Mark Carney said in Davos in January that middle powers are reorganising their foreign policy around Donald Trump’s continuing disruption. That shift is already pushing countries toward new diplomatic, military and trading alliances as world leaders prepare for the annual UN gathering.
John Bew called the process “a sub-threshold international order”, a phrase for arrangements built below the level of a full alliance system. Mark Leonard said the change is moving countries away from old bloc politics and toward hedging and self-defence if America is absent, and he asked, “How do we hedge and how do we make sure that we can defend ourselves if America isn’t there?”
Brics and Shanghai Cooperation Organisation
Brics and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation are thriving and deepening outside the United States, and the recent Brics summit in Delhi ended with a declaration. Those two groupings now sit at the center of the hedge: not a single replacement for the US, but overlapping ties that let middle powers spread risk across security and trade rather than wait on one great-power center.
Donald Trump remains the driver of that calculation. The article says he may face a Democrat-controlled Congress after the midterms election if the Republican party suffers a battering, and that if Trump is constrained by a Democrat-controlled Congress after November, he may focus even more on disruptive foreign policy.
UN general assembly
The timing matters because the shift is unfolding while leaders gather for the annual UN gathering. Hillary Clinton, David Lammy, António Guterres and other named voices in the broader discussion are part of the same question: how far countries move to protect themselves if the United States is less predictable.
Donald Trump’s own public style still feeds that uncertainty. He signs off Truth Social posts with “Thank you for your attention to this matter”, and the article places that posture alongside the wider move by former US allies to build options that do not depend on Washington alone.
After November
The next political test is After November, when the midterms election may leave Trump facing a Democrat-controlled Congress if Republicans take a battering. If that happens, the central dispute is whether restraint from Congress cools his foreign policy or prompts more disruption abroad, and readers will see the answer in whether new arrangements around Brics and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation keep hardening or stay symbolic.
