When Prime Minister Mark Carney stood at Davos in January 2026 and declared that the rules-based international order had experienced “a rupture, not a transition,” he was saying plainly what Canadian foreign policy had struggled to say for years. The speech was remarkable for its candour — and for the problem it left unsolved. Carney’s proposed response was collective action: middle powers must stop negotiating bilaterally with a hegemon from a position of weakness and build issue-specific coalitions around shared interests instead. “If you are not at the table,” he said, “you are on the menu.”
The instinct is right. The diagnosis is not in question. What is in question is what a state needs to have, and be, and do, in order for its seat at the table to carry real weight. States that arrive at the table without genuine leverage do not thereby escape the menu. They merely change the seating arrangement.
The “middle power” discourse that erupted after Davos has reproduced this gap. The conversation has been about collective action — how states in Canada’s weight class can coordinate, aggregate influence, and resist subordination — without resolving what individual states should be doing as the foundation for any such coordination. Canada needs to break decisively with the legacy of middle power internationalism and develop a grand strategy suited to the realities of multipolarity and great power competition. This paper takes that argument further, and does so with Carney’s agenda squarely in view.
It would be too easy to dismiss middle power internationalism as naivety dressed up as principle. The strategy had genuine coherence. Its practitioners understood that medium states operating under hegemonic conditions could amplify their influence by working through international institutions rather than around them — that the rules-based order, whatever its limitations, constrained great powers in ways that generally benefited states unable to impose their preferences through force. Canada’s investment in the United Nations, in peacekeeping, in treaty-based arms control, and in multilateral trade institutions was not altruism masquerading as strategy. There was strategic was a strategic logic in it.
The problem was a set of background conditions so stable, for so long, that they rarely needed to be named. Middle power internationalism assumed that the United States would continue to underwrite the basic architecture of international order — providing the security guarantees, the reserve currency, and the institutional leadership on which the whole system depended. It assumed that economic globalization would deepen, reducing the incentive for great power conflict. It assumed that multilateral institutions would retain sufficient authority to constrain state behaviour. These were reasonable assumptions in 1970. They were still defensible in 1995. By 2025, each had been overtaken by events.
What the classical literature rarely acknowledged was that these conditions were historically contingent rather than structurally permanent. Middle power internationalism was not a general theory of medium state strategy. It was a strategy for a specific era — one that has passed.
A more penetrating critique goes beyond this mismatch. Middle power internationalism was also a form of strategic overextension — one that went largely unrecognized because it expressed itself through institutional engagement rather than military adventure. By claiming universal relevance, by treating the preservation of a particular international order as Canada’s primary strategic mission, by substituting normative positioning for the cultivation of material leverage, middle power internationalism committed Canadian foreign policy to ambitions that consistently exceeded Canada’s actual capacities. The result was a foreign policy long on reputation and short on leverage. When the order it was designed to maintain began to fracture, there was no reserve to draw on — no regional depth built up, no material leverage accumulated, no strategy for operating outside the institutional frameworks that were losing their authority.
This is the restraint critique of middle power internationalism. A disciplined, interest-based foreign policy would have invested in the material foundations of influence rather than the reputational currencies of a passing order. The failure to do so is not merely a strategic error. It is a category of overextension just as real, if less dramatic, as military overreach.
A word on the existing conversation. The European Council on Foreign Relations’ recent work on middle powers in the post-rupture environment has begun to revisit these questions, focusing on coalition behaviour among states in Canada’s weight class. That is a necessary conversation. But it begins at the second order — asking how such states can cooperate — without addressing the prior question of what strategic posture each state should adopt as the foundation for that cooperation. That prior question is what this paper is trying to answer.
The international system that has replaced the post-Cold War order is not well described by the analogies that currently dominate strategic debate. It is not a new Cold War — the ideological clarity and bloc discipline of that era are absent. It is not a nineteenth-century balance of power — the depth of economic interdependence and the proliferation of non-state actors make that analogy more misleading than illuminating. It is not a Concert of Powers in formation — no shared framework for managing great power competition has emerged, and there are no grounds for expecting one.
What we have instead is fragmented multipolarity: an international system in which military multipolarity has returned while the institutions, norms, and economic arrangements that once provided coherent order are fracturing along geopolitical lines without being replaced by anything comparably coherent. Technology competition is bifurcating critical sectors — semiconductors, artificial intelligence, telecommunications — around geopolitical rather than commercial logics. Competing infrastructure networks, physical and digital, are being constructed in parallel. Regional security complexes are acquiring autonomy from great power management they did not have a generation ago.
