As an international order emerges in which “middle powers” seek to come to the fore alongside the relative decline of the US, “mini-middle powers” may also be coming to light.

An assessment published in the Financial Times (FT) points to countries that cannot set the broader international agenda but are nevertheless capable of making a difference.

Arguing that these states can be defined as “mini-middle powers”, the article provides the following definition: states that generally possess limited power, but exert real influence in a few areas such as energy, transport routes, regional security, mediation, finance, technology, geography, or access to actors that major powers find difficult to reach.

Noting that the crucial factor is not merely possessing one of these advantages, but being able to leverage it, the FT counts Azerbaijan, Qatar, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Oman among these mini-middle powers.

The assessment points out that Qatar and Oman are mini-middle powers in diplomatic terms: Qatar has converted its natural gas wealth, financial clout, and access to hard-to-reach actors into an extraordinary diplomatic role.

Oman, meanwhile, relies on “common sense, its strategic location, and its ability to keep channels open between adversaries.”

For both countries, mediation is not merely a diplomatic role, but also a source of influence.

Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan, on the other hand, possess influence rooted in geography and infrastructure. Azerbaijan exports energy, sits astride east-west trade routes, and holds significant weight in South Caucasus politics and security.

Kazakhstan’s oil, uranium, and position between Russia and China give the country an influence that extends beyond its region.

Uzbekistan’s demographic weight as Central Asia’s most populous country, combined with its central position, provides it with growing influence in regional trade and diplomacy.

The Middle Corridor demonstrates how this functions. While Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan sit at the centre of this Asia-Europe route, Uzbekistan is also strengthening its links with the corridor.

Although this route is more arduous than the northern route passing through Russia, it offers an alternative to governments and businesses.

The three countries are also developing a Caspian green energy corridor that could transport renewable energy generated in Central Asia through Azerbaijan and connect to the planned Black Sea electricity cable extending to Europe.

According to the FT, discussions regarding the South Caucasus and Central Asia are still too often treated as a rivalry between Russia, China, and the West.

Yet this approach overlooks how many countries in the region function. Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan maintain multidirectional relations because relying on a single side presents risks for geographic, commercial, and security reasons.

Consequently, while attempting to maintain room for manoeuvre among them, these countries cooperate with Russia, China, Türkiye, the EU, and the US.

Qatar and Oman, despite having close security ties with Washington, also keep channels open with adversaries of the US.

In December 2024, after Russian air defence systems shot down an Azerbaijan Airlines passenger plane, Baku’s response was unusually sharp given the power imbalance.

While Baku demanded that Moscow accept responsibility, punish those at fault, and pay compensation, it also sought to maintain overall relations without disruption.

Russia subsequently acknowledged the contribution of its air defence systems to the crash and agreed to pay compensation.

The influence of these “mini-middle powers” becomes strongest when other countries require the resources under their control.

Azerbaijan’s oil and natural gas gain even greater importance when buyers seek alternative supply sources.

The Middle Corridor benefited from the disruption of trade passing through Russia; however, governments along the route are aware that should Western commercial relations with Russia resume, some freight could shift back north.

For Qatar and Oman, mediation becomes even more valuable when the parties themselves no longer speak directly to one another.

The FT article concludes:

“These countries will not set the terms of the next international order. But those who wish to shape that order will often remain dependent on their routes, resources, or diplomatic access. Major powers will find it difficult to succeed without their cooperation.”

Thomas Karat, behavioral analyst

Two men, one word. Next Monday, at Kingston Crown Court in London, a 72-year-old grandfather goes on trial for terrorism; the evidence is a tweet of seven words, and the maximum sentence is 14 years. Nine months ago, a man who founded al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch and carried a $10 million American bounty on his head became the first Syrian head of state ever received at the White House. Tony Greenstein and Ahmed al-Sharaa have never met. Between them they define what the word “terrorist” now means — and for American readers there is a further twist: the seven words that may cost the pensioner his freedom are fully protected speech in the United States, which is why Washington has developed other methods for its own dissidents.

