fredag 23. april 2021

New Zealand’s stance on China has deep implications for the Five Eyes alliance

Jacinda Ardern, the New Zealand liberal prime minister has offended devotees of the Anglosphere by indicating she is not prepared to take her country into the kind of trade war with China that Australia has found itself facing. Her stance, asserting her country’s sovereignty, has potentially deep implications for the “Five Eyes” alliance, the intelligence sharing partnership that emerged after the second world war and blossomed in the cold war. Indeed some say New Zealand has confirmed itself as the weak link in the intelligence chain that it joined with the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia.

The cause of the upset was Ardern’s relatively new foreign minister Nanaia Mahuta insisting that she did not want New Zealand’s complex relationship with China to be defined by Five Eyes. She suggested that New Zealand needed to “maintain and respect” China’s “particular customs, traditions and values’”.