Even in the internet age, international news still arrives in New Zealand by boat.

Recent live-fire exercises from Chinese naval vessels in the Tasman Sea redirected flights and raised a flurry of alarm. If anything could have woken us up to a changing world, it was disruption—however brief—to the mass exodus of Kiwis to Australia. This follows hot on the heels of the Cook Islands’ Chinese trade deal made without New Zealand’s consultation.

For a trading nation like New Zealand, the rules-based international order has been crucial. Free trade with China has contributed meaningfully to our prosperity—trade we can’t easily give up. Even our “independent foreign policy,” often a fig leaf for rudderless nationalism, has served us pretty well.

But the world has changed. We acted as though the rules-based order had replaced great power politics. The institutions of international liberalism believed their own hype. High ideals and global stability have always been downstream of American power.

None of these observations are new. The second Cold War began some time ago—it just took time for the light to reach our distant galaxy—eight years after the Australian sitcom Utopia was joking about unnamed “unaligned regional players” threatening our strategic interests. The show poked fun at the government’s unwillingness to call China what it was—a power too obvious to ignore yet too inconvenient to name.

It’s the American Navy, not European good manners that underwrites our ability to safely export around the world.

Last week’s scare has renewed concerns about chronic underinvestment in our defence forces. Forget improving capability; we need to replace a boat, and we have army barracks that couldn’t pass a rental warrant of fitness. More money is needed, but it’s money we don’t have.

Niall Ferguson, speaking at the recent ARC conference, lamented that in 2025, for the first time since the 1930s, America would spend more on debt servicing than on defence. If only we were so lucky. In Budget 2024, our interest payments on government debt were 8.8 billion dollars, 1 billion dollars more than we spent on the Defence Force, Police, Corrections, and Customs combined.

Even with increased defence spending, we aren’t large or wealthy enough to make our military self-reliant. We can choose high capability, or we can choose independence. We can’t have both. Strengthening our military capability would necessarily involve closer alignment with Australia and, ultimately, America.

The contentious public spat over the weekend between Trump and Vance and Ukrainian President Zelensky left a bitter taste in the mouths of many observers. But however distasteful and erratic the current American regime, we still need them. It’s the American Navy, not European good manners that underwrites our ability to safely export around the world. Rejecting this reality isn’t just wishful thinking—it’s a dangerous act of naïveté.

The world is unfair. International relations are essentially feudal, and minor barons don’t get to dictate the rules to great kings. An unstable world doesn’t require us to be less humane, but we must be shrewder. Defence investment is necessary. Strategic alignment may be unavoidable. But realpolitik is inevitable.