Take the pensioner first, and take his record in full, because the prosecution will. Greenstein was expelled from the Labour Party in 2018; he lost a libel action against the Campaign Against Antisemitism, which had called him a “notorious antisemite,” the court finding the phrase protected as honest opinion; he accepted a suspended sentence over a Palestine Action attack on an Elbit arms factory. He is abrasive, litigious and unrepentant — a Jewish socialist from Brighton, a carer, the son of an Orthodox rabbi who marched against Mosley’s Blackshirts. None of that is the charge. The charge is that in November 2023, goaded by an anonymous account demanding he declare himself, he posted: “I support Hamas against the Israeli army.” Five weeks later, at 6:30 in the morning, counter-terrorism officers took his computers and phones, held him for nine hours, and released him under conditions that banned him from posting about the war at all. “This is Orwellian,” he told the arresting officers. He undersold it.

Now the other man, whose record requires no libel lawyer to establish, because the United States government wrote it down. Ahmed al-Sharaa — then Abu Mohammad al-Jolani — joined al-Qaeda in Iraq in 2003, was captured by American forces and imprisoned for five years, then crossed into Syria to found al-Nusra Front, al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch, pledging allegiance on video to Ayman al-Zawahiri. The State Department’s own wanted notice recorded that under his leadership the group “carried out multiple terrorist attacks throughout Syria, often targeting civilians” — and itemized them: roughly 300 Kurdish civilians abducted from a checkpoint; 20 residents of the Druze village of Qalb Lawzeh massacred in Idlib; suicide bombings claimed in Damascus, Homs and Quneitra. In 2014 he called for retaliatory attacks on the American-led coalition itself. For this the UN froze his assets and banned his travel, and the $10 million bounty placed him among the five most wanted jihadist leaders on earth, on the same short list as Baghdadi and Zawahiri. That is the conduct the word “terrorist” was coined for: emptied villages, detonated city centers, a decade of American soldiers and Syrian civilians in the ground.

While the state prepared its case against the tweeter, it laid siege to the man. Eleven months to charge him; a trial date pushed back the better part of a year; thirty-two months, in the end, between the dawn raid and the jury. And one by one, his banks left him. In a statement published two weeks before trial, Greenstein described being cut off by five institutions since his arrest: Nationwide after a quarter-century, HSBC and First Direct — closing, among others, the account kept for the care of his autistic son — then Santander, which froze his personal accounts and those of a registered charity he serves as treasurer, then a savings bank that shut out his family entirely. None gave a reason; none has to, since banks warned about a customer are forbidden by law to tip him off. Nor is his suspicion of state involvement far-fetched: the government’s own Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation warned in 2023 that proscription enforcement would push banks toward jettisoning clients — “de-risking,” the trade calls it. When Coutts closed one account belonging to Nigel Farage, the affair drew condemnation from the prime minister and toppled a chief executive. A pensioner debanked six times en route to a terror trial has drawn silence. A defendant is presumed innocent; his accounts are not.

And while the pensioner’s accounts froze, the warlord’s thawed. Damascus fell on December 8, 2024; twelve days later an American delegation sat with al-Sharaa and announced the $10 million bounty was being dropped — the file unchanged, the graves at Qalb Lawzeh exactly where they had been. Britain’s prime minister said deproscription was “far too early” to consider; his government then spent 2025 considering it at speed. In March 2025, as government-aligned militias swept the Alawite coast, Amnesty documented the deliberate sectarian killing of civilians and demanded a war-crimes investigation; al-Sharaa’s own fact-finding committee would eventually confirm 1,426 dead, most of them civilians. Two months after those massacres, Trump received him in Riyadh and reviewed him for the cameras: “Young, attractive guy, tough guy, strong past.” In June came an executive order lifting sanctions to “give Syrians a chance at greatness”; in July, Washington revoked the terrorist designation of the organization he built. Britain’s Foreign Secretary flew to Damascus that same July to shake his hand — while HTS was still proscribed under the Terrorism Act as an alias of al-Qaeda, the identical legal status Hamas holds in Greenstein’s indictment. Only in October did Parliament tidy up, erasing the proscription on the stated ground that it “serves the national interest.” By November al-Sharaa was in the Oval Office, enrolling Syria in the anti-ISIS coalition while the Treasury halted most remaining sanctions. No jury weighed the graves. No dawn raid preceded the handshakes. The men who wrote the wanted poster simply took it down — and wrote into Hansard, in their own words, what proscription is: an instrument of the national interest, adjustable by ministerial order.

