Crucial timing for Ardern-Biden meeting

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s trip overseas has been perfectly timed. One of things she can talk about is gun reform, and there was a shooting. One of other things she wants to talk about is the IndoPacific and how to deal with it. And now there will be a White House visit with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

The White House visit will be a study in contrasts: the world’s most powerful leader with a minnow, a young, vibrant, female leader with a 79-year-old who looks past his prime. For Ardern, the intersection of the meeting with tech firms, gun crime and her Christchurch Call – an anti-online extremism measure – presents a moment.

At the same time as all of that was going on, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi started travelling around the Pacific trying to gin up support for his new 10-nation Pacific deal covering everything from security to fisheries. According to China’s foreign ministry, he plans to visit the Solomons, Kiribati, Samoa, Fiji, Tonga, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea and East Timor.

Ardern’s trip, in addition to selling New Zealand, will be heavy on trade and geopolitics.

China is now clearly trying to pick off the Pacific Islands one by one, to create relationships and mini spheres of influence. In part, the pitch is to step in where either the United States, Australia or New Zealand is considered to have failed one or more of these nations – or not supported them enough.

Australia, in particular, has been seen with a consistent level of disdain within the Pacific for its views on climate change, for example.

Ardern has been at pains to use the language of respect in the region, consistently pointing out that each Pacific nation is sovereign and that she will not lecture them. But New Zealand officials and the Government will be – and need to be – thinking deeply about what to do regarding these emboldened moves in the Pacific.

While not giving orders to the islands, New Zealand should at the very least make sure that they have what they need, it can promise any more help if required, and deliver on the promise. It is not in New Zealand’s national interest for there to be more Chinese influence in the region.

Yes, China is New Zealand’s biggest trade partner and, yes, it should be treated with respect. But it is also an authoritarian dictatorship that has been steadily moving away from the trajectory it was on when it was growing fast and liberalising markets.

Now, as Xi Jinping becomes more entrenched as leader and tries to become more redistributive, China is less stable each time his grip on power tightens.

And let’s not forget, while the rest of the world – minus a few minority voices on the far left and far right – has backed Ukraine over Russia, China has conspicuously stayed out of it, or has been surreptitious in its help for Vladimir Putin.

There is little doubt that the Chinese government is biding its time and assessing the situation, the response from the West and trying to learn lessons from it. While any such lessons may not be used straight away, any conflict over Taiwan might be where they are applied.

These are developments being

watched very closely by the US and its foreign policy fraternity – hawks and doves alike. The Biden administration is pretty much an old-fashioned one that will expect things from its security allies, including New Zealand. And mostly, the current Government is happy to oblige, understanding the potential for the global order to be altered in a way inimical to New Zealand’s interests.

In the end it may be this fact, rather than anything on the economic side, that eventually impels the US to sign the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal in order to

form a stronger trading bloc without China. It isn’t at the moment, though. But it is a case New Zealand and Australia should be making: that the real risk of China’s revanchist tendencies in the Pacific is greater than the political domestic risk of signing the CPTPP.

All this means that, when Ardern meets Biden, she will be meeting him in a world of considerably more uncertainty than any other PM since the Cold War, with the possible exception of Helen Clark after the attacks on the World Trade Centre.

There is climate change uncertainty, upending and changing the built environment. Decarbonising will be the biggest economic shift over the next few

decades: it comes with opportunity, but it will mean the biggest change to energy consumption patterns since the industrial revolution. The internet and data revolutions continue to unleash massive disruption and create massive vulnerability to tech attacks.

Once upon a time, for example, New Zealand banks needed to be worried only about people who walked in the front door with a weapon. Now any actor – state or non-state – can be a threat at any time. And such attacks are frequently from Russia or China.

And then there is geo-strategic competition. The past 30 years since the Cold War have given a whole generation or two (including the prime minister’s) the mistaken impression that peace, co-operation and prosperity are the natural order of things; that somehow humans have advanced past largescale conflicts.

The war in Ukraine should disabuse anyone of that notion, as should China’s militarisation of islands in the South China Sea and unsubtle Pacific deal-making. Competition between empires, principalities or nation states is a natural state of affairs.

But staving off a world of allagainst-all requires the sort of stability that the US-led international order has provided since 1945. That means that the meetings with Biden will likely be an early step, although not the first, along a path where New Zealand hews more closely to the US.

Ardern doesn’t like to be drawn on New Zealand choosing between China and the US – indeed, New Zealand’s entire diplomatic posture is about avoiding the choice, as is Australia’s (although much less successfully). And the direct China relationship is multifaceted: there are areas of agreement and those of disagreement. Both sides more or less know where the boundaries lie, and both operate within that framework.

But more broadly the trend is now set. Ardern and Biden may both be essentially anti-war progressives, but both will be confronted with tough choices. The fact that Biden and Co have bent over backwards to meet – two leaders who have never met each other as leaders – suggests that there is political upside for him.

It has been clear from traipsing after Ardern in the US that she is known and has a following, at least among the nation’s decisionmaking class.

When it comes to regional security, trade and much beside, the conversations are going to get harder and head in a direction that Ardern would never have considered when she became prime minister.

Ardern and Biden may both be essentially anti-war progressives, but both will be confronted with tough choices.