New Zealand Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta’s new speech on her country’s relationship with China attracted international attention, much of which centered on her statement that New Zealand is “uncomfortable” with the idea of criticizing China under the auspices of the Five Eyes.
“New Zealand has been very clear … not to invoke the Five Eyes as the first point of contact on messaging out on a range of issues that really exist outside of the remit of the Five Eyes,” Mahuta told the New Zealand China Council. “We’ve not favored that type of approach and have expressed that to Five Eyes partners.”
Her comments give a glimpse of debates within a key network of U.S. allies about the purpose of those relationships in a moment of heightened geopolitical tensions.
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What is the Five Eyes alliance?
The Five Eyes network is a bloc of English-speaking countries that share intelligence about potential threats and security issues with a high degree of candor, unusual even among allies. The agreement was signed between the United States and the United Kingdom in 1943 at the height of World War II, but it expanded, as that conflict gave way to the Cold War, to include Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. The group’s geographic reach thus extends from Europe and North America to the Indo-Pacific — across several of the major dominions of the old British Empire, with the most notable exception of India.
What do the Five Eyes do?
Alliance priorities change with the history of geopolitical threats, but rapid information-sharing is central to the mission of the Five Eyes. “The parties agree to the exchange of the products of the following operations relating to foreign communications: collection of traffic, acquisition of communication documents and equipment, traffic analysis, cryptanalysis, decryption and translation, acquisition of information regarding communication organisations, practices, procedures, and equipment,” the declassified 1946 agreement states.
The cooperation is eased by the fact that all five countries speak English and enjoy democratic systems of governance. “The Five Eyes is the closest intel-sharing relationship group that exists,” said former Senate Intelligence Committee deputy staff director Emily Harding, now a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Our relationship with the Brits is so close that we share a lot of stuff even before we process it.”
The fall of the Berlin Wall heralded the end of the Soviet threat, but the collapse of the World Trade Center at the hands of al Qaeda inaugurated a new mission. “Throughout its history, the Five Eyes alliance allowed its members to pool their complementary capabilities for mutual benefit,” researchers RAND wrote in 2017. “But the alliance may now be facing its greatest challenge — precisely because it no longer faces a single predominant threat.”
Could Five Eyes membership ever change?
China’s intensifying rivalry with the U.S. could heighten the value of the network for strategists in Washington and clarify the purpose of the alliance, but Beijing also puts pressure on the bloc.
Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei’s low-cost offer of 5G wireless technology threatened to embed communist spy agencies in the communications networks of U.S. allies around the world, but Australian officials banned the company from their 5G network in 2018, followed by New Zealand imposing a security “test” that Huawei couldn’t pass in 2019. Those allied steps strengthened the argument, made by American officials, that the U.K. should also reject the company — a step British Prime Minister Boris Johnson agreed to take in 2020.
China has made a rigorous effort to cultivate political influence in both Australia and New Zealand, but the Australian government has taken a stronger stance in response, showing a greater willingness to oppose Beijing in international fora. New Zealand’s meeker posture has alarmed some analysts, but Harding cautioned against over-interpreting diplomatic statements at the expense of understanding the intelligence cooperation underway.
“One of the things that’s most valuable about the Five Eyes partnership is that we all speak the same language and we all have the general same approach to the world, but there is still some variety in the approach and the thinking in each place,” Harding said. “And the Kiwis are always pretty good about saying, ‘Well, you know, maybe that’s how you guys see things. This is how we see things.’ … A good counterbalance, making you question assumptions. Their analytical service is really quite strong.”
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As China’s geopolitical ambitions take shape, the U.S. and other allies in the network will have to innovate — and perhaps even expand. Then-Japanese Defense Minister Taro Kono suggested last year that Tokyo’s intelligence agencies join the bloc as a Sixth Eye, but that idea remains under debate, even as Japan works more closely with the U.S. and other democratic allies to manage potential threats from Beijing.
