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.

Author      Robert Ayson

Jim Rolfe’s vision for a New Zealand National Security Strategy has two main requirements. One is a comprehensive perspective – inclusive of international and domestic security challenges, inclusive of the many agencies that are part of an expanding national security community, and inclusive of the many building blocks which are already out there in existing documentation. The other is what Jim calls “overall coherence”. It’s the job of the national security strategy to connect the dots, providing guidance to agencies as they work together. An NSS for New Zealand would provide the big picture, the meta-narrative, for this collaborative effort.

But comprehensiveness and coherence can be unhappy bedfellows, as any grader of university essays will tell you. And on the basis of path dependency and sunken bureaucratic costs, I’d say that comprehensiveness begins as the early favourite. New Zealand’s existing National Security System takes an “all risks” approach to security. And the list of hazards on the 22nd and 23rd pages of the 2016 National Security System Handbook is anything but parsimonious: droughts, food safety issues, infectious human diseases, animal diseases, wild fires, marine oil spills, infrastructure failure, cyber incidents, terrorism, espionage, several varieties of meteorological hazard, and more (including, one might presume, war itself).

Author      Jim Rolfe

New Zealand is the only Five Eyes partner without an explicit national security strategy document (although technically Canada calls their version a national security policy). Clearly our closest partners believe that some form of overarching direction is useful for determining the activities of individual agencies.

Of course, a New Zealand strategy can be determined through examination of past statements and actions. But that is hindsight. What would be more useful would be some foresight in a form that brings together all the strands of the country’s strategic activities and lays out a sense, in one document, where we are going and where, in the future, resources to achieve national security goals should be directed. What should such a document encompass? 

Author     Robert Ayson

Since the Ardern government took office, we've been treated to a veritable deluge of publically launched defence policy documents. Minister Ron Mark has had no need of a new White Paper – the next one is due no earlier than 2021. But last year he launched something arguably just as significant in a Strategic Policy Statement which changed New Zealand's tune on China and paved the way for the purchase of the P8 maritime surveillance and patrol aircraft.
 
The government’s ambitious remit for the defence force has since been spelled out in a new Defence Capability Plan. There are now so many major projects (many exceeding $1billion) that one has to wonder about the breaking point for the purse-strings of future governments. And that’s not all for readers of defence policy pronouncements. Last year saw the first edition of a new series of Assessments explain how defence was taking climate change seriously, including in the Pacific. Jointly released by James Shaw, this was one way for Mr Mark to thank the Greens for their agreement to some of the above, including expensive aircraft good at finding submarines.

Author   Dorota Heidrich

Since 2014, the European Union (EU) has seen a steep rise in migrants (both economic and forced) crossing its external borders. Approximately 1.3 million and 1.2 million new asylum applications (mainly by Syrian nationals) were submitted in the EU in 2015 and 2016 (respectively). The numbers were almost twice as high as the previous peak of the early 1990s, triggered by the Balkan wars.
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However, the scale of this “crisis” is less apparent when the number of newcomers is set against the EU-28’s population of about 513 million. Moreover, out of over 1.2 million asylum applications lodged in 2016, fewer than 300,000 individuals were granted protection (refugee status or other). Why then have migration flows since 2014 been dubbed a “crisis”? And what was the “crisis” about?