As Great Power Competition (GPC) intensifies, middle power’s strategic calculations ponder over their responses to the changing distribution of capabilities. In international relations, middle powers are referred to as “guardians of the balance of power, ” meaning that their external alignment (shifting weights) follows the principle of maintaining power balances in the system. However, middle power strategies empirically challenge this law-like generalisation, by steering their strategic weight in a direction that either erodes the existing power configuration or perpetuates the prevailing imbalances in the system. In other words, as GPC consolidates power shifts, middle powers, rather than responding as per the prescriptions flowing out of the “structural-realist framework” demonstrates foreign policy behaviour that cannot be easily boxed into the categories of balancing, bandwagoning, hedging, or neutrality. In this context, the paper tries to understand and explain the strategies of the middle powers amidst GPC by using the typological method to account for various circumstances and operating conditions glued via the working of two independent variables – security concerns and aspirations – to evaluate the foreign policy choices of the middle powers. By doing so, this paper will establish different operating logics for the middle powers by testing the theoretical underpinnings through the case study of France and India as the United States and China grapples with increased tension and the prospects of war. The study confines itself to the decade of the 2010s to evaluate how India and France exploited or safely navigated this turbulence. Following this, the paper concludes that middle powers are rarely concerned about the systemic outcome of balances; instead, they prefer changes in the existing distribution of capabilities anchored around their security interests and aspirations to improve their relative positioning vis-à-vis others to determine their strategies. At last, this research contributes to understanding the strategy of the middle powers that the existing theories neglect because of their focus on great powers.