Allegedly, the defence environment has changed, and New Zealand thus needs to spend significantly more on Defence. The rationale is that China (our main trading partner) has been raising its profile in the Pacific, a region hitherto seen to be our own backyard, and an American lake. The cheek of it!
First the Solomons and now the Cook Islands have begun negotiating independently with China on a range of issues, without consulting us first, let alone seeking our permission. Keep in mind that the UK, the US and Australia recently formed an AUKUS pact that aims to send nuclear submarines on long range missions throughout the Pacific, without consulting Pacific nations beforehand, let alone seeking their approval.
It is a mindset thing. The US has long felt it to be entirely within its right to ring mainland China with huge military bases. The Western allies (including New Zealand) also think it’s quite OK to regularly take part in massive US-led war gaming exercises (e.g. Talisman Sabre) targeted at China, with some of these exercises including simulated invasions. Yet in the past few days, New Zealand has been shocked – shocked! – that China has dared to sail three warships on live exercises through international waters in the Tasman Sea.
This looks less like China upping the ante, and more like a tit-for-tat response for the occasion last September when Australian and New Zealand warships sailed provocatively for the first time since 2017, through the Taiwan Strait. Rightly or wrongly, China regards the Taiwan Strait as its own sovereign territory. So let’s be clear when this latest round of mutual aggressions started, and who started it.
In the debate over our “need” to spend more on Defence– and join the second pillar of the AUKUS pact – little or no weight has been given to the fact that the second Trump administration is making the US an increasingly unreliable partner in any defence and security arrangement. Daily, we are being given reason to doubt that the US would come to our aid, unless (a) we paid them cash upfront or unless (b) we broke our trade ties with China or (c) the White House saw it to be in its own economic interests at the time to do so.
Despite this US-generated uncertainty, we’re talking only about China. We are being primed to pour billions more dollars into Defence to fund a US-led counter force against a theoretical threat posed by China, should one ever arise sometime during the next decade or so. To enable this splurge on Defence to happen, we are currently running our public hospitals into the ground for lack of funding.
The Defence Review
Supposedly the upcoming Defence Capability Review will give us a rationale for that spending increase. Presumably, it will also provide a road map for how, where and why the spending will occur, and on what weapon systems. Hmm. Somehow, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) itself has been entrusted with conducting this review despite the NZDF being the main beneficiary of it – and the government is giving MoD a greenlight to spend up large, money is no object.
This is all deeply weird. As its track record shows, there is no culture of accountability within MoD when it comes to its procurement programmes, and little ability and no inclination to avoid massive cost overruns. There is no reason to expect MoD Defence will:
(a) exercise self-discipline in pursuing its purchasing priorities
(b) re-evaluate the worth of our traditional alliances in the light of Donald Trump’s purely transactional approach to defence and security matters; or
(c) identify with each line item of the spending priorities what benefits will accrue to New Zealand, and how those outcomes will be measured.
On that last point…everyone else in the public service is being asked to justify their funding by pointing to the concrete benefits to be delivered within a specified time frame. There is no reason why this looming spend-up on Defence should be treated any differently. Unfortunately, these sort of cost/benefit analyses will probably not be applied to this spend-up. In all likelihood, the coalition government will simply want to settle on a number for future Defence spending that will be big enough to satisfy our critics in Canberra and Washington. Any critics at home will be painted as naïve, and unwilling to make the hard sacrifices.
The risk of course is that if you give the recipients of the funding the task of rationalising how much they need, the sky will be the limit, and any downstream benefits will need to be taken on faith. Although the world has changed, institutional inertia within the NZDF will decree the need to do much the same old, same old tasks within the same old alliance configurations as of yore, alongside our traditional allies, only with more expensive gear this time around. No doubt, the UK and US arms dealers will welcome our readiness to spend money on their weaponry, and Australian politicians will welcome our readiness to create jobs in their shipyards.
The blue water navy blues
The litmus test of MoD’s projected spend-up will be whether we take for granted the need to retain a blue-water naval capability, suitably armed for its attack/defence roles, and expensively equipped to carry out offensive anti-submarine missions. In short…are we planning to buy/build new versions of the ANZAC frigates? What will be the concrete gain to this country of spending billions of dollars on ships that – in the event of an actual conflict – could potentially be taken out by a flurry of cheap drones, or by someone armed with a missile mounted on a truck?
