26 September, 2026. It was one of the key findings in the 2024 Global Diplomacy Index of the outstanding Lowy Institute (from which the title of this blog is a quote) that by 2023 Turkey and India had significantly expanded their networks of diplomatic and consular outposts. Since then, there has probably been a surge in the same direction, led above all by Canada.
By 2023 Turkey had leapt to third position in the top ten of the Global Diplomacy Index (with 252 posts of all kinds, behind China with 274 and the USA with 271), while India had significantly added to its own number of posts and was itself threatening to join the leading tier. Unlike small states, middle powers have the means to cast their diplomatic nets wider, and since the arrival of Donald Trump in the White House in January 2025 the motive for most of them to do so has become stronger than ever. This is their need to escape the clutches of predatory major powers too close for comfort and of technology platforms acting as if they, too, are sovereign powers. It is also a requirement that is the more urgent because the rules-based world order that emerged after the Second World War has to all intents and purposes been shredded by the American government, a development most recently advertised by the ugliness of President Trump’s language in addressing the UN General Assembly a few days ago. With a modicum of restraint, Geoffrey Hinton, ‘the Godfather of AI’, called Trump a “corrupt, senile felon”. We are back in the jungle where might is right and the rule of law is for suckers.
Advertised in two arresting speeches by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, one at Davos on 20 January 2026 and a second to the EU Parliament in Strasbourg on 17 September 2026, Canada is now leading the charge of the middle powers to reduce their economic and security dependence on the predatory Trump administration. Carney’s vision is not that the middle powers should create one new multilateral body but instead ‘different coalitions for different issues based on common values and interests’, with the ultimate goal of creating ‘the next just, stable, and prosperous world order.’
The reasons for the Canadian prime minister to give priority to the first of these aims are too well known – and too understandable – for this to need labouring here. But what is perhaps worth emphasising is that his ultimate goal should not be dismissed as window dressing for the benefit of the small states. This is because Canada’s acute sense of middle power responsibility for a rules-based world order has a history that goes back to the Second World War; it’s in the national blood. As another highly regarded but much earlier Canadian statesman, Lester Pearson, makes clear especially in the first volume of his Memoirs, ‘Middle Powers’ lack the strength and world-wide interests that make the ‘Big Powers’ too self-regarding and preoccupied with their main rival, but at the same time have sufficient power to do the right thing; that is, materially support the United Nations, which is what Canada has always done. (Pearson himself was nominated by the US and the UK to be the first secretary-general of the new United Nations but failed to obtain the support of the then Soviet Union. In October 1944, in addition to Canada, he thought ‘the principal middle powers’ were Brazil and the Netherlands and ‘perhaps Czechoslovakia, Norway, Belgium, and Mexico’. p. 270.) True to this tradition, Marc Carney – with a group of friends resembling a contact group – paraded a Partners for Multilateralism in the wings of the UN General Assembly in September. Meanwhile, traditional bilateral diplomacy has been given another shot in the arm.