On paper, New Zealand is one of America’s four closest allies. In practice, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern isn’t quite the friend one might hope for in a dangerous world in which Russia and China are all too eager to flex their muscles.
Alongside Australia, Britain, Canada, and the United States, New Zealand is a member of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance. A bastion of the post-World War II, rule-of-law-based democratic international order, the alliance involves the cooperation and sharing of highly sensitive intelligence material. This is the intelligence inner circle of the good guys.
But New Zealand’s overt appeasement of China poses a critical challenge to the Five Eyes’s survival.
Ardern gets very uncomfortable when the U.S. tries to hold China accountable for its misdeeds. These misdeeds include Beijing’s effort to dominate the South China Sea militarily, its rapacious annual theft of hundreds of billions of dollars in intellectual property, and its annihilation of treaty and human rights obligations toward the Uyghur peoples and Hong Kongers.
In the face of these outrages, New Zealand has offered diplomatic jargon.
In a quite ludicrous speech last week, Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta justified her government’s appeasement of China by comparing the bilateral relationship to that of a dragon and a taniwha (a being from Maori mythology). “It’s not getting any easier to be a small country,” Mahuta explained. But while recognizing that “the international rules-based system is under pressure,” the foreign minister also noted that the primary instigator of that pressure, China, “has been our largest trading partner since 2017. This is a relationship in which all New Zealanders have an interest.” China, she said, offers “a comprehensive strategic partnership which continues to serve us well.”
This is a euphemism. She means: We need to appease China for economic reasons.
Consider New Zealand’s reluctance to condemn the most egregious of Chinese human rights abuses. In January, New Zealand was the only Five Eyes member that refused to sign on to a statement condemning Beijing for its destruction of Hong Kong’s democracy.
Mahuta said that New Zealand is “uncomfortable with expanding the remit of the Five Eyes. We would much rather prefer to look for multilateral opportunities to express our interests.” Perhaps the foreign minister is referring to “multilateral opportunities” such as New Zealand’s enabling of a Chinese intelligence officer to serve in its Parliament. That absurdity is just one facet of the overt and covert influence that China now holds over New Zealand. The U.S. intelligence community is now wary of sharing its most sensitive secrets with New Zealand for fear that those secrets might end up in Xi Jinping’s intelligence briefings.
The Biden administration needs to stop tolerating New Zealand’s behavior and start exerting pressure on Ardern, who has much to lose if the U.S. takes action.
Consider, for example, that New Zealand spends on intelligence less than 1% of what the U.S. spends. While it is true that New Zealand retains some highly skilled intelligence officers, its primary support to the Five Eyes comes from two signal intelligence listening posts. The geostrategic position of these facilities means they are primarily utilized for collecting intelligence on South Pacific and Latin American targets. Important concerns, yes, but not critically so. Australia bears primary regional responsibility for signal collection on China. Australia’s relative proximity would allow it to fill the gap were New Zealand suspended from the alliance.
Indeed, Australia bears special note. Because its strategy toward China could not be more different to that of its southeastern neighbor. In retaliation for its support of the U.S. effort to restrain China’s espionage, aggression, and bullying, Australia is now suffering under a major Chinese trade boycott, which Mahuta failed to mention in her “multilateral” speech.
China is the preeminent global threat not only to the survival of the democratic international order but also to the lives of millions of innocent people. New Zealand’s refusal to stand shoulder to shoulder with its allies is grounds for its suspension.
It may be time to vote for Four Eyes.
