In his dismissal of middle power strategy on 15 June, US Under Secretary of Defense Elbridge Colby may have made the strategy’s importance clearer.
In a series of posts on X, Colby criticised the emergence of ‘middle power strategy’, dismissing it as a ‘distraction’ on which US partners would ‘waste valuable time, money and political capital’.
In middle power strategy, some of the stronger US partners are working together more deeply in response to uncertainty and instability in their security environment, including what they see as weakening reliability of the United States as a backer. European countries have stepped up efforts at joint weapons development, for example, and Japan and Australia say they will enhance defence cooperation. Diplomatic examples include European countries issuing joint statements on fighting in Iran.
In one of the posts, Colby said, ‘under President [Donald] Trump’s leadership, countries not only see the value of American engagement, they can no longer take it for granted.’ Far from supporting his suggestion that middle power strategy ‘isn’t borne out of reality’, this statement pinpointed a key reason for the strategy’s existence.
Well, if the US’s partners can no longer take its support for granted, they need another strategy.
Colby wrote that the US ‘makes the best [military] equipment, and we make it at a scale that no plausible competitor can match.’ Yet that only tells US friends how far they must deepen their mutual military-industrial cooperation. No single one of them can match US sophistication and quantity, but by working together they have a fair shot at closing the gap.
The under secretary of defense gave them all the more reason for doing so, writing, ‘access to the American [defence industrial base] is a privilege, not a right.’ Implicitly, if US partners misbehave, Washington will withdraw support. Faced with this, any sensible country will be looking for ways to keep its options open.
A second issue with Colby’s assessment of middle power strategy is that it seems to misunderstand some key elements of it.
The idea that middle powers don’t have a ‘coherent basis for alignment’, as Colby also said, isn’t right. They’re all democratic, have similar levels of economic development and often share security interests. In fact, they align with each other rather well, though some groups or pairings are more natural than others.
Australia’s 2026 National Defence Strategy outlines plans for deepening engagement with Indo-Pacific partners such as Japan, India and New Zealand to bolster regional defence and security. The document doesn’t identify this as middle power strategy, but that’s just what it is, and there’s every reason to expect it to be beneficial.
Colby also wrongly suggested that middle powers were trying to replace the US. In most cases, when countries talk about ‘middle power strategy’, they aren’t suggesting that middle powers should go it alone. The discussion of engagement with middle powers in the 2026 National Defence Strategy, for example, is immediately preceded by a chapter on Australia’s role in the US alliance.
As middle power strategies develop, we see no partnership that’s intended to usurp or supplant the US. No US partner is turning its back on Washington. Instead, middle powers are engaging in a familiar practice of strategic hedging to reduce vulnerability and build greater resilience, so if US support were limited or withdrawn – a possibility that Colby emphasies – they could rely on each other.
A middle power strategy isn’t anti-American. It’s just sensible.
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