Hold the two files side by side and the statute confesses. Under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act, as amended in 2019, a person commits an offense by expressing an opinion supportive of a proscribed organization, reckless as to whether anyone is encouraged — an offense Parliament created precisely because the courts had ruled the old law could not touch opinions. By its literal terms, a Foreign Secretary renewing relations with the commander of a then-proscribed organization sits closer to the offense than anything Greenstein typed; nobody suggests prosecuting him, and that is the point. In the United States such a statute could not exist at all: even Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, the Supreme Court’s furthest reach into “material support,” held that “any independent advocacy in which plaintiffs wish to engage is not prohibited.”

Britain criminalized exactly what America’s highest court fenced off, and then demonstrated, through Damascus, that the criminal category is edited by hand. The Terrorism Act carries a clause no draftsman wrote: it binds the powerless and dissolves on contact with the useful.

The state’s own ledgers show which of the two uses is the real one. Across fourteen years to mid-2025, the Ministry of Justice records 55 people prosecuted under the Act’s membership and support sections — four a year, through the entire era of ISIS. Then the subject changed from bombs to opinions. In the twelve months to September 2025 the Home Office counted 1,886 terrorism arrests — up 660 percent — and 86 percent of them were for supporting Palestine Action, a group proscribed for spray-painting warplanes weeks after HTS’s rehabilitation began. The share of arrests producing a charge collapsed from 47 percent to 17: five of six people seized under terror law are never meant to face trial, because the arrest is the product. The UN human rights chief called the ban “disproportionate and unnecessary”; more than 2,700 arrests followed anyway, 522 in a single day, pensioners and priests led off over cardboard signs. When the High Court ruled the ban unlawful in February, police paused, then resumed — “We must enforce the law as it is at the time,” a commissioner explained, arresting 18 more on the steps of Scotland Yard — and the Supreme Court will rule in November on whether any of it was ever legal. The government’s own reviewer confirms that terror prosecutions now run at record levels, “dominated by documentary offences and proscription related charges.” An apparatus built against the authors of Qalb Lawzeh is processing placards — while the author of Qalb Lawzeh signs coalition documents in the Oval Office.

The American half of the mirror completes itself. The administration that lifted the bounty cannot, thanks to the First Amendment, prosecute its own citizens’ words — so it deports the speakers instead. Mahmoud Khalil, a green-card holder, was seized by plainclothes ICE agents over his campus advocacy, held 104 days in Louisiana, made to miss the birth of his first child, never charged with a crime — detained on the Secretary of State’s certification that his presence compromised American foreign policy. Rümeysa Öztürk was taken off a street by masked agents and jailed 45 days over an op-ed; a judge found the whole policy unconstitutional, her case was thrown out, and she left for Türkiye anyway, while Khalil’s protections were stripped on appeal and his fate rides on the Supreme Court.

Hold that against Damascus: the same State Department that certified a student op-ed a threat to American foreign policy spent the year unwinding the terrorist status of a man it once ranked beside Baghdadi. The department’s terror lists and its visa lists are, it turns out, the same list, kept for the same purpose — sorting the useful from the inconvenient.

The inconvenient include the press. Richard Medhurst, an independent journalist covering Gaza, became the first reporter arrested under the statute now aimed at Greenstein — 14 months under investigation, no charge, his files handed to Austria so the ordeal could continue abroad. Ten officers raided the home of Asa Winstanley of The Electronic Intifada over his posts; a court found the warrants improperly obtained and ordered his devices returned. No conviction anywhere; months of seized equipment and fear everywhere — a fair description of the function. Even in Kingston, the instinct holds: by Greenstein’s account, prosecutors have fought to keep his published writings out of the jury bundle, the judge citing an old rule that “courts are not sounding boards for anybody’s political views” — in a trial where the defendant’s political views are the offense.

