Can Middle Powers Make the US-Led G20 Relevant?

We are in a period of global disruption. Trade rules are being broken. Norms and laws governing the use of force are being upended. The plug is being pulled on global public goods, from the World Health Organization (WHO) to the Paris Agreement to the US Agency for International Development (USAID). With the United States reorienting its international role, the search is on for old and new solutions to the problem of world order. But can legacy multilateral institutions withstand the pressure? Or can middle powers step up to govern the globe?

At a recent workshop convened by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the British Academy, there was a general consensus among participants that the old international order has broken down. But there was robust debate on most of the major questions that stemmed from such a determination, including the ability of middle powers to move the needle on matters of geopolitical and geoeconomic significance, the prospect of a world divided into spheres of influence, the centrality of nonstate actors to the future world order, and the dominance of the G2 (the United States and China). The question that produced a surprisingly fierce disagreement among contributors, however, was on the relevancy of the G20 and its ability to survive the second Trump presidency.

One participant argued that US President Donald Trump’s decision to exclude South Africa violated the most fundamental principle of the group, nearly making it dead on arrival. Others, myself included, advocated for taking the G20 seriously, even while under the leadership of a US administration that often sees multilateralism as antithetical to its “America First” agenda.

The global climate has hardly helped, with this year’s G20 taking place at a time when the group’s leading powers find themselves on opposite sides of the war in Ukraine and as the US war with Iran threatens further damage to global alliances and economic stability. While skepticism is warranted, there is another critical aspect of this moment: the rise of middle powers. Many question whether these nations can either unlock or work around great power deadlocks. Others argue that through new trade arrangements and plurilateral forums, middle powers are nudging discrete issues forward and creating the foundations for a new order.

For those who agree, as I do, that the ability of middle powers to contribute meaningfully to international order depends crucially on their ability to nudge, persuade, attract, or influence great power, then the G20 remains an important forum.

Together, the G20 member nations account for roughly 85 percent of global GDP, 75 percent of world trade, and two-thirds of the world's population . Of the 13 middle powers identified by Harvard University's Belfer Center, six are members of the G20. In 2023, the African Union joined, giving two additional middle powers—Egypt and Nigeria—indirect representation. Compare this to the G7, which accounts for 45 percent of global GDP and excludes all middle powers in the Global South, and it is easy to see why Indian External Affairs Minister Dr S Jaishankar argued that the world has passed right by the G7. 

To be fair, the barriers to G20 relevance are high. Many fear the assumption of the presidency by an "America First" president threatens to deflate four successive years of determined, even ebullient Global South leadership (Indonesia in 2022, India in 2023, Brazil in 2024, and South Africa in 2025).

Trump will preside over the G20 in Florida this December before passing the baton to the United Kingdom. One workshop participant thus suggested that the United States may simply be a bridge between the ambitions of Global South leadership and the United Kingdom—a European power whose convening power is hard to match.

So far, the Trump administration’s strategy for managing a potentially unwieldy agenda has been to take the group "back to basics.” The official 2026 G20 site says the United States is "returning the G20 to its core mission" by placing the group’s focus on economic growth, innovation, and partnerships that benefit US workers, businesses, and allies. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has framed the agenda around four working groups and three themes: removing regulatory burdens, affordable and secure energy supply chains, and new technologies and innovation. The US Treasury has similarly described a "streamlined, results-oriented" finance track.

Some believe that this narrowing of the agenda is critical to the group’s success. Indeed, the G20 was created in 1999 to “broaden the dialogue on key economic and financial policy issues among systemically significant economies and to promote cooperation to achieve stable and sustainable world growth that benefits all.” Under the past four presidencies, its agenda has expanded to include development, climate finance, debt, sustainable development goals, inequality, food security, Multilateral Development Bank reform, critical minerals, artificial intelligence, and broader stakeholder engagement. The G20 in 2025 had 15 working groups focused on nonfinancial socioeconomic development, climate, and geopolitical issues.

At a time of widening geopolitical and geoeconomic shocks, though, the US effort to shrink the agenda is unlikely to hold. There is a strong argument for bringing the leaders of the world’s most powerful economies together, and in the margins of any formal discussion, a wider agenda is likely to take hold. The war with Iran has choked off roughly 20 percent of the world's oil supply and significant volumes of liquefied natural gas, slowing global GDP growth to anestimated 2.1 percent in 2026 (down from 3.4 percent in 2025). Nearly 1 million people in the Global South have experienced surging energy prices and the crisis has disrupted the supply of inputs for fertilizer production, severely straining agricultural supply chains and potentially causing long-term systemic increases in global food prices. A recent United Nations Development Program (UNDP) study estimates that the conflict could wipe out $120 billion to $194 billion from the GDP of Arab nations, effectively stalling the region's non-oil development and infrastructure plans.

But the success of this G20 will also depend on who turns up. Chinese President Xi Jinping may, or may not be present. President Trump has also invited Russian President Vladimir Putin. The last time all three leaders physically attended the summit was in 2019. None attended last year, marking the lowest leadership turnout in G20 history.

This year’s G20 summit in Miami may thus show the limits of effective multilateralism absent a favorable geopolitical context and the goodwill of the world’s leading power. The disinvitation of South Africa and the golf course venue could set a precedent of exclusion that undermines the future of this fragile forum. Or this may just be a difficult but important moment to get through before the UK's 2027 presidency bridges back to continuity, leaving open the possibility that middle powers can save the day. And of course there is the possibility that Trump will use the 2026 convening to make the G20 “relevant again.”