The result is a patchwork of overlapping partial orders, each with its own logic, none dominant across all domains. It is not a transitional state on the way to a new stable hierarchy. The forces producing it are structural and durable, and states in Canada’s weight class must develop strategies for operating inside fragmentation as a permanent condition rather than managing toward a restoration that will not come.
The strategic implication is direct. Great powers cannot simultaneously dominate every region, every supply chain, every technology ecosystem, and every institutional forum. The incompleteness of the system creates strategic interstices — spaces between competing poles where states capable of operating across geopolitical divides can establish genuine leverage. The fragmentation that destroyed the conditions for middle power internationalism has simultaneously created conditions for a different kind of influence: one that requires not the preservation of any particular order, but the capacity to operate productively within disorder itself.
The terms “middle power” and “medium power” are currently used interchangeably in most academic literature and official documents. The practice is understandable, but it should not survive scrutiny.
Middle power is a behavioural concept. It describes a state exercising influence primarily through institutional activism, normative entrepreneurship, and multilateral coalition-building under conditions of hegemonic order. Medium power, as I am using it here, is a structural and strategic concept. It describes a state occupying a position of genuine material relevance in an international system and exercising influence through the disciplined deployment of positional leverage — regardless of what institutional order happens to prevail.
The distinction generates different strategies. Middle powers invest in reputation. Medium powers invest in leverage. Middle powers seek to shape the rules of the order. Medium powers work the order’s interstices — the spaces where the rules do not reach, where great power competition has created dependency and demand that a well-positioned state can meet on its own terms.
A Canadian foreign policy organized around the middle power concept will continue to invest in multilateral forums, normative coalitions, and the performance of good international citizenship. A Canadian foreign policy organized around the medium power concept will ask different prior questions: what does Canada have that others cannot easily replace? Where does Canada sit in the systems — logistics, energy, minerals, data, defence — that great powers depend on? The two strategies point in different directions. The choice between them is the most consequential strategic question Canada currently faces.
What defines medium power statecraft as a coherent type is a cluster of four orientations.
The first is positional leverage. Medium powers occupy geographic, logistical, or infrastructural positions of genuine strategic value that multiple great powers need. The relevant assets vary — Arctic shipping routes, critical mineral supply chains, energy transit corridors, maritime chokepoints, digital infrastructure nodes — but share a common feature: indispensability. The medium power sits at a node the system requires, and rivals cannot easily replicate or route around it. Influence flows from material position rather than from normative prestige or institutional activism. The medium power’s leverage, notably, does not depend on any particular international order surviving. Geography, geology, and infrastructure persist regardless of what happens to liberal institutions.
The second is strategic flexibility — the deliberate maintenance of meaningful relationships across competing poles so that no single relationship forecloses others. This is often misdescribed as opportunism. It is not. Sustaining relationships that are mutually understood to be partly competitive is active and demanding work. It requires constant calibration, accepts friction in every direction, and generates pressure from allies who prefer cleaner alignment. The discipline this imposes — resisting the pull toward full bloc membership, refusing the false clarity of unconditional alignment — is what distinguishes strategic flexibility from passive hedging. It is also where the restraint tradition bites most directly. A medium power that over-commits to one partner trades strategic flexibility for short-term reassurance, and typically gets the worse end of that bargain.
The third is restrained ambition. Medium powers keep their strategic aims calibrated to their actual capacities. They focus on regions and domains where they have genuine leverage, pursue interests that are realistically achievable, and resist the temptation to substitute moral positioning for strategic substance. As I have argued in the context of grand strategy more broadly, restraint is not passivity. It is strategic discipline — the willingness to say clearly what a state can and cannot accomplish, and to concentrate effort accordingly rather than diffusing it across ambitions that exceed the state’s reach. For a medium power in a fragmented order, that means giving up the vocation of custodianship of universal norms and embracing instead the more achievable goal of genuine influence in the domains where genuine leverage exists.
The fourth is selective institutional engagement. Medium powers treat multilateral institutions as instruments of statecraft rather than as ends in themselves. They participate where participation generates leverage, builds useful coalitions, or advances concrete interests. They pull back from engagements that are primarily reputational. They are willing to invest in new frameworks where existing ones have become paralyzed or captured. This is not indifference to international institutions — the alternative to some form of institutional order is a raw balance of power in which states Canada’s size have few tools beyond their material position. The point is to recover institutions as instruments of policy rather than as substitutes for it.
These four orientations together constitute an integrated posture, not a menu of options. That posture is the restraint tradition applied to medium state strategy in a fragmented order. And one thing must be said plainly about what it is not. Medium power statecraft is not small-scale or passive. Medium powers are internationally active. They maintain alliances, contribute to regional stability, and advance their values through diplomatic engagement. The difference from middle power internationalism is not a smaller international footprint. It is a more honest relationship between footprint and foundation — between what a state does internationally and what it can actually back up.
Of the four orientations, positional leverage is the master variable. Strategic flexibility, restrained ambition, and selective institutional engagement are the conditions that preserve and deploy it. A state that loses any of the three finds its positional leverage eroding; a state that cultivates all of them compounds it. What distinguishes a medium power in a fragmented order is not the sophistication of its diplomacy. It is the structural fact that competitors cannot easily route around it — that great powers seeking access to strategic interstices must deal with it on terms it helps set.
Canada is sitting on structural leverage that most analyses of its foreign policy consistently underestimate. The Arctic geography, the critical mineral endowments, the North Atlantic depth — these are not background conditions or diplomatic talking points. They are the raw material of genuine positional leverage in a fragmented order, under-deployed because Canadian foreign policy has been organized around a different theory of how influence works. The gap between what Canada has and what Canadian statecraft does with it is not a function of capacity. It is a function of framework.
Start with geography. Canada’s Arctic position is an emerging strategic asset of the first order. As Arctic sea ice retreats at rates that continue to exceed earlier projections, the Northwest Passage and the waters north of the Canadian archipelago are becoming maritime corridors and logistics hubs that every major naval and commercial power has a stake in. Trans-Arctic digital infrastructure compounds this: the Far North fiber cable system, connecting Japan to Europe via Alaska, Canada’s Arctic waters, and Greenland, is a concrete expression of what that geography means in the age of undersea connectivity. Canada’s northern position puts it astride routes and nodes that competitors cannot simply route around. That is positional leverage, substantial and largely undeployed.
Critical minerals reinforce the structural argument. Lithium, cobalt, nickel, rare earth elements, copper — the inputs that every major industrial economy requires for the energy transition, for battery manufacturing, and for advanced defence production — are present in Canada in quantities that no competing supply base can readily substitute for. Washington has recognized this, fitfully and under political pressure; the EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act reflects it; Chinese interest in Arctic development is partly an expression of it. Ottawa has been slow to convert this recognition into explicit strategic leverage, treating mineral development primarily as an economic and regulatory question rather than as a foreign policy instrument. That omission carries a rising opportunity cost.
The North Atlantic adds a third dimension. Canada’s geographic depth along the western side of the transatlantic corridor gives it significance for the defence of that corridor that chronic underfunding has not fully eliminated. Russian naval and submarine activity has intensified since February 2022, and the GIUK gap — the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom passage controlling Atlantic access — has recovered the strategic salience it held during the Cold War. Canada’s position relative to that gap is not incidental to NATO’s maritime posture. It is central to it.
None of these assets are new. What has changed is the environment in which they sit. In the unipolar era, Canadian critical minerals were commercially significant but geopolitically unremarkable — supply chains were open and the stakes were low. With technology decoupling accelerating, with the United States and Europe scrambling to reduce dependence on Chinese-controlled supply chains, and with Arctic competition intensifying across military, commercial, and digital dimensions, those same assets now carry strategic weight they have not carried before. Canada is sitting on leverage it has not yet learned to deploy as such.
Carney’s Davos speech was a genuine break from the language of the foreign policy establishment, and his subsequent activity has been substantive: a trade deal with China signed the week before Davos, a diplomatic circuit through India, Japan, and Australia in the first months of 2026, and a sustained effort to diversify Canadian economic and security relationships. None of this looks like middle power internationalism as classically practiced.
And yet. Observers tracking Carney’s Indo-Pacific engagements have noted that the trips, for all their ambition, “follow familiar patterns and do not yet demonstrate the envisioned conceptual shift.” Variable geometry names the form of Canada’s new foreign policy — issue-specific, shifting coalitions. What it does not specify is the content: what Canada brings to each coalition that gives its participation genuine weight. Coalition-building is only as effective as the leverage each party brings to the table. Carney said it himself at Davos: middle powers that negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon “negotiate from weakness.” The logic applies equally to multilateral coalitions. A Canada without positional depth, without assets that multiple great powers genuinely need, without the discipline to concentrate effort where its leverage is real — such a Canada does not escape subordination by diversifying who it accommodates.
The failure to convert structural assets into explicit strategic leverage has a name. It is the mirror image of middle power overextension. Where the old model committed Canadian foreign policy to ambitions that exceeded its material foundations, the current approach leaves material foundations that exceed its diplomatic ambitions. The mismatch runs in the opposite direction. The underlying error is the same — a foreign policy out of alignment with the structural position it actually occupies.
Medium power statecraft is the answer to the prior question that variable geometry leaves open. It means treating Arctic sovereignty and infrastructure as the strategic priority they actually are — not one regional file among many, but the theatre in which Canada’s most irreplaceable assets are located. It means converting critical mineral endowments into instruments of foreign policy, deployed with the deliberateness that other resource-rich states deploy theirs. It means rebuilding North Atlantic defence capacity as the foundation of Canadian strategic credibility in Washington and NATO capitals. It means calibrating multilateral engagement to questions where Canadian participation generates real influence — and accepting that this requires more willingness than Ottawa has historically shown to let go of engagements that serve mainly to maintain the appearance of global relevance.
What medium power statecraft does not mean is retreat from Canada’s international commitments or indifference to the values that have long animated its foreign policy. Canada’s commitment to the rule of law, to human rights, to the kind of ordered international politics that allows smaller states to operate with genuine autonomy — these are part of what Canada brings to the strategic relationships that positional leverage enables. Values function as instruments of influence, though, only when they are backed by genuine leverage. A Canada that takes its Arctic position seriously, converts its mineral wealth into strategic standing, and rebuilds its defence credibility in the Atlantic can advance its values from a position of real weight. That is a more effective internationalism than the version Canada has been practicing — not smaller in ambition, but grounded in the realities that make ambition achievable.
A Canada that takes its Arctic position seriously, converts its mineral wealth into strategic standing, and rebuilds its defence credibility in the Atlantic can advance its values from a position of real weight. That is a more effective internationalism than the version Canada has been practicing — not smaller in ambition, but grounded in the realities that make ambition achievable.
The old model was not wrong. Middle power internationalism was a coherent response to a specific international configuration, and its practitioners were neither naïve nor incompetent. The strategy worked because the conditions it required were present. The American security guarantee was real. The institutions had authority. The liberal order was durable enough that working through it made strategic sense.
Those conditions have changed, and the strategy must change with them. Carney’s diagnosis — “a rupture, not a transition” — is correct. His prescription — middle powers acting collectively — is necessary but not sufficient. Collective action among states without individual leverage tends to produce collective weakness dressed up as solidarity. Before the question of how medium states can cooperate comes the question of what each must be in order for its participation to matter. This paper has tried to answer that prior question.
The states navigating fragmented multipolarity successfully have grasped that influence flows from position rather than reputation, from material leverage rather than institutional activism, from strategic discipline rather than the performance of universal responsibility. These are medium powers, in the specific sense this paper has given that term. Their statecraft is the restraint tradition applied to medium state strategy in the twenty-first century.
Restraint, applied at the medium state level, is not a counsel of smallness. It is a counsel of discipline — of concentrating strategic effort where genuine leverage exists rather than diffusing it across ambitions that exceed the state’s reach. For Canada, that means a foreign policy grounded in its Arctic geography, its mineral endowments, and its North Atlantic depth: the material realities that give any diplomatic activity its actual weight.
Carney has identified the rupture and named the tactic. What neither his speech nor the debate that followed it has specified is the strategic posture that gives variable geometry actual weight. That posture begins with positional leverage — with the recognition that Canada’s Arctic geography, its mineral endowments, and its North Atlantic depth are structural foundations of real influence in a fragmented order, not diplomatic talking points. Variable geometry without positional leverage is not a foreign policy. It is an itinerary. Canada has what it takes to be something more than that. Whether it chooses to govern itself accordingly is the defining foreign policy question of this moment.
The Western powers have failed to effectively manage the increasing threat of proliferation in the Middle East. While the international community is concerned with Iran’s nuclear program, Saudi Arabia has moved forward with developing its own nuclear program, and independent studies show that Israel has longed possessed dozens of nuclear warheads. The former is a member of the treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), while the latter has refused to sign the international agreement.
On Middle East policy, the Biden campaign had staunchly criticized the Trump administration’s unilateral withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), more commonly known as the Iran Nuclear Deal and it has begun re-engaging Iran on the nuclear dossier since assuming office in January 2021. However, serious obstacles remain for responsible actors in expanding non-proliferation efforts toward a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East.