So the ledger closes where it opened, with two men and one word. One commanded an organization that committed atrocities at scale, and the two governments that hunted him have concluded, in Hansard’s own language, that his rehabilitation serves the national interest. The other posted seven words, and those same two governments — one with its Terrorism Act, one with its immigration code — have spent three years demonstrating what happens to the powerless who say the wrong thing about the wrong war. Greenstein has argued that his verdict will set the price for everyone arrested behind him: acquittal imperils the campaign, conviction licenses it. Perhaps. But the deeper verdict is already in, delivered in Riyadh and sealed in the Oval Office: terrorism, as governed practice, is a description of usefulness. Al-Sharaa became useful, and the word released him. Greenstein and 2,700 placard-carriers remain inconvenient, and the word descends on them with dawn raids and frozen accounts. The trial at Kingston is listed for five days. The word on trial has already been acquitted of meaning anything at all.

Officials speaking to the British newspaper The Telegraph said a plan for an armed Kurdish uprising against Iran, which had been discussed by the CIA and Mossad, was blocked by President Erdogan.

In February, during a visit to the White House, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proposed an attack on Iran’s western borders by an army consisting of thousands of Kurdish militiamen from the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq under US air cover as a formula to overthrow the Iranian government.

Under the operation developed by Mossad and discussed with the CIA, they were to cross the Iraqi Kurdistan border into Iran to stoke an uprising that would overthrow the Iranian government “forever”.

According to information obtained by The Telegraph, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who was displeased by the prospect of armed Kurdish forces in the region, intervened in the matter and ultimately forced Israel and the US to terminate this covert operation.

The official added: “A few of these conditions did not materialize, for reasons I will not go into detail here. This is due not to a lack of foresight, but either to an operational failure or to decisions taken.”

According to Israeli and Gulf sources, Erdogan, understood to be one of the world leaders Trump trusts most, told the US president that he would not tolerate Kurdish independence anywhere in the region.

Upon learning of this plan, Erdogan became concerned that arming Kurdish militiamen would lead to “broad segments of his political enemies becoming armed and dangerous” on Türkiye’s eastern border.

According to the newspaper, Erdogan’s intervention contributed to “the failure of one of the most ambitious attempts at regime change in this war, which turned into a quagmire and failed to achieve its objectives.”

Trump said that regime change had already been carried out twice and that the new government was much more “sensible” than the previous ones.

According to The New York Times, following the meeting at the White House, US officials assessed that elements of Netanyahu’s presentation, which included the possibility of a ground invasion of Iran by the Kurds, were “detached from reality”.

While receiving a briefing from CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Trump described the Israeli prime minister’s regime change scenarios in a single word: “ridiculous”.

Nevertheless, this situation did not prevent Mr. Trump from pursuing the idea. The president met with Kurdish leaders on March 1 and continued to exert pressure on local officials who could benefit from Tehran’s weakness.

In a move seen as an obvious preparation for an attack, Israel bombed positions in western Iran, including regime officials, military bases, missile systems, outposts, and Basij facilities.

This situation led to speculation that Israel was laying the groundwork for the advance of the Kurds.

It was reported that fighters from all six Iranian Kurdish factions joined the attack to be launched from Iraqi Kurdistan, and these fighters would also supply weapons to Kurds inside Iran.

The coalition was allegedly ready for the invasion on March 18. All they needed was a green light from Trump.

As preparations continued, Kurdish organizations also began expressing concerns about their situation regarding the Iranian leadership, demanding “political guarantees” beyond mere military support.

A senior Israeli official told The Telegraph: “Intelligence did not promise that [regime change] would happen. It said that you could increase the probability or likelihood of it happening.”

Shortly after the plan began to collapse, details of the operation were leaked to the American media.

Fox News reported that an attack was launched in March. This situation forced Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary at the time, to clarify that the US was not arming the Kurds for this purpose.

At the same time, it is understood that Erdogan was lobbying in Washington for the cancellation of the plan.

Gulf countries also reportedly warned that an ethnic division of Iran could destabilize the entire Middle East.

This failure was not well received in Tel Aviv. Mossad Director Roman Gofman decided to dismiss the agency’s top two officials who had helped prepare the regime change plan.

According to insider information, during a final meeting in the Oval Office on July 28, the topic of regime change was raised once again.

Netanyahu stated that regime change was still possible under certain conditions, but he did not appear to convince Trump.

Trump ultimately preferred a long-term economic blockade over air strikes to end the war.