Author      Ford Hart

Joe Biden’s election will not change the fundamentals of U.S.-China relations, which, for all the drama of the last four years, pre-date the Trump Administration.  President Biden is likely to return to earlier presidents’ practice of more carefully regulating this vital strategic relationship and the complex trade-offs it features. The restoration of a more effective, conventional policy process in Washington should improve the tone of the relationship, but major differences will remain. With fewer distractions from The White House, the increasing challenges of a more assertive, authoritarian China should become more apparent. 
 
President Trump has represented himself as the first American president to confront challenges presented by China. This is simply not true. Indeed, the reality is that the U.S.-China relationship was always contentious.  Given sharply differing PRC values and goals, powerful American constituencies had reservations about China from Nixon’s visit on, and it fell to successive presidents to balance these voices against strategic interests.  Far from overlooking difficulties in the China relationship in the vain hope of Chinese democratization, as Mr. Trump has alleged, previous U.S. administrations grappled with knotty concerns ranging from intellectual property theft to the threat of war. Even a cursory review of the low points in U.S.-China relations — e.g., Tiananmen Square, the Taiwan Missile Crisis, the bombing of China’s Belgrade Embassy, the EP-3 incident — illuminates recurring tensions.  

Author    Robert Ayson

​As the election night excitement quickly wears off, Jacinda Ardern has work to do.  There is a refreshed cabinet to select from a much larger range of MPs.  There are talks to be had with James Shaw about the role that the Greens might play. And the big challenges have not disappeared. Each new case of the virus, however well managed, is a fresh reminder that the international pandemic is still with us. And before long, there will be renewed attention to the government’s plan to get New Zealand’s economy humming without adding to an already strenuous covid-era debt burden.
 
But the Prime Minister’s thoughts must occasionally turn to the US federal election on 3 November. Ardern and her colleagues, like so many New Zealanders, will be waiting and hoping for Joe Biden to defeat Donald Trump. But New Zealand hasn’t been waiting for Joe since the Democratic Party made Biden its nominee. We’ve been doing that for the best part of four years.

Author    Robert Ayson

​The truism that there aren't many votes in foreign or defence policy seems spot on for New Zealand’s 2020 general election. Less than a month from the October 17 polling day, there are few external policy musings on offer from the three largest parties in the current parliament. On New Zealand’s foreign and defence relations with the rest of the world, Spinoff’s Policy tracker is nearly empty.
 
The party websites bear out these gaps. If Labour is expecting to romp home under Ardern, there is little sign that foreign policy is part of the winning recipe.  A few general points about climate change and free trade agreements can’t compete with the emphasis on the international dimensions of the government’s covid response. National’s online pickings are even slimmer. The main policy page almost suggests the world isn’t out there, and even by a process of elimination your writer could not discover anything on defence and foreign policy.

Author    David Capie

​This week sees the end of Shinzo Abe’s remarkable second term as Prime Minister of Japan. When he resigned in 2007 after a scandal-plagued year as PM, few would have imagined that he would return to power five years later and go on to be Japan’s longest serving prime minister and one of the region’s leading statesmen.
 
Abe’s international legacy will be to have steered Japan through turbulent times in the region, navigating between what Michael Fullilove has called ‘a feckless America and a reckless China’. From the outset, Abe was clear in his ambitions. He told a Washington audience in 2013 “I am back and so shall Japan be.” Abe wanted to fashion a Japan that could lead and be a ‘rule maker’ as well as a ‘rule taker’. He wanted to prove that reports of Japan’s demise were exaggerated and that it ‘is not and never will be a tier-two country’. While he didn’t achieve all his goals, Abe’s leadership marked the return of a more confident Japan, a respected leader in regional diplomacy.

Author     Jim Rolfe

The so-called five-eyes grouping of the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand is in the news and increasingly referred to as an alliance. That designation overstates the case somewhat. The grouping began as a UK-US signals intelligence sharing arrangement during World War II and expanded following the end of the war. This arrangement has both remained true to its roots and evolved considerably since then.

Close cooperation between the electronic intelligence agencies of the five countries continues. This arrangement allows for more or less seamless tasking and sharing of each other’s capabilities. The original signals sharing arrangement has inevitably spread to the rest of the intelligence community. There are almost equally close links between the human and defence intelligence agencies of the five countries. At this level the arrangement is primarily a technical and operational (as opposed to strategic) one, with considerable benefits to all partners. It must be noted, however, that ‘operational’ can conceal a very close relationship indeed. This may mean that there is a risk agencies could become complicit (if unwittingly) in the illicit activities of partner agencies, although legislation and policies are in place to prevent that from happening.

But, as news headlines routinely remind us, it would be a mistake to consider this as 'merely' an intelligence relationship.

