Anwar Ibrahim: Can Middle Powers Hold Superpowers Accountable?

Malaysia sits in a peculiar position in the world right now—large enough to matter, too small to ignore the gravitational pull of the great powers circling overhead. Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim has spent much of his tenure thinking through what that means, and in a recent conversation with journalist Sreenivasan Jain, he articulated a question that has become urgent for dozens of countries in his position: if the superpowers themselves no longer follow the rules they wrote, what leverage do the rest of us actually have?

The premise is straightforward but unsettling. For decades, the international system rested on a foundation of agreed-upon norms—rules about trade, about justice, about how nations should treat one another. Those rules were written largely by the powerful, yes, but they were written as universal principles, meant to bind everyone equally. The theory was that even superpowers would be constrained by them, or at least embarrassed into compliance. That theory is collapsing. When the United States or China or Russia ignore the very frameworks they helped establish, smaller nations face a choice that feels increasingly binary: align with one superpower for protection, or try to maintain independence and hope it doesn't cost you.

Anwar's framing of the problem cuts deeper than simple power politics. He is asking whether accountability still means anything when it flows only downward. A middle power like Malaysia can be sanctioned, isolated, or pressured into compliance. But what happens when a superpower decides the rules no longer apply to it? The answer, increasingly, is nothing. There are no consequences. The rules-based order, in other words, has become a rules-based order only for those without the power to break it.

This is not abstract. It plays out in trade disputes where larger economies rewrite the terms of engagement on a whim. It appears in military actions taken without the consent of international bodies. It surfaces in the treatment of smaller nations' sovereignty—the assumption that great powers have the right to intervene in the affairs of countries they deem strategically important. Malaysia, sitting at the crossroads of global commerce and caught between the competing interests of the United States and China, feels all of this acutely.

What makes Anwar's intervention notable is that he does not simply accept this as inevitable. Instead, he poses a challenge: can middle powers still hold superpowers to account? The question itself is radical because it suggests that accountability is not a gift granted by the powerful but something that can be demanded, collectively, by those who have been written into the rules. If smaller nations band together, if they refuse to be divided, if they insist on the application of the same standards to all—perhaps the rules retain some force.

But there is a tension here that Anwar does not fully resolve, and perhaps cannot. Holding superpowers accountable requires leverage, and leverage comes from either economic weight, military capacity, or coalition-building. Malaysia has some of each, but not enough to act alone. Yet coalition-building among middle powers is notoriously difficult. Each nation has its own vulnerabilities, its own dependencies, its own reasons to fear isolation. The moment one country breaks ranks to appease a superpower, the collective position weakens.

The conversation between Anwar and Jain touches on justice, trade, and sovereignty—the three pillars on which any functional international order must rest. But the underlying question is whether those pillars can hold when the architects of the system no longer believe in it themselves. For Malaysia and countries like it, the answer will determine not just their foreign policy but their fundamental security and prosperity in the decades ahead.