The only real question for small countries like New Zealand is how to respond, now that China’s imperialist ambitions are playing out to our west, northwest and northeast, including colonising part of our realm.
Ideally, small countries want great powers out of their regions.
Sensibly, that’s been modern New Zealand’s general policy, and pre-European New Zealanders might have been wiser taking a firmer line in the 1700s.
Our rational aversion to great powers contributed to our own search for independence after World War I, and is why we supported other Pacific states’ aspirations to become independent of the UK and France.
But it’s not so simple. Great powers will always do what they do. If no other great power is playing in a region, then one will surely show up.
Small countries’ best strategy, then, is to identify those great powers with the capability to protect them and keep the rest out, and then choose the one they are least suspicious of and which they think most closely aligns with their values. That’s what Māori sought to do in the 1830s.
Until the fall of Singapore in 1942, the UK continued meeting both tests for New Zealand and Australia. After that, it was the US.
That continued in practice even after the anti-nuclear issue. It remains true today, despite Donald Trump aligning himself with Russia, North Korea and Iran over Ukraine.
This has never meant we have agreed with everything the US does, domestically or globally. Often, like now, we may disagree with most of it.
Nor does it mean we like the US being in our region. Our preference is to have no great powers active in our region, but that’s not an option.
We have chosen the US, and in practice continue to, because of the only three options since 1945 – the US, Russia/USSR and China – we have judged it the least malign.
The USSR tried, mostly incompetently, to disrupt this relationship, funding unpopular subversive groups.
China has been shrewder, flattering both the Bolger and Clark Governments with the so-called “Four Firsts”, including the historic free-trade agreement in 2008.
It seemed like a good idea at the time. China opened its markets to our exporters, paid higher prices for our primary products than others would offer, and encouraged its people to take holidays and become students here.
Desperate and naive, we went all-in with the cuddly panda, even though such privileged access made us a bit lazy through the 2010s, reducing pressure to innovate and improve productivity.
China’s objective was to subvert the weakest Five Eyes member and, more recently, the weakest of Nato’s Indo-Pacific Four, which includes Australia, Japan and South Korea.
It placed assets in our two main political parties and attacked our government and private-sector IT infrastructure.
Its embassy has increasingly taken the tone of a Soviet embassy in Eastern Europe during the Cold War.
Over the decades, it has established a powerful lobby in New Zealand, led by former politicians, diplomats, exporters and opinion leaders who have done well personally out of the Chinese Communist Party and in some cases remain on the payroll of organisations it controls.
They may dress in corporate-wear rather than dungarees and Mao caps, but they should be treated the same as the extreme-left organisations and activists the USSR infiltrated and funded during the Cold War.
Their current line is that China just wants to be friends with the Cook Islands’ 15,000 people, that the Tasman Sea is just like the South China Sea and that, anyway, New Zealand wouldn’t mind the US sending ships to do exercises 300 nautical miles southeast of Sydney.
Those spinning China’s lines are either cynical, naive or won’t move on from the anti-Vietnam War protests of their Baby Boomer youths.
The Tasman is nothing like the South China Sea, where territorial disputes involve half a dozen countries, including our friends and at least one formal Western ally.
For centuries, rivals have tested one another in those waters.
There is no current situation in the Tasman Sea justifying such game-playing. In any case, China hasn’t done it before, which in itself makes it aggressive, especially with no warning given.
Moreover, it’s nothing like the US carrying out similar exercises in the same area. As much as the China lobby doesn’t like it, the US is a formal ally of Australia and a quasi-ally of ours and represents less of a danger to our security and values than China or Russia. Were the US to carry out exercises in the Tasman Sea, Australia and probably New Zealand would be informed and asked to participate.
Sending warships and perhaps a supporting nuclear submarine into the Tasman Sea can only be interpreted in the context of China’s recent behaviour in the Cook Islands and elsewhere in our region.
That clearly indicates a programme to turn our Pacific neighbours into vassal states, with their resources exploited by Chinese companies, their governments unable to participate in international affairs without Beijing’s agreement, and the ports Beijing promises turned into a network of naval bases.
The Tasman Sea live-fire exercises are probably best interpreted as a warning to Australia and New Zealand to stay in our box as it colonises the rest of the South Pacific.
New Zealand’s particular problem is, with our finances in such a mess, we have no room to make even the minimum defence investments to remain allies with Australia and quasi-allies of the US, Nato, Japan and South Korea.
Unless we raise taxes, cut the welfare state or borrow even more, we cannot fund the 2% of GDP on defence that is now the entry-level requirement.
And 2% is only the start of what will be required for the democratic world to successfully check China and Russia’s ambitions.
The UK announced this week it will reach 2.5% within two years. The US is talking about 5%. If we can’t or won’t pay the entry fee, then we might be best very soon to just submit to China the way other economically failing South Pacific states already have.
