series should now be evaluated partly through this lens: is this economy building genuine middle-power leverage (resource control, transit-corridor position, financial-institution building), or is it simply a smaller economy along for the ride.
Part of an ongoing journal — observations recorded when something in the world economy is worth saying. No schedule. No noise. Not investment advice.