The hedging is real and it is not over: most large second-tier states still buy security from one camp and goods from another. But the 2021–2026 record — 50 percent tariffs on India, expulsion of Türkiye from the F-35 program, and economic coercion against Australia — shows the two dominant powers making ambiguity progressively more expensive, and the space that made it cheap is closing at a measurable pace.
Why do middle powers hedge at all?
Hedging is not indecision; it is a business model. A state that depends on the United States for weapons and on China for trade keeps both relationships precisely because neither patron can flip one switch and ruin it. The academic term for the conditions that make this work is "structural asymmetry": no single great power dominates every domain of a middle power's dependence. A recent 2025 study of ten Global South states found that countries combining asymmetric dependencies, membership in ideologically divergent institutions, and rhetorical flexibility — India, Türkiye and Saudi Arabia above all — sustained the most durable hedging between 2010 and 2023 (Strategic hedging by middle powers).
The material base is real. India was the world's largest arms importer in 2019–23 with 9.8 percent of all imports, and Russia remained its main supplier at 36 percent — even as Moscow's share collapsed from 76 percent a decade earlier and new orders shifted to France and the United States (SIPRI, March 2024). Saudi Arabia, the second-largest importer, still took 75 percent of its arms from the US in the same period. That is a client relationship, but one Riyadh has learned to stretch: it entered BRICS, signed oil-production agreements with Russia against Washington's wishes, and deepened commercial ties with its biggest oil customer, China (SIPRI; Spanish Defence Ministry IEEE analysis, 2025).
What happens when the giants stop tolerating ambiguity?
The counter-argument — put sharply in a May 2026 Foreign Affairs essay — is that the room itself is vanishing: as rivalry hardens, "hedging will start to look like betrayal" (Foreign Affairs, May 2026). The evidence is not rhetorical. When India kept buying Russian oil after 2022, Washington eventually answered with 50 percent tariffs in 2025. When Türkiye bought Russian air defenses, Washington expelled it from the F-35 program — a decades-old alliance discounting one procurement decision as alignment. When Europe tried to keep trading with Iran through the INSTEX vehicle in 2019, the US threatened its users with exile from the dollar system. Australia's case is the fullest demonstration: after Canberra called for an inquiry into COVID-19's origins, Beijing hit it with informal bans and tariffs on barley, wine, beef, coal, cotton and lobsters — proof that the "economic China, security America" compartment is one Beijing can smash whenever it finds it convenient.
Enforcement has become the growth industry of great-power competition. China controls systems others depend on — finance, minerals, shipping, data — and it has demonstrated willingness to punish any coalition that tries to route around it. Washington, in this reading, operates the same way. The Foreign Affairs essay's phrase for the result is that the middle is no longer "an open marketplace" but "a minefield" (Foreign Affairs, May 2026).
Is the middle still growing — or shrinking?
Both, on different clocks. The Munich Security Report 2025 documents that many states called the non-aligned or "hedging middle" refuse rigid blocs and decline to be enlisted in either anti-Western coalitions or Western democracy-versus-autocracy framing; the report concludes that "a neat, two-bloc world looks unlikely" (Munich Security Report 2025). Survey data behind the same report suggests only about a third of respondents in eleven countries think the US remains the dominant superpower, with another third seeing a US–China duopoly (Munich Security Index 2025). Multi-alignment is the stated doctrine of most large Global South states as of September 2026.
Yet the foundations are eroding on a separate schedule. Three supports made hedging cheap after 1990: hegemonic shelter (one power underwrote the sea lanes and finance), hyperglobalization (everyone could trade with everyone), and fast growth that made loyalty cheap to buy. All three are weakening. China's share of global manufacturing output rose from 6 percent in 2000 to 31 percent, and the UN Industrial Development Organization projects 45 percent by 2030 — a concentration that squeezes every middle power trying to industrialize by exporting to the West (Policy Center for the New South, January 2025). Meanwhile economic statecraft — sanctions, tariffs, investment controls, secondary sanctions — has become the superpowers' weapon of choice, and secondary sanctions are aimed precisely at third countries trying to trade with both sides.
What does the case table actually show?
| Case | Hedge still standing? | The 2021–2026 cost | |---|---|---| | India | Partially — Quad with Washington, discounted Russian oil from Moscow | 50 percent US tariffs imposed in 2025 for buying Russian oil (Foreign Affairs) | | Türkiye | Partially — NATO member, F-35 expelled over Russian S-400 | Kicked out of the F-35 program in 2019 and kept out; BRICS courtship coexists with alliance membership (Foreign Affairs) | | Brazil | Yes, but narrowing | Tariffs on Chinese EVs rising to 35 percent by July 2026 to protect its own industry — balancing now means taxing its biggest partner (Policy Center) | | Saudi Arabia / UAE | Yes, materially the strongest hedge | BRICS entry, OPEC+ coordination with Moscow, pipeline bypass capacity — but 75 percent of arms still American (SIPRI) | | Finland / Sweden | Ended — by choice | Two decades of military non-alignment ended under pressure from Russia's 2022 invasion: Finland joined NATO on 4 April 2023, Sweden on 7 March 2024 (NATO) |
The table's honest reading: the hedgers are all still standing, but every one of them paid a visible bill between 2021 and 2026, and the two that stopped hedging — Helsinki and Stockholm — did so because a neighbor's invasion collapsed the threat distance that made hedging sensible.
Why can't the hedgers simply organize?
Because coalitions of the middle keep failing two tests: they are either too small to matter or too visible to survive. The Harvard Belfer Center's 13 designated middle powers together amount to less than half of US GDP, roughly a quarter of US military spending, and almost none of the world's leading high-tech revenue — "not a coherent bloc," in the Center's own words (Foreign Affairs, May 2026). BRICS has expanded, but its members distrust each other — India fears China, Gulf states clash with Iran — and when the United States and Israel attacked Iran, BRICS could not even agree on a joint statement. Variable geometry, the Canadian proposal to improvise issue-by-issue coalitions, describes the world as it has always worked: strong powers divide, bribe and punish visible coalitions.
What decides the next decade?
The question is no longer whether to hedge but which patron to lean into without becoming a pawn. On the core currencies of power — whose weapons, whose intelligence, whose banks, whose chips, whose sanctions — the ambiguity premium is falling. China offers no security umbrella, no reserve currency and no open political bargaining channels; its power works by enclosure, financing ports and supplying goods while keeping partners dependent. That asymmetry is why most hedgers, for all the BRICS rhetoric, still buy their security in Washington.
The honest conclusion is neither the optimists' nor the pessimists'. Hedging is not dead — India will keep buying Russian oil until the price of doing so exceeds the discount. But each year since 2021 has added a tariff, an expulsion or a coercion campaign to the ledger, and a strategy priced by others is not a strategy you control.