Power Gap Paradox: Analyzing the Discrepancies between How Middle-Tier States Perceive their Power and their Actual Success in Foreign Policy

Abstract

This paper analyzed the Power Gap Paradox, the middle tier states’ perception of their power and their foreign policy success class disconnect. This study goes beyond traditional measures of power and incorporates material, institutional, and ideational power as described in the Asia Power Index (2024), Global Diplomacy Index (2024), V-Dem Democracy Report (2025), and Global Soft Power Index (2025). This research uses Germany, India, and Turkey as case studies and explores how strategic culture, domestic narratives and structural constraints influence the translation of power into influence. This study finds that middle powers politics lack the ambition to match their means, and thus underperformance is predictable: Germany lacks sufficient ambition in the face of power, India is caught in ambition whose means are bureaucratically organized and Turkey is overambitious and status-frenzied. From a quantitative perspective, misperceptions (overconfidence and underconfidence) in foreign policy significantly disconnected the outcomes from the real foreign policymaking capabilities. This study integrates the realist perspective of power as capability, and a constructivist perspective of power as identity, to build the relational, perceptive and performative theory of power and suggests that middle powers engage in institutional revision, strategic adaptability and outcome measurement to bridge ambition and means to convert symbolic prestige into sustained influence in a multipolar world.