Moreover…if the threat from China is as urgent as the sabre rattlers in academia and the military think tanks say it is…what will be the expected delivery date for these new naval platforms? The first of Australia’s six new Hunter class frigates – given the greenlight back in 2020 – will not arrive before 2034, and the remainder won’t arrive much before 2043.
Meaning: if something kicks off over Taiwan in 2027 or soon thereafter, our huge Defence spend-up won’t be able to deliver anything beforehand that would make a realistic difference to the outcome, much less protect our shores. We would still be relying on an isolationist US to treat Taiwan (unlike Ukraine) as vital to its own economic interests – such that it would risk a nuclear showdown with China over Taiwan, with us dragging along behind, as bit players.
If that’s not the plan…what actual scenarios can MoD provide to make spending up large on armaments to deter China seem even half-way realistic, given those long due dates for delivery of the items in question? Deterrence works only if the other side thinks you’re willing to go to war, and – in the course of this paranoid process of mutual escalation – you also create a heightened risk that war will break out by accident, or in order to save political face.
For now though…what defence configuration does the coalition government imagine that New Zealand will be operating within by 2035, which has previously been indicated to be the operational lifespan of the current frigates? Presumably, our Defence spend-up is expected to complement, and to be interoperable with whatever Australia, the US and UK have in mind.
To repeat: if we want to talk about how the global security environment has changed, the big change isn’t that China is now acting like the superpower that it patently has become.The bigger change is that the US is speedily withdrawing into isolationism. That will create a power vacuum in the Pacific, and a problem for us. Do we invest our limited resources purely in order to stay inter-operable with an increasingly unreliable partner who is just as likely to throw us under a bus should our time of need ever arise?
There is another option. Instead, we retain our independence, and decide for ourselves what level of equipment we need to protect our own economic zone. For that job, even our ANZAC frigates were overkill. So are our four fancy new Poseidon aircraft which are currently kitted out for submarine hunting thousands of kilometres away from these shores.
Chances are, the answer to our EEZ needs are not surveillance aircraft packed to the gills with sophisticated anti-submarine detection gear, or a new generation of naval frigates that we will buy at great cost simply because we’ve always done it that way. Security begins at home. We can’t afford to keep starving our public health system, neglecting child poverty and feeding slop to our hungry school-kids in order to make this next round of military spending possible. At this rate, China is less of a threat to us than we are to ourselves.
Footnote: The cost overruns in defence procurement are legendary. Elsewhere in our economy, projects will be cancelled – the Cook Strait ferries project, or the new Dunedin hospital – because of alleged “cost blow-outs”. Well, no MoD project has ever been cancelled because its costs were starting to exceed the early projections.
That’s worth keeping in mind with respect to the early costings for the ANZAC frigate replacements which – bank on it – will not include the costs of the perpetual upgrades to the vessels’ defensive/offensive capabilities. Since our shopping list will have to be interoperable with what Australia has in mind, it is worth considering this vision of Australia’s blue water, surface ship capability set out almost exactly a year ago by Australia’s Defence Minister Richard Marles:
“We’re also announcing today that we will procure a new general purpose frigate, of which we will procure 11, and this will be a new class of ship for the Royal Australian Navy. We’re also procuring six large optionally crewed surface crewed-surface vessels. The LOSVs are in development with the United States … They will operate in combination with the Hobart Class air warfare destroyers and they will also operate in conjunction with the Hunter Class frigates. These ships, in combination with the three existing air warfare destroyers, will take our service fleet of warships to 26.”
That new general purpose frigate that Marles is talking about – in addition to the Hunter class frigates – may well be the programme we are now lining up to join. As the Australian Financial Review reported in August 2023, the New Zealand Navy has told its counterparts in Canberra that New Zealand is “keen” to support a joint purchase of the British firm Babcock’s Arrowhead “light” frigates. Babcock is all in for it, too, judging by this November 2023 article headlined “Babcock’s Arrowhead offers perfect fit for Royal New Zealand Navy.”
BTW, the Babcock’s Arrowhead “light” frigates are almost twice the size of our current ANZAC frigates. Gosh. Has anyone told Finance Minister Nicola Willis that MoD has been telling the Australians how keen it is to buy the Ferrari of frigate replacements?