Authors    Jon Fraenkel and Anthony Tutugoro

​New Caledonia will vote again on whether to remain within the French republic on October 4th 2020. At the last such referendum, in November 2018, the result was 56.67% against independence and 43.33% in favour, with most indigenous Kanaks voting in favour and most non-Kanaks against, including a majority of those descended from French settlers (Caldoches) and from migrants from the nearby French territories of Wallis and Futuna and Tahiti.
 
Since the 2018 outcome, continuing tensions have centred on the outcome of the May 2019 provincial polls and mutual recriminations surrounding the government’s handling of Covid-19. The October contest will bring the territory midway through the potential three-referendum process envisaged under the 1998 Nouméa Accord.

Author     B K Greener

In an era of multiple ‘world orders’ we need to embrace the grey in global politics. The nuances involved in the recent stoush over Winston Peters’ discussion about learning from Taiwan’s COVID-19 response, and a rise in COVID-related racism at home both underscore that there is a pressing need to not view the world in black and white, good and bad. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) isn’t automatically always ‘bad’. The United States of America (US) isn’t automatically always ‘good’. This might seem obvious (it might also not seem obvious, which is the point) but we are at risk of falling into this way of thinking in part because we retain assumptions about who is ‘like-minded’ in our approaches to foreign policy, giving more or less credit to others depending upon our preconceived assumptions without considering the utility and consequences of those assumptions.   
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In late 2015 I suggested that New Zealand might not be as ‘like-minded’ with the US and Australia as we like to assume. The election of Trump increased these differences. Economic protectionism and the withdrawal from CPTPP negotiations, the rejection of attempts to mitigate against climate change (indeed this refusal to act on climate change is shared by Australia, despite Pacific Island states clearly identifying climate change as their greatest security threat in the 2018 Boe Declaration and despite Australia’s assertion that they want to be the ‘partner of choice’ in the region) and the (lack of) federal response to COVID-19 constitute obvious and significant policy differences between the US and New Zealand.

Author   David Capie

​Making predictions about the impact of COVID-19 on Asia’s strategic environment is a risky endeavour. With international borders locked down, economies near standstill, and infections still rising in parts of the world, it’s hard to anticipate the challenges we will face in the next few weeks, let alone a year from now. But a few months into the first global pandemic in a century, perhaps we can at least think about how it looks through different lenses of security. These are the way the virus represents a threat to human security, the challenge it poses to economic security and the way it has exacerbated and aggravated pre-existing trends in geopolitics.
 
First and foremost of course COVID-19 is a devastating threat to regional and global public health. Although the virus has inflicted a heavy global toll with millions infected and hundreds of thousands dead, Asia appears to have fared better than much of Western Europe and the Americas. Asia-Pacific nations have had a range of experiences tackling the COVID-19 virus. Some - notably South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, Australia and New Zealand - have been more successful than others. Categories such as democratic vs authoritarian, rich vs poor, big vs small do not seem to provide a simple guide to success. What is clear however is that states have relied overwhelmingly on individual, national-level responses and there has been little in the way of coordinated or deep regional cooperation. For all the oft-stated importance of the ASEAN-centred architecture, or regional groups like the East Asia Summit or APEC, they have been largely irrelevant to the immediate pandemic response.

Authors    Robert Ayson and David Capie

For those wondering whether covid-19 has changed everything, geopolitics may be one notable exception. With every day passing, we’re being bombarded with arguments that the already intensifying competition between China and the United States hasn’t gone away. In fact, as some would have it, their contest has just got nastier.
 
Already criticized for its non-transparent early response to the Wuhan outbreak, China is now being portrayed as the early opportunist, turning a crisis that is causing great suffering elsewhere to its own advantage. Peter Jennings, the Director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, argues that Beijing is using the distraction of covid-19 to advance its ambitions in East Asia and beyond.

Author    Robert Ayson

Fresh from a thumping general election victory and an anti-climactic Commons vote confirming the U.K.'s departure from the European Union, Boris Johnson's Government is struggling to make up its mind about Huawei.
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Britain’s choice between telecommunications efficiency and network security has the makings of a transatlantic showdown. A team of Trump administration officials arrived in London recently to raise new security concerns. There have also been bad tidings about the future of the special relationship, with warnings that the UK’s intelligence links with United States could suffer if Huawei becomes part of Britain's 5G mix.

​But I’ve also been struck by the way New Zealand’s positioning is mentioned, if ever so briefly, in some accounts of Britain’s crunch moment. The idea that New Zealand has banned Huawei lives on in a recent report in my favourite newspaper, The Washington Post. And Evan Osnos, one of the best proponents of long-form journalism going around, has taken the same line in a substantial piece in The New Yorker. In case you fiercely object to my reading choices, a similar judgment about New Zealand’s approach to Huawei can be found in Sputnik.