This panel will discuss how Western powers and multilateral institutions, such as the IAEA, can play a more effective role in managing non-proliferation efforts in the Middle East.
Panelists:
– Peggy Mason: Canada’s former Ambassador to the UN for Disarmament
– Mark Fitzpatrick: Associate Fellow & Former Executive Director, International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS)
– Ali Vaez: Iran Project Director, International Crisis Group
– Negar Mortazavi: Journalist and Political Analyst, Host of Iran Podcast
– David Albright: Founder and President of the Institute for Science and International Security
Closing (5:45 PM – 6:00 PM ET)
What is the current economic landscape in the Middle East? While global foreign direct investment is expected to fall drastically in the post-COVID era, the World Bank reported a 5% contraction in the economic output of the Middle East and North African (MENA) countries in 2020 due to the pandemic. While oil prices are expected to rebound with normalization in demand, political instability, regional and geopolitical tensions, domestic corruption, and a volatile regulatory and legal environment all threaten economic recovery in the Middle East. What is the prospect for economic growth and development in the region post-pandemic, and how could MENA nations promote sustainable growth and regional trade moving forward?
At the same time, Middle Eastern diaspora communities have become financially successful and can help promote trade between North America and the region. In this respect, the diaspora can become vital intermediaries for advancing U.S. and Canada’s business interests abroad. Promoting business diplomacy can both benefit the MENA region and be an effective and positive way to advance engagement and achieve foreign policy goals of the North Atlantic.
This panel will investigate the trade and investment opportunities in the Middle East, discuss how facilitating economic engagement with the region can benefit Canadian and American national interests, and explore relevant policy prescriptions.
Panelists:
– Hon. Sergio Marchi: Canada’s Former Minister of International Trade
– Scott Jolliffe: Chairperson, Canada Arab Business Council
– Esfandyar Batmanghelidj: Founder and Publisher of Bourse & Bazaar
– Nizar Ghanem: Director of Research and Co-founder at Triangle
– Nicki Siamaki: Researcher at Control Risks
The Middle East continues to grapple with violence and instability, particularly in Yemen, Syria and Iraq. Fueled by government incompetence and foreign interventions, terrorist insurgencies have imposed severe humanitarian and economic costs on the region. Meanwhile, regional actors have engaged in an unprecedented pursuit of arms accumulation. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have imported billions of both Western and Russian-made weapons and funded militant groups across the region, intending to contain their regional adversaries, particularly Iran. Tehran has also provided sophisticated weaponry to various militia groups across the region to strengthen its geopolitical position against Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Israel.
On the other hand, with international terrorist networks and intense regional rivalry in the Middle East, it is impractical to discuss peace and security without addressing terrorism and the arms race in the region. This panel will primarily discuss the implications of the ongoing arms race in the region and the role of Western powers and multilateral organizations in facilitating trust-building security arrangements among regional stakeholders to limit the proliferation of arms across the Middle East.
Panelists:
Luciano Zaccara: Assistant Professor, Qatar University
Dania Thafer: Executive Director, Gulf International Forum
Kayhan Barzegar: Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the Science and Research Branch of Azad University
Barbara Slavin: Director of Iran Initiative, Atlantic Council
Sanam Shantyaei: Senior Journalist at France24 & host of Middle East Matters
The emerging regional order in West Asia will have wide-ranging implications for global security. The Biden administration has begun re-engaging Iran on the nuclear dossier, an initiative staunchly opposed by Israel, while also taking a harder line on Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Yemen. Meanwhile, key regional actors, including Qatar, Iraq, and Oman, have engaged in backchannel efforts to bring Iran and Saudi Arabia to the negotiating table. From a broader geopolitical perspective, with the need to secure its energy imports, China is also expected to increase its footprint in the region and influence the mentioned challenges.
In this evolving landscape, Western powers will be compelled to redefine their strategic priorities and adjust their policies with the new realities in the region. In this panel, we will discuss how the West, including the United States and its allies, can utilize multilateral diplomacy with its adversaries to prevent military escalation in the region. Most importantly, the panel will discuss if a multilateral security dialogue in the Persian Gulf region, proposed by some regional actors, can help reduce tensions among regional foes and produce sustainable peace and development for the region.
