10 December 2025, NIICE Commentary 12024
Sinu Kunjumon
Indo-Pacific middle powers have long advocated the importance of a multipolar regional order, one in which no single state dominates and where all countries can operate on relatively equal footing. India’s Indo-Pacific vision, Australia’s strategic policy documents, and the discourses of Japan and Indonesia all resonate with this aspiration. Including them and many middle powers assume that a multipolar order promises greater strategic space and flexibility, enabling middle powers to balance their security needs, economic interests, and diplomatic alignments without being forced into rigid blocs.
Yet, in practice, a genuinely multipolar order is far more burdensome than middle powers often acknowledge. Multipolarity requires significantly greater financial, security, and diplomatic investments- costs that many regional middle powers are neither institutionally prepared nor materially equipped to bear. Unlike in a unipolar or even a loosely bipolar system, multipolarity diffuses responsibility for regional stability, compelling each state to assume a larger share of the burden.
Given their current economic capacities, military capabilities, and strategic bandwidth, most Indo-Pacific middle powers are unlikely to sustain the level of responsibility a multipolar order would impose. Compounding this challenge is the fact that these states have long been beneficiaries of a US-led order that provided security guarantees, economic stability, and a wide range of collective goods at minimal cost. In a multipolar world, where the United States would cease to function as the primary stabilising force and instead stand as one power among many, middle powers would receive far fewer of these collective goods.
Paradoxically, as scholar Ashley J. Tellis observes, therefore, middle powers may find themselves worse off under multipolarity, facing higher security burdens, reduced strategic influence, and diminished stabilising benefits compared to those available under either unipolar or bipolar structures. Multipolarity, while attractive in rhetoric, may ultimately shrink the very strategic space and autonomy that Indo-Pacific middle powers hope to expand.
Decades of underinvestment in defence further magnify this vulnerability. Middle powers would face intense pressure to increase military spending, secure their borders, and counter political, economic, and technological penetration by stronger states- efforts they have not historically been prepared to undertake alone. This reality is already reflected in the current US administration’s National Security Strategy 2025, which emphasises ‘flexible realism, burden-sharing, and burden-shifting.’ Washington now expects its partners to develop substantive capabilities for collective defence. Even longstanding allies such as Canada are no longer treated as sovereign partners with special status but rather as functional domains expected to shoulder greater responsibilities. The strategy explicitly signals that “the days of the United States holding up the world like Atlas are over.”
If such expectations prevail even in a system where American dominance remains largely unmatched, the pressures on middle powers in a truly multipolar world would only intensify. There would be no privileged partnerships, no free strategic assurances, and no automatic security dividends. Instead, the system would be more fragmented, transactional, and unforgiving, far removed from the idealised vision of equitable multipolarity imagined by Indo-Pacific middle powers.
Australia’s experience underscores this point. Canberra’s long-standing strategic proposition, that minimal defence investment was sufficient because geography and the American alliance ensured safety, becomes untenable in a more competitive and less hierarchical order. If Australia, one of the wealthiest middle powers, must undertake unprecedented defence spending simply to preserve strategic agency, the challenges for other Indo-Pacific middle powers would be even more severe.
For instance, in India’s case, the strain would be even greater. India’s defence spending continues to fall short of the 3 per cent of GDP often assessed as the minimum required to meet its expanding security commitments, modernisation needs, and operational demands across two active land borders and the wider maritime domain. This structural gap makes the costs of sustaining strategic autonomy in a multipolar environment significantly higher for India than for Australia.
So, ultimately, only serious and sustained investment, not idealistic expectations, can preserve middle-power agency in a harsher strategic era. Indo-Pacific middle powers must move beyond rhetorical commitments to multipolarity and confront the practical discrepancies and material demands inherent in such a system. Preparing wisely, realistically, and proactively for these emerging pressures is essential if they hope to maintain influence and autonomy in a more contested and unpredictable regional order. No longer able to remain subcontractors of peace and stability under the protection of a dominant power, these states must increasingly learn to operate on their own terms, building the capabilities, partnerships, and strategic discipline necessary to navigate a far more demanding multipolarised Indo-Pacific.
Sinu Kunjumon is a guest lecturer in the Department of Political Science, St. John's College, Anchal, Kerala, India.
