Kalev Crossland
In the last week of August, a C-17 Globemaster III lifted out of Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, transited Riga, and put down in Moscow. On board was John Ratcliffe, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Washington did not announce the trip. When it surfaced, the broadcaster Glenn Beck asked the President what his intelligence chief was doing in Russia. Something “very sort of semi-routine”, Trump said. “I hate to disappoint people.”1 Nothing says routine like an unannounced military transport in the night.
The last CIA director to make that flight was William Burns, in 2021. He went to warn Vladimir Putin against invading Ukraine. Russia invaded three months later.2
So, the trip deserves attention and it has had plenty. One reading now circulating is that the flight was choreography. On this account Trump, Putin and Xi Jinping are settling the world into spheres of influence, each taking his own neighbourhood. Ukraine for Moscow. Taiwan for Beijing. Venezuela, Greenland and perhaps Canada for Washington.
Nobody has claimed us yet, which is either comforting or mildly insulting. Ratcliffe, on this reading, flew to Moscow to synchronise the diary.
That is a large claim. Lawyers test large claims rather than repeat them. So here is the test, and then the part that matters for us.
Three readings of one flight
The first reading is choreography, and the available evidence does not carry it. CNN’s reporting, which rests on unnamed officials, describes an errand close to the opposite of partition. Ratcliffe carried a warning that Russia should not stage an attack on NATO territory. He also pressed Moscow to cut off economic and military support for Iran.3 The Kremlin’s own spokesman said the director never met Putin at all and placed the contact “more or less at the level of the special services”.4 A division of the world is not settled at that level.
The second reading is the one the reporting supports. This was deterrence and coercion. American intelligence had assessed that Russia, weakening in Ukraine, might move against NATO to raise the price of supporting Kyiv, an “escalate to de-escalate” strategy.5
One assessment circulated before the trip, in the same reporting, judged that Putin likely believes the United States will not risk another war, because American opinion would not wear it.6
The third reading is the strongest, and it needs no conspiracy at all. Call it the window. Washington is committed in the Gulf, has lately run an operation in the Caribbean and faces midterm elections on 3 November. Its rivals do not need an invitation. They need only to notice that this is the cheapest moment in decades to take something. Boxing Day prices. They need only to calculate that a later administration would arrive too late to give it back. Opportunism explains the same facts as collusion and explains them without a plot.
I do not need to choose between the three and neither does New Zealand. All three produce the same map, in which the strong take what lies close to them, and the rules follow the taking rather than restrain it. The prudent response is identical in each case, and that is what makes it prudent.
The doctrine is not a secret
The plan may be hidden. The doctrine is not. The US Secretary of State delivered it from a stage in Munich on 14 February this year and the State Department published every word.
Marco Rubio
Marco Rubio told the Munich Security Conference that the euphoria after 1989 had led the West into “a dangerous delusion”. Among the articles of that delusion, he said, was the belief that “the rules-based global order”, a phrase he called “an overused term”, would replace the national interest. He said the United Nations “has no answers and has played virtually no role” on the matters that count.
Iran’s nuclear programme, on his account, “required 14 bombs dropped with precision from American B-2 bombers”. Venezuela “took American Special Forces to bring this fugitive to justice”. Then this: “we in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline”.7
Be fair to the speech, because the case is stronger when it is fair. Rubio did not announce a carve-up. He told Europe that America and Europe “belong together”. He said the global institutions should be reformed rather than dismantled. He warned that every country in the room would have to deal with China and called it “geopolitical malpractice” not to be in conversations with Beijing.8
But read the sentence a legal audience should read twice. The United States, Rubio said, cannot allow those who threaten its citizens “to shield themselves behind abstractions of international law which they themselves routinely violate”.9 That is not a claim about rogue states. It is a canon of construction. Law binds according to conduct. The party who judges the conduct is the party with the bombers.
Consider what the Venezuela sentence means if your country is a minnow. The Secretary of State did not describe an act of war. He described a police operation. The United Nations could not address the threat, he said, so American special forces brought a fugitive to justice. A head of government becomes a fugitive, and a state becomes a jurisdiction, when a stronger state says so. Every small country in that hemisphere can read that sentence.
A doctrine of this kind needs no secret agreement with Moscow to produce spheres of influence. It produces them by default. Every other capital reads the speech, draws the obvious conclusion, and begins pricing its own neighbourhood.
A line drawn in 1948
None of this is new. History does not repeat here so much as reverberate and the note was struck clearly enough within living memory.
In 1948, writing about the Marshall Plan and a continent settling into two camps, Arnold Toynbee asked a question that reads like this morning’s news. “But is ‘union’ the right name for the constellation of forces that we are forecasting? Would not ‘partition’ be a more accurate word?”10
He went on to imagine the United States able to draw “the demarcation line between an American and a Russian sphere”. That would give it “the lion’s share of a partitioned globe”. He then warned that the arithmetic would mislead. Statistical preponderance, he wrote, is “a theoretical and possibly misleading basis of comparison”.11
The older pattern sits on the same page of the same book. Toynbee wrote of political unity achieved before now by the “forcible imposition of the Pax Romana and the Pax Sinica” and set our own attempts against it. The first was the League of Nations. The second was the United Nations, which he called a difficult political pioneering enterprise over largely unknown ground.12 Rome and imperial China are the deeper reverberation, not the secret protocols of 1939. Whether the world is ordered by agreement or by the strongest sword is a question thousands of years old. We are living through one more round of it.
