New Zealand's Geopolitics and the US-China Competition

This book advances the establishment of a contemporary New Zealand geopolitical tradition. It details and examines New Zealands geopolitical reality in an increasingly fractured global security (dis)order defined by interdependent strategic competition and emerging multipolarity. A centrepiece is the multidimensional US-China Great Power Competition that has the makings of a Second Cold War. This has immense implications for New Zealands greater region, the Indo-Pacific, and its immediate area, the South Pacific. The latter is of existential importance to New Zealand, becoming an active area of strategic competition as China projects its influence southwards, and New Zealand, Australia and the United States respond. In this context, New Zealands location is increasingly geopolitically relevant and the idea it occupies a benign security environment has now been cast into the dustbin of history. The decisions it makes presently will determine the countrys prosperity and geostrategic security for decades. Geopolitical theory, along with a detailed empirical account of strategic competition in the Indo-Pacific and South Pacific, offers a clear exposition of the implications of US-China competition for New Zealand. This directs us to the nations material characteristics and imperatives that flow from it. The book also appraises the countrys strategic options and indicates how and why Wellingtons approach has shifted over time from hedging between the US and China to, increasingly, balancing against Beijings efforts to alter the global and regional status quo. Through analysis and provocation, this book marks a major new contribution that will interest policymakers, academics, students and everyday citizens.