Panelists:
– Abdullah Baabood: Academic Researcher and Former Director of the Centre for Gulf Studies, Qatar University
– Trita Parsi: Executive Vice-President, Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft
– Ebtesam Al-Ketbi: President, Emirates Policy Centre
– Jon Allen: Canada’s Former Ambassador to Israel
– Elizabeth Hagedorn: Washington correspondent for Al-Monitor
Military interventions, political and economic instabilities, and civil unrest in the Middle East have led to a global refugee crisis with an increasing wave of refugees and asylum seekers to Europe and Canada. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic has, in myriad ways, exacerbated and contributed to the ongoing security threats and destabilization of the region.
While these challenges pose serious risks to Canadian security, Ottawa will also have the opportunity to limit such risks and prevent a spillover effect vis-à-vis effective humanitarian initiatives in the region. In this panel, we will primarily investigate Canada’s Middle East Strategy’s degree of success in providing humanitarian aid to the region. Secondly, the panel will discuss what programs and initiatives Canada can introduce to further build on the renewed strategy. and more specifically, how Canada can utilize its policy instruments to more effectively deal with the increasing influx of refugees from the Middle East.
Panelists:
Erica Di Ruggiero: Director of Centre for Global Health, University of Toronto
Reyhana Patel: Head of Communications & Government Relations, Islamic Relief Canada
Amir Barmaki: Former Head of UN OCHA in Iran
Catherine Gribbin: Senior Legal Advisor for International and Humanitarian Law, Canadian Red Cross
In 2016, Canada launched an ambitious five-year “Middle East Engagement Strategy” (2016-2021), committing to investing CA$3.5 billion over five years to help establish the necessary conditions for security and stability, alleviate human suffering and enable stabilization programs in the region. In the latest development, during the meeting of the Global Coalition against ISIS, Minister of Foreign Affairs Marc Garneau announced more than $43.6 million in Peace and Stabilization Operations Program funding for 11 projects in Syria and Iraq.
With Canada’s Middle East Engagement Strategy expiring this year, it is time to examine and evaluate this massive investment in the Middle East region in the past five years. More importantly, the panel will discuss a principled and strategic roadmap for the future of Canada’s short-term and long-term engagement in the Middle East.
Panelists:
– Ferry de Kerckhove: Canada’s Former Ambassador to Egypt
– Dennis Horak: Canada’s Former Ambassador to Saudi Arabia
– Chris Kilford: Former Canadian Defence Attaché in Turkey, member of the national board of the Canadian International Council (CIC)
– David Dewitt: University Professor Emeritus, York University
While the United States continues to pull back from certain regional conflicts, reflected by the Biden administration’s decision to halt American backing for Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Yemen and the expected withdrawal from Afghanistan, US troops continue to be stationed across the region. Meanwhile, Russia and China have significantly maintained and even expanded their regional activities. On one hand, the Kremlin has maintained its military presence in Syria, and on the other hand, China has signed an unprecedented 25-year strategic agreement with Iran.
As the global power structure continues to shift, it is essential to analyze the future of the US regional presence under the Biden administration, explore the emerging global rivalry with Russia and China, and at last, investigate the implications of such competition for peace and security in the Middle East.
Panelists:
– Dmitri Trenin: Director of Carnegie Moscow Center
– Joost R. Hiltermann: Director of MENA Programme, International Crisis Group
– Roxane Farmanfarmaian: Affiliated Lecturer in International Relations of the Middle East and North Africa, University of Cambridge
– Andrew A. Michta: Dean of the College of International and Security Studies at Marshall Center
– Kelley Vlahos: Senior Advisor, Quincy Institute
The security architecture of the Middle East has undergone rapid transformations in an exceptionally short period. Notable developments include the United States gradual withdrawal from the region, rapprochement between Israel and some GCC states through the Abraham Accords and the rise of Chinese and Russian regional engagement.
With these new trends in the Middle East, it is timely to investigate the security implications of the Biden administration’s Middle East policy. In this respect, we will discuss the Biden team’s new approach vis-à-vis Iran, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. The panel will also discuss the role of other major powers, including China and Russia in shaping this new security environment in the region, and how the Biden administration will respond to these powers’ increasing regional presence.
Panelists:
– Sanam Vakil: Deputy Director of MENA Programme at Chatham House
– Denise Natali: Acting Director, Institute for National Strategic Studies & Director of the Center for Strategic Research, National Defense University
– Hassan Ahmadian: Professor of the Middle East and North Africa Studies, University of Tehran
– Abdulaziz Sagar: Chairman, Gulf Research Center
– Andrew Parasiliti: President, Al-Monitor
