As the EU rethinks its geostrategy for a new, turbulent era, the appeal of so-called middle-power diplomacy is gaining ground. Since Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s repeatedly-cited January 2026 speech, many European governments have enthused that deeper coordination between middle powers could help in their pursuit of strategic independence.

Several current developments reflect the emerging middle-power movement. The EU and Canada are finalizing an upgraded partnership and the bloc, alongside several member states individually, has joined a new initiative called Partners for Multilateralism with just over a dozen other countries. The British-French-led coalition of the willing has intimated at deeper involvement in Ukraine. And the EU has applied for observer status in a Saudi-led maritime defense coalition working to protect the Bab al-Mandab Strait from Houthi rebels.

Middle-power diplomacy could be potentially valuable in shielding the EU’s external action from the nefarious impacts of U.S. and Chinese predominance. Plurilateral partnerships among middle powers will be one structural pillar of the emerging international system and European governments need to position themselves to benefit from this incipient dynamic.

However, at present, the concept of middle-power diplomacy risks being what academics refer to as an empty signifier. In other words, a label that can be attached to so many different policies and principles that its operational value is limited when applied to specific issues and third-country contexts.

Debate on this kind of cooperation has percolated policy discussions for two decades. While the concept seems intuitively promising, doubts about what it portends in practice have held it back. Apart from the perennial conundrum of deciding which countries are to be defined as middle powers, the category has struggled to gain substantive cohesiveness: On any policy issue or principle, it invariably spans a full range of clashing positions.

If middle-power cooperation is to act as a useful framing for EU foreign policies, European governments will need to add precision on three crucial and delicate vectors.

First is the question of whether European governments pursue it as a vestige of a substantively liberal order, or as its replacement.

Mark Carney’s attempt, alongside Finnish President Alexander Stubb, to add detail to the concept encapsulates a fundamental tension: They confusingly paint it both as a way of keeping liberal values alive and as a vehicle for more pragmatic and power-oriented foreign policy. But it is unlikely that European governments can build an effective geostrategy by airily insisting that these opposites go easily together.

One option for European middle-power diplomacy is to push for as wide a network of partnerships as possible with states other than the United States or China. The EU has moved fast to sign strategic partnerships, including with illiberal regimes that increasingly challenge the union’s notions of order. This leaves middle-power diplomacy as a curious attempt to counter Trumpian illiberalism through deeper cooperation with regimes far more illiberal even than the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump.

If, in contrast, the EU seeks these strategic partnerships for liberal ends, then it would require a different kind of diplomacy than the one it has embarked upon so far: a more norms-oriented focus on a far narrower, more select subset of liberal middle powers.

A second conundrum is how the concept relates to EU unity. The bloc is already a collection of largely middle powers. But widening the continent’s diplomatic lens to prioritize global-level cooperation among middle powers will often entail a less absolute preferential focus on EU coordination.

If, to the contrary, EU coordination remains the greater priority, then this will rub uneasily with the precepts of building a wider middle-power alliance. A constant refrain from countries in the Global South is that middle-power diplomacy cannot amount to European powers simply inviting others to sign up to their own pre-existing cooperative templates and principles.

There will be many issues on which a subset of EU member states is strongly in agreement and ponders whether to strike out to forge vanguard cooperation with non-EU middle powers. Doing so would inject content and meaning to middle-power diplomacy but leave many other member states behind, undercutting the a priori reflex toward cooperation within the bloc. Brussels will struggle to advance both middle-power diplomacy and deeper EU unity simultaneously.

A third issue on which clarity is needed is exactly how middle-power diplomacy relates to the United States. Trump administration officials are unsurprisingly hostile to the concept and insist that most powers still seek to safeguard their relationship with Washington above middle powers.

To a degree, this very discomfort should make the concept attractive to European geostrategic planners. Still, it is true that many middle powers have sought to protect their bilateral relations with the United States with greater alacrity than any effort they have invested in middle-power formats.

Middle-power diplomacy will be partly confrontational to the United States and partly complementary to countries’ bilateral ties with Washington. Even if middle powers share a desire for inoculation from U.S. unreliability, they will disagree on what the precise balance should be between these two dynamics.

Clear EU positioning on this question remains conspicuous by its absence. Middle power diplomacy cannot be a work-around for transatlantic tensions, but will itself prosper only in tandem with a more coherent approach to addressing the latter.

In sum, middle-power diplomacy has promise for the new era of European geostrategy. But docking it into EU foreign policy will be far from smooth. Its utility to the EU depends on the substantive content with which governments infuse it. A strategically astute use of the concept will be far more complex than simply rushing to sign as many international partnerships as possible in a quest for diversification away from the United States and China.

If middle powers, including European governments, are to work consequentially together, they will need to move beyond a shared dislike of the Trump administration and map out a positive vision of their own for power and order.