Chokepoints Cut Both Ways

A Response to Michael Beckley's "The Middle Power Delusion"

I read Michael Beckley’s Foreign Affairs essay, “The Middle Power Delusion,” with great interest. His core argument is bracing: middle powers may believe they are gaining agency in a multipolar world, but the deeper structure of international politics is still being shaped by two giants, the United States and China. In this view, hedging will become harder, autonomy will narrow, and most states will eventually have to choose a patron.

There is a great deal to take seriously in this argument. The United States still holds unmatched advantages in military power, technology, finance, alliance networks, and the dollar system. China is not a reliable substitute for American security. For many states, especially those facing immediate military threats, the U.S. security umbrella remains the best available option.

But this is also where the argument becomes less persuasive from the perspective of the Gulf Arab States.

Imagine reading Beckley’s essay as the Sultan of Oman, and then watching an American president suggest, even rhetorically, that Oman must “behave like everyone else” or be “blown up”. Or imagine reading it as a Gulf policymaker after years of watching U.S. policy pull the region into wars that threaten Gulf stability, confrontations with Iran that expose Gulf infrastructure to attack, and demands that Arab states normalize with Israel despite Israel’s own actions destabilizing its neighbors?

From a narrow segment of the policy community in Washington, the message “Align with the United States because it is the stronger patron” may seem rational. But from the vantage of many middle powers, the question reads a bit more like: “What happens when the stronger patron becomes not only less reliable, but also a potential liability?”

This does not mean that the Gulf states will turn to China for defense. They will not, nor will Beijing seek to fill that role. China has shown little willingness to provide hard security guarantees, absorb any regional risk, or replace the U.S. military role (which it tends to benefit from). The Gulf do not see China as a substitute security umbrella.

The more likely scenario is self-strengthening and strategic autonomy.

Resurgent middle-power agency is a strategy (or coping mechanism) for surviving the U.S.-China competition, not replacing it. States want to reduce their exposure to foreign leverage because they understand that dependence, once seen as a necessity in cases like the GCC, where it was an existential factor, is increasingly seen as a vulnerability. How this behavior manifests in each state differs. For the GCC, it is investing in defense industries, ports, AI infrastructure, energy systems, logistics corridors, sovereign funds, diplomatic mediation capacity, and new security minilaterals. This buys it access and leverage in a wide number of potential chokepoints on which the U.S. and China rely.

Beckley is right that the United States and China still dominate the heights of global power. But even a G2 world is not a closed system. Both powers are still reliant on nodes across a deeply interdependent and increasingly weaponized series of supply chains, value chains, and corridors that sustain their dominance. Middle powers asserting agency through interdependence make each of these nodes a new effective leverage point. States are increasingly aware of this and learning the same lesson that great powers have already internalized. Chokepoints are power, and no single state can control all of them.

Beckley treats supply-chain securitization as a demonstration of American structural power. From the other side of the chokepoint, the same policies may be a driver for middle power’ efforts to escape them. Export controls, entity listings, sanctions regimes, and friend-shoring frameworks have taught producer and transit states that proximity to American or Chinese supply chains constitutes exposure.

The response by middle powers has been resistance, marked by growing trends in resource nationalism, export quotas, equity stakes in foreign offtakers, and the construction of parallel processing geographies that neither Washington nor Beijing fully controls. Indonesia banned raw nickel exports and forced downstream investment onto its own soil. Chile and Mexico moved to nationalize lithium. The DRC renegotiated its cobalt terms with Beijing. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are building midstream refining capacity for rare earths and battery metals, positioning themselves as the indispensable middle of any future supply chain. A widening band of African, Latin American, and Southeast Asian states is writing local content rules into virtually every new mining concession. Soon, the new normal for middle powers will be adapting weaponized interdependence as a feature of their foreign policies toward great powers. The result will be a slowly thickening lattice of chokepoints, owned by middle powers.

This highlights what may be the deeper concern in Beckley’s argument. Rising middle-power agency reduces U.S. leverage at a time when U.S. partners see their ties to the U.S. weakening rather than strengthening. This gradually weakens the structural advantages Washington takes for granted while strengthening China’s position, which gains in terms of public image as the “alternative”.

It is very American to tell middle powers that autonomy is impossible or illogical to pursue, while asserting in the same breath that American power remains the preeminent structural influence and source of security for middle states. Perhaps the more interesting (and arguably wiser) move should be to ask why so many of states now feel autonomy is necessary.”

I am convinced the U.S. is the better long-term partner among the options, but many are losing faith in this view. If Washington wants states to choose the United States, pointing to American power has diminishing returns, especially when that power is being made to look foolish in the Persian Gulf. It has to make the American partnership feel less like exposure and more like security. Alignment cannot look like subordination, and protection should not feel political humiliation. Sadly, for many, this seems to be the present predicament.

In the end, middle powers may not be able to escape the current power balance, but they can still bargain within it. Global politics is not a two-player game, and middle powers are learning in real time how to better position themselves within it. The biggest hindrance to the U.S. winning friends and influencing partners is itself. If it can overcome that, it can win.