Comment: There is a German phrase – zeitgeist – which roughly translates to ‘spirit of the time’.
The spirit of our time is the return of great power politics.
The current era of US-China ‘strategic competition’ that began in 2017 is a return to great power competition that we last saw during the Cold War, when the US and the Soviet Union were foes.
US-China rivalry cannot be wished away; it is structural in nature.
In an important sense, it doesn’t matter whether we call the new era a ‘New Cold War’ or a ‘strategic competition’.
The more fundamental point is that these are the most powerful countries in the international system.
And their rivalry presents us with dilemmas that we have not had to deal with since the Cold War ended in 1991.
New Zealand’s agency in the New Cold War
Does New Zealand have agency in this new era? Clearly, we do.
But judging by the increasingly contentious foreign policy discourse in New Zealand – be it over our stance on US Middle East policy or the Aukus security pact – what is less clear is whether we have the nous to exercise that agency wisely.
The politics of the Cold War 2.0 has already proved to be more complex than Cold War 1.0.
For most of the original Cold War, each side’s top trade partners were located within its own bloc.
In the New Cold War, top trade partners can also be a country’s top security concern.
The US is China’s top trade partner, while China is the US’s third largest trade partner.
New Zealand is no exception to this phenomenon.
Prior to 2017, New Zealand’s relationship with China was notable for the absence of security and political frictions, and the achievements of ‘diplomatic firsts’.
New Zealand was the first Western country to back China’s World Trade Organization accession. It was also the first OECD country to both formally recognise China as a market economy, and to reach a free trade agreement with China.
NZ-China relations and the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence
Since 2017, even as China has consolidated its position as our top trade partner, the relationship has buckled under strain.
To take one prominent example, China’s ambassador to New Zealand has regularly and very publicly weighed in in favour of one side of our internal discussion on whether to join the Pillar II component of Aukus.
In the process, Beijing’s Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence – one of which says countries achieve peaceful relations by not interfering in the internal affairs of other countries – has been serially violated.
New Zealand has been more than tolerant on this issue. Is there any doubt what China would do if the tables were turned and a New Zealand ambassador to Beijing made a similar intervention over a major Chinese foreign policy decision?
The recent ruckus over four New Zealand MPs visiting Taiwan in May is yet another instance of the Five Principles colliding with China’s more robust foreign policy.
Since the establishment of formal diplomatic relations between Beijing and Wellington in 1972, New Zealand MPs have regularly visited Taiwan.
This has not been viewed by Beijing as inconsistent with New Zealand’s adherence to the ‘One China principle’, until now.
Beijing has moved the goalposts on the principle even while claiming it hasn’t.
As Foreign Minister Winston Peters put it: “New Zealand has maintained its One China policy for over half a century. New Zealand MPs have visited Taiwan for decades and such visits are not inconsistent with New Zealand’s One China policy.”
The One China principle has a clear link to the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence.
Beijing’s decision to impose a one-year ban on the four MPs for allegedly violating the One China Principle undermines the spirit and letter of the Five Principles which is based on ‘peaceful coexistence.’
The big picture
That said, focusing on details without reference to the bigger picture is like treating the symptoms of a problem while overlooking the underlying causes.
A core strategic goal for China in the New Cold War is to dismantle the ring of US alliances and partnerships that encircle it from Northeast Asia through to Southeast Asia and South Asia.
China’s leader Xi Jinping declared in 2023 that “Western countries led by the United States have implemented all-round containment, encirclement and suppression of China, which has brought unprecedented severe challenges to our country’s development.”
The recent developments referred to above teach us two important lessons.
First, like China, New Zealand has core interests.
Caution in the service of avoiding conflict should never prevent us from defending our core security interests.
China knows exactly what it is doing in the South Pacific. And recent Chinese policy in New Zealand’s home region can only be viewed as a direct and unambiguous security concern.
A quick review of Chinese moves in recent years includes the following: the deployment of economic coercion by China against Australia from 2020-23; Beijing’s Intercontinental ballistic missile tests in the South Pacific in 2024 and 2026; the People’s Liberation Army-Navy exercises in the Tasman Sea in 2025; and China’s attempts at altering regional diplomatic alignments in the Cook Islands from 2024-26, and the Solomon Islands in 2022.
Second, however welcome a retooled Australian-New Zealand alliance may be, it takes a great power to balance a great power.
The US has an interest in balancing Chinese power in the region, and we need to strategically maximise our options, keeping in mind that the New Cold War is more likely to be a marathon than a sprint.
In 2023, then defence minister Andrew Little cautioned that “we do not live in a benign strategic environment”.
In 2026, one can say without fear of contradiction that what may previously have been seen in some quarters as overstatement is now understatement.
