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? 

Author     Euan Graham

​Rob Ayson’s thought-provoking post implied that the temporary incapacity of New Zealand’s two ANZAC frigates is a blessing in disguise. In other words, because both vessels were undergoing a significant upgrade refit in Canada, Wellington would be able to rebuff any request from Washington to send a warship to the Gulf, simply because the capability was unavailable. Rob went on to ponder whether the absence of a surface combat capability beyond 2030 really matters for keeping New Zealand’s lights on.
 
To this Australia-based occasional commentator on trans-Tasman strategic affairs that seems like a fair, if deliberately provocative, question. After all, successive New Zealand governments have run down the NZDF’s combat capabilities, including its fast jets, without incurring obvious strategic costs. Or, at least not costs that bother most taxpayers, since it is they who are ultimately expected to foot the bill for defence, against competing priorities with more tangible socio-economic benefits. 
  

Author    Robert Ayson

One day (well, 20 May of this year to be precise) as Opposition Leader you’re launching a discussion document on your party’s international policies. ‘National's positioning on international relations issues is anchored in our values, ’ you say. ‘Those values are rooted in our country's long history of unbroken democracy, embrace of political and economic freedoms, tolerance, a staunch defence of fundamental human rights, and a recognition of the need to provide security and safety to our people at home and abroad.’ Hear, hear. But barely 100 days later and you give an interview in China where you laud Xi Jinping and the Communist Party of China, doing your level best to prove the thesis that the only value that really matters is trade-enabled prosperity.

​This is the recent course that New Zealand’s National Party leader Simon Bridges has taken, and it’s no surprise that he is getting roasted for his interview performance. He’s easy meat for the Ardern government which has toughened up New Zealand’s stance on China since coming into office, laying out New Zealand’s concerns about Beijing’s South China Sea moves in last year’s Strategic Defence Policy Statement and more recently including New Zealand’s signature on a letter to the UN Human Rights Council about China’s detention practices in Xinjiang. Finance Minister Grant Robertson, a keen rugby player, took the ball and ran: “the most extraordinary interview I think I've ever seen the leader of a National Party give", he is reported to have said in parliament. 

Author      Lance Beath

Professor Robert Ayson is right to be uncertain about the likely shape of the future surface combatant force once HMNZS Te Kaha and Te Mana are withdrawn from service in the first half of the 2030s. But the reasons for uncertainty are a good deal more complex than Rob’s piece argues.

Robert writes ‘If I was Navy, and fond of my frigates, I’d regard with dread paragraph 204 of the DCP (government’s Defence Capability Plan of April 2019): “The ANZAC Frigates are scheduled to be replaced with modern surface combatants relevant to New Zealand’s prevailing strategic environment in the mid-2030s.” This is hardly a definitive commitment.’ 
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It is hard to see why anyone thinking about the question of the replacement of the frigates would be unhappy with this drafting. The DCP says as much as needs to be said, or indeed can sensibly be said, this far out from any replacement decision, viz: the ANZAC frigates are scheduled to be replaced with modern surface combatants relevant to the strategic environment of the mid-2030s and well beyond.