As the ground shifts, how can New Zealand hold its footing?

Wednesday, 21 January 2026

New Zealand soldiers along with counterparts from Australia, Singapore, Malaysia and the United Kingdom taking part in a defence exercise. As the global picture rapidly changes, the “quiet space” that this country has often occupied is shrinking, writes Josh Wineera.

Josh Wineera is a national security and defence commentator and founder of Latent Service, with experience in military diplomacy. He is a former Massey University defence and security studies lecturer and a retired lieutenant colonel.

OPINION: New Zealand is used to living in two worlds at once: Pacific by geography, Western democracy by values and institutions. For decades we’ve balanced that by being dependable, pragmatic and, often, relatively quiet. But the quiet space is shrinking.

At the Nato Summit last year, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon put it plainly: “Meeting with Nato leaders, I described the challenges in the Indo-Pacific as seen from New Zealand.” That is the right starting point for us. Keep eyes on our region because the pressures elsewhere are now showing up here, faster, and more directly than many New Zealanders realise.

Looking at the wider environment, Greenland has become a public signal of how quickly allied interests can collide and how openly those collisions and their tremors now play out. The dispute has turned into a stress test inside the transatlantic system. Arguments among partners are spilling into open diplomacy and economic threats.

That’s not to equate partners disagreeing with coercion by adversaries, but it is a reminder that interests are being stated more bluntly, and publicly. For New Zealand the lesson isn’t to moralise about partners, it’s to build a method that preserves trust while protecting sovereignty.

Canada, meanwhile, is managing its own trade and strategic realities in a way that won’t always match Washington’s preferences. Australia is locking in long-horizon defence integration through Aukus, with a submarine pathway explicitly framed as a decades-long industrial and military undertaking.

Greenland has become an unlikely focus of global uncertainty as US President Donald Trump amps up his rhetoric about a US takeover of the Danish-controlled territory. PIctured, a protest on the island by local people opposed to Trump’s designs on their homeland.

None of these are New Zealand issues in the narrow sense. But together they point to a shift: big partners are becoming more explicit about interests, more willing to use leverage, and more comfortable with public friction, even inside friendly groupings.

That matters because New Zealand is not only a Five Eyes partner. We also engage with Nato as a partner country, with regular consultation as part of Nato’s Indo-Pacific engagement.

Partnership doesn’t mean automatic alignment. New Zealand should stay consistent on principles, and sovereign in decisions, case by case, not by default.

And this isn’t abstract. New Zealanders in uniform already serve alongside partners around the world, including in Nato-led settings and US-led environments, many carrying real responsibility. Our foreign and defence settings are lived out by service men and women, not just debated in Wellington. I’ve seen first-hand how quickly policy settings become real-world constraints for people doing the mahi.

So what should a small country do when big countries in its orbit disagree, and when alignment starts to look like a decision rather than a default? Whatever we do, we can’t afford to wing it.

One option is silence. Keep our head down and hope the storms pass. That can work, until it doesn’t. Silence is rarely neutral. It can be read as free-riding by some partners, and as quiet alignment by others.

Nato secretary-general Mark Rutte with representatives of the alliance’s “partner” countries, including New Zealand PM Christopher Luxon along with representatives from Japan and South Korea.

Another option is picking a side in each dispute. That creates clarity, but it also creates a ratchet. Once you become a predictable vote, you lose flexibility. Small countries live and die by decision-space.

The better option is to be a solid partner by design, not by impulse. Useful to allies and partners, clear about our principles, and stubbornly focused on sovereign resilience at home.

What could this look like in practice? First, define our contribution in terms of functions, not flags. Instead of “are we with Five Eyes or with Nato”, the more useful question is “what jobs can New Zealand reliably do that make the wider system stronger?”. Cyber resilience, maritime awareness, training, logistics and sustainment are all areas where small nations can be disproportionately useful.

Second, protect sovereignty by building domestic capability where it matters. Sovereignty isn’t a speech. It’s whether you can keep operating when supply chains tighten, when systems are contested and when partners are distracted. That requires treating readiness, resilience and sustainment as national security and recognising our own industry as part of that spine, not an afterthought.

Third, connect our small partner value to the capability areas our friends actually care about right now, and do it in a way that still keeps New Zealand’s decision-space intact.

Foreign Minister Winston Peters captured the practical direction in a recent foreign policy speech, noting that deeper Nato–Indo-Pacific engagement has helped “drive enhanced cooperation in areas including cyber, artificial intelligence, and defence capability”. Those are exactly the domains where New Zealand can contribute meaningfully without pretending we can match larger states platform-for-platform.

Josh Wineera: The response for a small country isn’t louder rhetoric, or permanent ambiguity. It’s competence.

There is a wider responsibility here. In a region of small states, New Zealand’s choices are watched closely, not because we are the biggest player, but because we often have more room to speak and manoeuvre than many of our Pacific neighbours. In partnership with Pacific nations, a principled, steady New Zealand stance can help reinforce what “good partnership” looks like without coercion, and without forcing false binaries.

The point here is not to criticise partners, or pretend New Zealand can stand outside global competition. It is to recognise the shift: the groupings we rely on are becoming more interest-explicit at the margins, and more connected across theatres.

The response for a small country isn’t louder rhetoric, or permanent ambiguity. It’s competence. A clear contribution, resilient domestic foundations and principled consistency.

Whatever New Zealand’s domestic priorities, 2026 will also be an external-settings year. The next government will inherit a world where security, trade, technology and supply chains are firmly interlocked, and where even close partners are more willing to disagree in public, apply pressure and expect clarity.

That makes the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade portfolios unusually consequential. Not because New Zealand needs slogans, but because we’ll need steady hands to protect decision-space and to keep our alliances strong, our economic options credible, and our sovereignty practical rather than symbolic.

In an election year, it’s worth saying plainly: these portfolios aren’t side-shows. They are the guardrails that will shape New Zealand’s room to manoeuvre, and our ability to hold our footing when the ground shifts, for the decade ahead.