It’s happening very quickly. Donald Trump was sworn in as US President on January 20. At the Munich Security Conference in mid-February, US officials – including Vice President JD Vance – signalled a turn away from Nato and US involvement in European defence, pivoting towards China and the Pacific.
One week later, China’s People’s Liberation Navy conducted multiple live-firing tests in the Tasman Sea, causing flights between Australia and New Zealand to be diverted.
At the same time, it was revealed that the new agreements between China and the Cook Islands allow development of the seabed in the Cooks’ vast economic zone, and guarantee a maritime presence for China’s fleets, including ports and supply facilities.
The new right in the US – who are setting the intellectual framework of much of the Trump administration – are heavily influenced by a 20th-century legal and political theorist called Carl Schmitt. Schmitt was a Nazi in the old-fashioned sense: he joined the National Socialist Party in 1933, and was one of the constitutional architects of the Hitler regime.
But you don’t need to be a fascist to read him – just a critic of the modern international system. Schmitt has also been fashionable on the radical anti-capitalist left for decades, and China’s foreign policy intelligentsia is sometimes described as having “Schmitt fever”.
Schmittians believe any nation trying to conduct its foreign and defence policy by promoting abstract ideals – like human rights, globalism, international law, democracy – over its own strategic interests will overreach and destroy itself. His disciples see the relative decline of the US over the past 20 years – with its failed missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and its seemingly endless commitment to supporting Ukraine against Russia without any plan to win the conflict – as validations of this world view.
So was the decision made by previous administrations to outsource the US’s manufacturing base to China – its principal geostrategic adversary – in the name of free trade. So was allowing tens of millions of illegal migrants into the country to advance open borders and multiculturalism. All pathologies of a dying order the Trump administration has brought to an end.
It is being replaced with Schmitt’s doctrine of Grossraum: hegemony and operating space. Instead of upholding international trade and national sovereignty, great powers will organise and dominate their own supranational spheres of influence, treating the lesser powers within their regions as vassal states. The US is withdrawing its support from Ukraine and negotiating a deal with Russia while signalling to Europe it will no longer guarantee peace on that continent. Europe is not in its sphere.
Instead, the US is re-establishing its industrial capacity and militarising its own borders, sending special forces into Mexico to target the drug cartels. China is signalling that the South Pacific is its operating space.
Benign strategy
This is a devastating development for New Zealand. Since the end of the Cold War, we have dramatically reduced our defence budget, taking advantage of what Helen Clark referred to as a benign strategic environment to reduce military spending to a microscopic 1.3% of GDP. We have celebrated our soft power: the Lord of the Rings movies, Jacinda Ardern’s Vogue cover.
At the same time, we have congratulated ourselves on adopting a principled and independent foreign policy, safe in the knowledge that our independence was safeguarded by US military might.
Our own hard power is non-existent. Our Navy’s ships cannot float; the Air Force’s planes cannot fly. Our diplomatic capability leaves much to be desired: the government’s obliviousness to developments in the Cooks has brought about one of the most disastrous security and defence failures in our modern history.
Foreign Minister Winston Peters has just visited Beijing trying to maintain our ambivalent status as a trade partner to China and a trade and security partner to the US. Defence Minister Judith Collins has indicated a dramatic increase in defence spending as a response to the rapid geopolitical shifts in the region. She helpfully tweeted a graph showing the nation’s World War II military expenditure at 35% of GDP.
Christopher Luxon – who bizarrely has not visited China since the election – was in Vietnam this week, desperately trying to diversify our trade portfolio. Shortly after his arrival, China’s Navy conducted a live-fire exercise in the Gulf of Tonkin, which borders northern Vietnam and southern China. We are not the only Asia-Pacific nation being told the world has changed.
Australia matters
It’s anyone’s guess what the Trump administration thinks of this. Possibly it doesn’t know, or even care. New Zealand’s most important security relationship is with Australia, traditionally the US’s deputy in the Pacific region and a vital partner in the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing arrangement.
Recent events are likely to drive Canberra closer to Washington. Do we follow, entering into pillar 2 of the US’s Aukus arrangement? Would we be accepted? Everything with Trump is transactional – what would we have to concede in return? Would our nuclear-free policy be gone by lunchtime? Do Five Eyes and Aukus even have a future, or are they relics of the old world, alliances the US no longer has any use for?
This uncertainty in a chaotic situation will be compounded by domestic political disputes: National and Labour are increasingly divided on foreign and defence policy. Labour still advocates the independent, values-based policy of recent decades and the right-wing coalition favours a closer relationship with the US, insisting you can enter into a military alliance with a global superpower and somehow still remain autonomous.
We’re waking up to a world in which neither option may be viable.
