Middle-power defence pacts are multiplying. Whether they hold depends on whether they stay middle.

On 30 June 2026, Swasti Rao — the consulting editor for international and strategic affairs at ThePrint — published a column arguing that the latest wave of middle-power defence cooperation represents a structural shift in international politics, and warning that the same grouping will squander its leverage if it rebrands itself as another iteration of "Global South" solidarity. The argument is worth taking seriously precisely because it concedes the trend is real before questioning whether its spokespeople understand what they have.

The trend is real. Middle powers — states large enough to matter and small enough to retain room for manoeuvre — are signing defence pacts, running joint exercises, and co-producing hardware at a pace not seen since the early Cold War. The instinct to huddle is rational: the superpower order that anchored the last four decades is visibly fragmenting, and middle powers cannot outsource their security to a single patron without paying an unacceptable premium in autonomy. The question is what kind of bloc they intend to be.

The shape of the new minilateralism

What is emerging is not a bloc in the Cold-War sense — there is no organising ideology, no Warsaw-Treaty-style hierarchy, no single headquarters. It is a thicket of overlapping arrangements: bilateral logistics agreements, quadrilateral intelligence-sharing formats, technology-component supply chains strung between capitals on three continents. The participants are uneven in capability but aligned in anxiety. They want deterrence without vassalage, and industrial cooperation without dependency on a single supplier.

That is a coherent strategic posture. It is also a fragile one, because the same states that want autonomy from the principal powers are under constant pressure — from those very powers, and from their own domestic constituencies — to convert the arrangement into a moral coalition. That is where the Global South framing does its damage.

Why "Global South" framing is the wrong container

"Global South" is a useful shorthand for a set of development experiences, a posture in trade negotiations, and a negotiating tactic in multilateral forums. It is a poor container for a defence arrangement. Defence pacts bind signatories to specific operational commitments — basing, intelligence, ammunition, wartime industrial surge. Those commitments cannot be honoured on the basis of shared experience of colonialism, however legitimate that experience is. They are honoured on the basis of shared threat perception, interoperable doctrine, and reciprocal supply arrangements that hold up under stress.

When middle-power defence cooperation is dressed in the language of postcolonial solidarity, two predictable failures follow. First, the operational partners — the militaries, the procurement bureaucracies, the intelligence services — find the political rhetoric embarrassingly empty. They want to know which airfields will accept which aircraft, not which historical grievance justifies the partnership. Second, the rhetorical cover invites states whose interests are tangential or worse to demand inclusion on identity grounds, diluting the operational seriousness of the arrangement.

The point is not that historical justice is unimportant. It is that it answers a different question than the one a defence pact exists to answer.

What the counter-narrative gets right

The strongest objection to Rao's argument is also the simplest: in a world where the principal powers weaponise their own moral vocabularies, middle powers need a counter-vocabulary just to occupy diplomatic space. Refusing the Global South framing can read like a refusal to fight on the rhetorical terrain at all — and rhetorical terrain is part of the battlefield. There is a tactical case for wearing the label in UN corridors even as the operational work happens elsewhere.

That case is real, but it is also bounded. The label has costs that compound over time: it attracts states whose interest is grievance-performance rather than capability-building; it antagonises partners who do not wish to be read as members of a hostile bloc; and it confuses domestic audiences about what the partnership is actually for. A defence arrangement sold as moral solidarity will be evaluated as moral solidarity, and found wanting the first time a signatory declines to participate in an operation on grounds of pure national interest.

What the arrangement actually has to deliver

If the new minilateralism is to be more than a press-release phenomenon, three things have to happen. The participating states have to commit real industrial work — not just memoranda of understanding but joint production lines, shared standards, and reciprocal wartime-priority clauses that bind them when supplies are tight. They have to sustain intelligence arrangements that survive political turnover, which means institutionalising them inside defence ministries rather than inside the offices of particular leaders. And they have to be honest with their publics about what the pact is for: deterrence and capability, not solidarity.

ThePrint's argument, in plain terms, is that middle powers should resist the temptation to launder a hard-edged security project in the soft language of historical grievance, because the laundering will be discovered at the worst possible moment — in a crisis, when the rhetoric cannot substitute for interoperable radios and a common logistics doctrine.

What remains contested

The column does not name the specific pacts under discussion, which leaves the argument operating at a level of abstraction that lets readers fill in their preferred examples. The sources for this piece do not specify which arrangements Rao has in mind, whether the warning is addressed principally at Indian policymakers, and whether the operational partnerships currently in motion have already begun drifting toward the rhetorical comfort he warns against. Those are empirical questions, and the column's force depends on the reader's view of them. What is clear is the structural claim: middle-power defence cooperation is real, its institutional form matters, and the wrong institutional form will waste the opportunity.

This publication treats the argument as a useful frame rather than a settled verdict. The trend Rao describes is empirically visible; the prescription depends on choices that, as of 30 June 2026, remain open.