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Overcoming the Challenges As seen during the pandemic, the notion that middle powers can somehow fill the US-China leadership void is still fairly remote, especially if the United States seeks to directly undermine middle power efforts. Recent European efforts to engage with the United States on reforming the WHO indicate a more realistic assessment of multilateralism than in the past.[65] By forcefully defending rules-based multilateralism, middle powers have the potential to provide a diplomatic alternative to the US-China global competition paradigm that can also be attractive to other international players. Over the past four years, while the Trump administration doubled down on its "America First" foreign policy and Sino-American tensions continued to sharpen, another trend has been equally pertinent: the growing relevance of middle power diplomacy. During the pandemic outbreak in 2020, as the Trump administration further withdrew Washington from multilateral frameworks and as US-China tensions continued to deteriorate, middle powers increasingly saw themselves as confronting an uncomfortable reality in which they could not really depend on either the United States or China to address pressing challenges like COVID-19 and climate change. [Extracted from the article]