Very busy about NATO while Ardern attends the summit

foreign affairs

An unprecedented invitation to the NATO summit is high on Jacinda Ardern’s agenda for Europe. Some see the visit as an unwelcome sign that New Zealand is being brought closer to war, but others say such concerns are overheated, reports Sam Sachdeva

In the months since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has found herself talking more and more frequently about the unstable geopolitical climate.

It continues in Europe, with Ardern kicking off her time in the region with a visit to the NATO summit in Madrid – the first time a New Zealand leader has been invited to take part.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, as it is formally known, is an alliance of the United States, Canada and 28 European countries that was established in the aftermath of World War II to prevent further conflict.

Under his system of collective security, an attack on one member is seen as an attack on all – a principle invoked for the first time after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Now, war in Europe has the region on high alert and has led the grouping to extend a hand to those who are further away.

Nina Obermaier, the European Union’s ambassador to New Zealand, told Newsroom the invitation reflected the role Ardern’s government had played so far in standing up to Russia’s war.

“What this conflict has shown is that we really have to stand together if we want to defend the global rule-based order, so in that sense I think it’s very important.”

However, some in Aotearoa are less in love with the news.

In an opinion piece published by Newsroom, former Green Party MP Keith Locke argued that Ardern’s NATO visit would jeopardize New Zealand’s non-nuclear status and independent foreign policy, “which is more on peacekeeping than on warfare is focused “.

“Our Prime Minister’s latest decision to attend the NATO leaders’ meeting and to miss the meeting of the Commonwealth Heads of Government in Rwanda shows where her priorities lie. “Former Prime Minister David Lange, a fighter for the Commonwealth and our nuclear-free policy, may turn upside down in his grave,” Locke wrote.

“It’s not as if NATO and New Zealand have suddenly discovered each other – it’s more that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has provided a new target for what at one point became quite a close partnership with Afghanistan. has.”
– Prof Robert Ayson, Victoria University of Wellington

But New Zealand’s ties with NATO did not appear overnight, as Professor Robert Ayson notes in strategic studies at Victoria University of Wellington.

New Zealand participated in the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force’s mission to Afghanistan in 2001, while in 2012 John Key signed a “partnership cooperation agreement” with the organization’s secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

“It’s not as if NATO and New Zealand have suddenly discovered each other – it’s more that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has provided a new target for what at one point became quite a close partnership with Afghanistan. has, “says Ayson.

The invitation to Ardern and the leaders of Australia, Japan and South Korea comes at a time when China’s geopolitical maneuvers in the Indo-Pacific have attracted considerable attention from those outside the region.

It is not surprising that Beijing expressed the decision, with Wang Wenbin, spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, saying: “NATO has already disrupted stability in Europe. It should not try to do the same to the Asia-Pacific and the whole world. “

China’s growing influence is indeed on the agenda for the first time, as NATO revises the latest version of its Strategic Draft, a document that is updated approximately once a decade to address the best security challenges facing the Alliance. reflect.

Speaking at an event on the eve of the summit, Stoltenberg said the discussion of Beijing’s role was a major change, with China not once mentioned in the last Strategic Draft of 2010.

“We do not see China as an adversary, but we must realize that the rise of China, the fact that they are investing heavily in new modern military equipment, including the significant scale of their nuclear capability, investing in key technologies, and also trying to critique controlling infrastructure in Europe that comes closer to us also makes it important for us to address it. ”

NZ ‘already part of the team’

But Ayson says the war in Russia has reduced its bandwidth for dealing with issues outside Europe, while briefly addressing any proposal New Zealand would find to join the organization, saying NATO would not be inclined to to extend its membership outside the North. Atlantic Ocean.

On the broader issue of New Zealand moving closer to the United States, he says the warming in that relationship has taken place over years rather than overnight, due to an increasingly volatile international environment.

“I do not really think the visit to NATO will be at that moment where they say: ‘New Zealand has joined the team’ – New Zealand has been part of the team on the security side for some time.

“It’s just that those things are becoming more prominent, in part because of what we see, and one of the things we are seeing is that China is becoming more ambitious in the security field in ways that do not always fit New Zealand’s perceptions of which is good for it and the region. ”

There will still be difficult questions for Ardern and her cabinet to address, says Ayson, such as how they manage expectations of NATO partners over New Zealand’s ongoing contribution to Ukraine.

Then there is the issue of Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s reported arrangement of a four – way summit with South Korea, Australia and New Zealand on the sidelines of NATO.

At the recent Shangri-La dialogue in Singapore, Kishida outlined the framework of a more muscular foreign policy and defense approach from Japan, and exactly how nations like New Zealand can fit into it remains to be seen.

It would come as little surprise to see the government announce an additional commitment to Ukraine while Ardern joins NATO – but that may be just the beginning.