In February 2025, the most consequential US-Russia talks since the invasion of Ukraine did not happen in Washington, Moscow, or Brussels. They happened in Riyadh’s Ritz-Carlton hotel, hosted by a kingdom whose economy is smaller than Spain’s. The talks, taking place in Riyadh’s opulent Ritz-Carlton Hotel, came after the Saudis hosted a Ukrainian delegation, highlighting the kingdom’s growing role as a host for important international negotiations. A few months after this, Turkish officials in Istanbul had been mediating the direct talks between Moscow and Kyiv, producing the exchange of around 1000 war prisoners. This is not how the post-1945 order was supposed to work. Crises were meant to be managed in the capitals of Washington, Moscow, and Beijing. Increasingly, they are being managed in Riyadh, Ankara, Jakarta, Brasília, and New Delhi.
Call them what you like, middle powers, swing states, the strategic Global South but six countries in particular, India, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Brazil, and Pakistan, have moved from the audience to the stage.
Start with raw economic weight. India’s economy has reached roughly $4.15 trillion, ranking sixth in the world, and remains the fastest-growing major economy, expanding at 6.5 percent, even as advanced economies stall. Turkey and Indonesia have each crossed into the $1.36–1.46 trillion range, and together with Brazil’s roughly $2.3 trillion economy, this is no longer a story of poor countries hoping for a seat at the table. It is a story of countries that already set the price of nickel, oil, and grain. Collectively, Asia-Pacific economies now account for around 69 percent of global GDP, a regional weight unimaginable a generation ago.
Institutional architecture is catching up to economics. The BRICS bloc, built around Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, has expanded to include Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, the UAE and Indonesia. The expanded bloc’s GDP, measured at purchasing power parity, now accounts for 40 percent of the global economy, surpassing the G7’s roughly 28 percent share. That is not symbolic. It means the institutions claiming to speak for the “Global Majority” now out-produce the club that built the postwar order.
The Countries Reshaping Global Politics
Saudi Arabia has built a diplomatic portfolio almost overnight. From Brokering prisoner swap of around 300 people between Russia-Ukraine in September 2022, hosting Volodymyr Zelensky at the 2023 Arab League summit, and convening the first direct US-Russia talks on the war in February 2025. Turkey has matched its move for move. Ankara, along with the United Nations ,mediated the Black Sea Grain Initiative in 2022, and its officials chaired three rounds of direct Russia-Ukraine talks in Istanbul through 2025, producing exchanges of more than a thousand prisoners of war at a time. Neither country is a party to that war. Both have made themselves impossible to exclude from ending it.
India has used the same logic on energy. Before 2022, Russian crude oil only accounts for 0.2 percent of India’s total crude oil imports. By 2025, Russian oil accounted for 35 to 40 percent of India’s crude imports, making New Delhi Moscow’s largest single oil customer even as it maintains close defense and trade ties with Washington. This balancing act has irritated Western capitals without costing India serious consequences.
Indonesia has chosen resources over diplomacy as its lever. Having banned raw nickel ore exports in 2020 to force smelting onshore, Jakarta now commands over 60 percent of global nickel output. This share is significant enough that its decision to cut its 2025 mining quota by roughly 120 million tons sent ripples through electric-vehicle supply chains worldwide. That is the kind of leverage once reserved for OPEC.
Brazil, for its part, has pushed de-dollarization talks as instruments of Global South coordination, hosting the bloc’s most consequential summit yet in Rio de Janeiro in 2025. And Pakistan shows the limits of the model. Even as Islamabad’s strategic relevance grows after mediation between Iran and the U.S amid the West Asia conflict, it remains economically dependent on others. Its 24th IMF bailout since 1958, a $7 billion facility approved in September 2024. Although, Strategic weight and economic fragility can coexist in the same country, sometimes in the same week.
Why Great Powers No Longer Control Every Crisis
The clearest evidence is in the hard-power numbers. According to 2026 figures, India is now the world’s fifth-largest military spender, having raised expenditure by 8.9 percent to $92.1 billion in 2025, while Pakistan’s military budget grew 11 percent to $11.9 billion, a rise links partly to new Chinese arms orders following the brief but intense India-Pakistan conflict of May 2025. Saudi Arabia spent $83.2 billion on its military, the largest defense budget in the Middle East, while Brazil’s spending jumped 13 percent to $23.9 billion, driven by naval modernization. None of these figures approaches Washington’s or Beijing’s, but together they represent a region-by-region redistribution of military weight away from a purely unipolar or bipolar world.
This does not mean middle powers have escaped great-power gravity, Pakistan’s IMF dependency proves otherwise. But it does mean the old assumption, that a handful of capitals could dictate how every crisis ends, no longer holds. Washington needed Riyadh to talk to Moscow. Moscow needed Ankara to talk to Kyiv. The West needs Jakarta’s nickel and New Delhi’s market. None of these six countries can dictate outcomes the way superpowers once did, but increasingly, none of the old superpowers can get an outcome without them either. That is not multipolarity in theory. It is multipolarity showing up in the data.