Rare Earths, Ukraine
One of the odder aspects of Donald Trump’s transactional approach to Ukraine – give us access to your reserves of rare earth minerals, as payback for what we’ve spent in your defence – is that most media coverage has assumed that yeah, that sounds like Trump. Follow the money. The more significant point, as Javier Blas pointed out in a Bloomberg News column, is that Ukraine doesn’t actually have much in the way of rare earth minerals.
This isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened. As Blas says, the Pentagon had claimed that there were US $1Trillion worth of lithium deposits in Afghanistan, which the Pentagon claimed had the potential to make Afghanistan “the Saudi Arabia of lithium.” This was a fantasy. Similarly, the authoritative US Geological Survey shows no rare earth listings for Ukraine, either as reserves, or as mined production figures. China, Vietnam, Burma, Australia, Brazil, Canada – and Greenland ! – do figure prominently.
Ukraine got itself into this fix:
The hype about the Ukrainian rare earths began with Ukrainians themselves. Desperate to find a way to engage Trump, they miscalculated presenting the then-incoming president a “victory plan” in November that talked up — way, way up — the potential of the country’s mineral resources. Soon, they lost control of the narrative.
On Feb. 3, Trump emphatically said the Ukrainians had “very valuable rare earths.” Always keen to be perceived as a dealmaker, he added: “We’re looking to do a deal with Ukraine where they’re going to secure what we’re giving them with their rare earths and other things.” He doubled down a few days later, telling Fox News on Feb. 11 about his talks with Ukrainian officials: “I told them that I want the equivalent like $500 billion worth of rare earth.”
$500 billion? Reportedly, the world’s entire annual production of the 17 rare earth minerals is worth only about $15 billion a year. Ukraine does have some mineral deposits of scandium, and it also earns some money from its mining for titanium and gallium but these mines tend to be located in eastern regions now controlled by Russia. There are tiny rare earth deposits at the Novopoltavske deposit, discovered by the Soviets in 1970 – but as Blas explains, because these cannot be extracted at a commercially viable rate of return, they remain undeveloped today, 50 years after being discovered.
Finally, a document produced in Lithuania and bearing a NATO imprint has been cited – online – as vindicating Trump’s repeated arguments that Ukraine is laden with rare earth minerals. With good reason, Bloomberg News is deeply sceptical:
Although affiliated with the military alliance, bearing its name and logo, the entity [in Lithuania that produced the report] and its counterparts are autonomous bodies outside the command chain. The document is provocative: “Ukraine emerges as a key potential supplier of rare earth metals such as titanium, lithium, beryllium, manganese, gallium, uranium…” The list should ring every alarm. Anyone with a passing knowledge of chemistry knows none of those minerals are rare earths.
Why NATO’s imprint is attached to the report, which appears devoid of basic fact-checking, is beyond comprehension. A spokesperson told me the views reflected those of the author rather than NATO — something the document doesn’t say. The report, uncorrected, is still available online.
But this only highlights the basic problem with fact checking Donald Trump, and his assertions. He’s not much interested in facts and policy details and assumes most of his audience feels likewise. That doesn’t make him stupid. It means he’s really engaged in shifting the American public’s attitudes to Ukraine.
In this case, rather than having the US being seen to be throwing Ukraine to the wolves, he has chosen to portray Ukraine as a greedy ingrate that is hoarding its own wealth while sponging off everyone else. There will always be an audience for that kind of message. It is the foreign policy equivalent of “people on welfare are driving around in Cadillacs” on your tax dollar, friend. In Trumpworld, Ukraine is the welfare queen of geo-politics.
Youth Lagoon, Revisited
I’m assuming that everyone by now will have seen this video for the duet between Mike Hadreas (aka Perfume Genius) and Aldous Harding. So instead today…this latest single by the Idaho musician Trevor Powers (aka Youth Lagoon) is right up to his usual disturbing, endearing and dream-like best standards:
Here’s one of the excellent tracks from his Heaven Is A Junkyard album, called “Prizefighter…” The song remains optimistic, despite the odds:
Powers’ half sung/half spoken vocals were partly a by-product of a serious, eight month long physical reaction to an over-the-counter medicine that turned his body into a prison, and eroded his ability to speak, let alone to sing. Here’s his breakthrough single: