New Zealand is facing a much more challenging and complex strategic environment because of China's rise and increasingly strong nationalist narrative, according to a report released by the country's defence ministry.
The remarkably explicit warning on Wednesday included a detailed discussion of China's military modernisation and emphasised the importance of New Zealand's deep security relationships with Anglosphere countries such as the United States, Canada and Australia.
Professor David Capie, the director of Victoria University of Wellington's Centre for Strategic Studies, says it paints a pretty sobering picture of changes in New Zealand's strategic environment. It argues that the South Pacific is no longer a benign backwater, but rather that some of the challenges we have seen playing out in the wider Indo-Pacific are closer to home. Many officials and observers in Wellington have taken a more hawkish view of China in recent years and pushed for a closer security partnership with America.
The ministry's report seems to influence that discussion. Some see it as a pushback to the foreign minister, Nanaia Mahuta, who expressed discomfort with expanding the remit of the Five Eyes partnership beyond intelligence-gathering.
The defence aspect of Five Eyes is as long-standing and as fundamental as the intelligence aspect, it strongly endorsed New Zealand s continued involvement in the partnership, saying that the country derives enormous benefits from this partnership, including access to defence capabilities, information technologies and military developments, which would otherwise be unachievable Strategic competition between America and China was singled out as a major driver of increased insecurity. The ministry characterised the Indo-Pacific as the central global stage for strategic competition, warning that an external force almost certainly could establish a military base or use military forces in the region, and implicitly cautioned American policymakers that delivery on President Joe Biden's renewed commitment to the Indo-Pacific will be important for the future of this region. Another driver of the increased security threats New Zealand faces, per the ministry, is intensified climate change. It noted that climate change's impacts are already present and include extreme fires, intense cyclones and prolonged droughts. These will cause more social and political instability. More frequent disasters mean less recovery time between events, and more intense disasters mean more damage to recover from. The report makes clear that the South Pacific is where New Zealand needs to focus its defence efforts in the future, after decades of deployments to Afghanistan and the Middle East. It remains to be seen if that will lead to a change in New Zealand foreign policy going forward. The government has set out a very worrying picture of New Zealand's strategic environment, but is it willing to spend more or do anything different from what it has done in the past?