Manish Tewari | Middle Powers In The Fourth Industrial Era
The former US secretary of defense famously uttered the following statement on February 12, 2002: “There are known knowns, as we know; there are things that we know that we know. We also know that there are known unknowns, that is, we know that there are some things that we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – things that we do not know that we do not know.”
But Rumsfeld’s remarks came in response to a question about the lack of evidence that Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq was linked to the supply of “weapons of mass destruction” to various terrorist groups.
Though his words won him a 2002 word-of-mouth award for the absurdity of political hypocrisy. However, he is quite prescient about the evolutionary trajectory of Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies and their impact on the human species.
It would be trite to underline that the United States (USA) and China are leaders in fourth industrial revolution technologies. The US is a clear leader in quantum computing, semiconductors, genomics, biotechnology and space, while China is a leader in electric batteries, hypersonics, solar technology, 6G networks, unmanned aerial vehicles and robotics. Both countries are in intense competition in artificial intelligence, advanced materials, quantum sensors, machine learning and nanotechnology. This list is indicative and not descriptive.
But a broader reality check is necessary. The competition between the dominant hegemon, the United States, and its closest rival, China, is intensifying across the spectrum, especially in the field of military applications of fourth-generation technologies. Xi Jingping recently characterized this challenge by calling attention to whether the United States and China can “overcome the Thucydides trap and create a new paradigm for relations between great powers.” A potential G-2 that benefits from its great leadership in frontier technologies.
Middle powers are structurally dependent on the Great Power order, which they criticize but cannot shape. A liberal and internationalist establishment was willing to show some interest in the middle powers, offering coalition membership and allowing some degree of participation in the norm-setting process in exchange for military and diplomatic support. The current US administration disdains such patterns.
The Trump administration has shown no hesitation in conveying in its projections and plans that middle powers remain dependent on great powers, especially the United States, for their prosperity and security, and it is perfectly happy to let this pattern continue as middle powers move toward burden sharing.
The Trump administration may be willing to cut corners and cut some slack on the margins; but it is reluctant to support attempts by middle powers to shape the epicenter of the international system, especially as the MAGA specter actively seeks to redesign the hardware and software of the global order.
China under Xi Jingping has also become more authoritarian, chauvinistic and all too comfortable flexing its newfound strategic heft, as highlighted by the wolf warrior diplomacy syndrome that is now almost a decade old.
These broader trends actually encourage intensified middle power cooperation and technological synergies because they are in fact a necessary subset of the overarching geostrategic matrix. For middle powers, this is extraordinarily important.
What impact does increasing your strategic autonomy in terms of hard and soft power have when middle powers and less developed countries will remain dependent on the goodwill and numerous commercial interests of private tech giants whose revenues are larger than the GDP of most developing economies?
However, the truth here is again thought-provoking. As an example of artificial intelligence alone, China will spend $295 billion building data centers over the next five years. China spent $98 billion on artificial intelligence in 2025 alone. China’s government spending was $56 billion.
Five US-based private companies Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta and Oracle will collectively invest $700 billion in 2026. By comparison, between 2025 and 2030, India’s AI mission will spend only $1.2 billion. So what was the point of holding a flashy AI Summit when there was no appetite to put your money where your mouth was?
Therefore, middle powers need to decide whether they want to train middle management or create top managers of the global AI economy. Until the middle powers no longer have their own basic model(s), they will always remain at the edges of the technology frontier as the horizons of deep and big tech continue to evolve and expand exponentially. This can only happen with large public investments or very intensive public private partnerships; because state-of-the-art border operations in 2026 could cost more than $2 trillion to build and operate before they can be monetized.
Artificial intelligence is just one of them; There are countless other pioneering technologies that are reshaping the conventions of human existence.
Middle powers can, if they wish, strengthen their collective power by pooling resources for the deployment and proliferation of technologies in research and development, hardware and software development, personal skills, scale and flexibility, and building redundancy capacity.
Here Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Australia, India, UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Germany, France, Canada, Brazil, Argentina and Chile, to name a few, are working below their weight and not taking advantage of their inherent convergence. This is where the collective weight lies, but even the intellectual structure, not to mention practical cooperation, remains in the zone of blurriness.
The structural and political obstacles that prevent the cooperation of middle powers are obvious. Most of the middle powers rely on the United States for their safety and security.
The United States still remains the sole external balancer of power in every geographic region of the world, but with its decreasing weight, the manufacturing umbilical cord still extends to China, and now stretches back to the 1980s, when the great leadership achieved by both the United States and China in the core technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and of course the tendency to rely on the United States and China, led to technological innovation rather than allocating their own resources on a macro scale.
Overcoming these political and structural challenges requires a revolution in mindset, courage and ability to withstand strategic and economic challenges in the short and medium term, but it can be done.
Within the challenges lies opportunity, and given the fact that the liberal democratic post-Cold War order shaped by the victors of both World War II and the Cold War has been subverted by its own creator, middle powers need to intensify regional defense cooperation and create certain types of global technology-based alliances, especially in the area of offensive and defensive capabilities, given that there has been a revolution in military matters in the last four-odd years.
Nothing demonstrates this better than Ukraine’s successful asymmetric warfare against Russia since 2022, or even Iran’s currently operationalized resistance against the United States and Israel.
If there was ever a moment for the middle powers, it is here and now.
