Model citizens required of middle powers to step up

Comments on Gareth Evans "Time for the middle powers to step up", 21/07/2015

There will be justifiable places for the middle powers in Asia or Asia Pacific to play their rightful roles in building and managing regional security and other useful regional institutions.

It, however, requires the middle powers to be creative and truly independent, at least when acting to play such roles. Otherwise, some middle powers may be quite biased and may act with some outdated historical links or allies, that may be perceived by some non allied regional members as doing harmful things to them.

Perhaps that is the challenge for some middle powers, do they really act in the interests of all the regional members or do they work for their allies, one may ask?

Certainly, some and possibly lot of actions by some middle powers have either an overt or covert agenda, such as the so called “The not-quite-quadrilateral: Australia, Japan and India” posted by David Lang on the Australian Policy Online, may point to some of those. That seems to aim squarely at containing China, if judged from what the Japanese official was saying. That would unlikely make China happy and warm to ideas like that.