Toynbee had watched the number of great powers, measured by war potential, dwindle from eight to two within a single lifetime, and he did not welcome it.13 This is the part our present anxiety gets backwards. We talk as though multipolarity itself were the danger.
Toynbee thought the opposite. “In politics, unlike personal relations, the saying that ‘two is company, three is none’ is the very opposite of the truth. Where eight great powers, or even three great powers, can be gathered together, it is less difficult to manage a cooperative government of the world than where we can muster no more than two.”14
More centres of power is not the problem. The problem is the rule the table keeps. Toynbee set out both possibilities in one passage on a single page. In “an even partially constitutional world community”, he wrote, Britain, the West Europeans and the Dominions “can still have an influence in international counsels far in excess of the ratio of their war potential” to that of the Big Two. Then the other case. “In a pure power-politics world, on the other hand, these highly civilized but materially less powerful states will count for nothing compared with the United States and the Soviet Union.”15
There is the whole argument for a country like ours, written before most of us were born. It is not a plea for idealism. It is a calculation. In a world of rules, we count far above our weight. In a world of spheres, we do not count at all. Toynbee even names us on the same page, listing the dominions that might escape being battlefields in a third world war. South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.16
It is the only cheerful sentence on the page and we are in it. Being far away has always been our luck. It has never been our policy.
Why a sphere is not a shelter
If the world is dividing into neighbourhoods, an answer suggests itself, and I hear it more often than I used to. Get under China’s umbrella. Our largest trading partner sits in Asia. Our traditional guarantor is an ocean away. It now taxes our exports, and it has just told a hall in Munich what it thinks of the old rules. Why not follow the money and stop worrying? Call it the “she’ll-be-right” school of foreign policy.
Read our Security Intelligence Service’s threat assessment for this year before answering. The Service published it in August.
The SIS records that several states conduct espionage against New Zealand, “but the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is the only country we have detected doing it at scale”.17 It describes disrupting an attempt by the Purple Mountain Observatory to install ground-based space infrastructure here. The observatory has close links to the Chinese government. This was “not the first time this organisation has attempted to install its own GBSI in New Zealand and is unlikely to be the last”.18 The SIS reports increased targeting of current and former government officials on job platforms by “China’s military intelligence services”.19 It notes that Chinese national security laws compel any individual or organisation in China to comply with requests from its intelligence services.20
Protection is not a service you buy. It is a relationship, and the protector writes the terms. A state already working at scale inside your systems is not offering shelter. It is quoting a price.
Our own neighbourhood is on somebody’s map already. The SIS describes the Pacific as “a space contested by major powers”, and Pacific states as navigating an unpredictable strategic environment.21
In the Pacific it also describes intelligence officers and co-optees working to “undermine Pacific regionalism, sovereignty and the national interests of a range of countries”.22 If the arrangement being discussed in the great capitals is neighbourhoods, then ours is a neighbourhood too, and it is made up of some of the smallest states on earth.
The SIS does not counsel disengagement, and neither do I. Its own words are worth quoting against the hawks as much as the doves. The activity of Chinese intelligence “should not prevent New Zealand organisations from engaging or doing business with entities in that country”. Businesses should take “an eyes-wide-open approach to espionage across all international markets where they operate”.23 That is multi-alignment written in the plainest official prose we have. Deal widely and know exactly who you are dealing with.
The same reasoning rules out the mirror-image answer, which is to crawl further under Washington’s umbrella and hope for the best. That umbrella is held by the government whose Secretary of State has told us what he thinks of abstractions of international law.
We should also stop making the job harder than it already is. In July the Foreign Minister told a Green MP born in Tianjin, in the House, to “go back to your own country”. The Chinese embassy lodged solemn representations with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. The Speaker called the remark inappropriate.24
Take whatever view you like of the domestic politics. The diplomacy is not complicated. A small country that needs many doors open should not slam one of them for a headline.
What the rules are for
Small states did not build international law out of sentiment. We built it because it is the only instrument that makes a country of five million weigh more than its tonnage. A rule that binds everybody is worth more to us than to anyone else, precisely because we cannot enforce anything ourselves.
Watch, then, how the rules are handled by the power that once wrote them. Washington announced a toll on cargo passing through the Strait of Hormuz in July and rested its position there on the freedom of navigation. The United States Senate has never consented to ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which is where that freedom is written down.25 A power that tolls a strait under a treaty it declined to join is not enforcing the rules. It is quoting them.
This is why the profession has a stake in the argument and not merely an interest in it. When the doctrine holds that the rules bind according to conduct and that the strongest party judges the conduct, every small state’s insurance policy is being quietly rewritten. Lawyers notice unilateral variation. We should notice this one.
Multi-aligned and what that does not mean
The word for the policy is not non-aligned. It is multi-aligned, and the distinction carries weight. Non-alignment means standing apart. Multi-alignment means standing with many, on purpose, and keeping every relationship in repair.
It does not mean neutrality as between friends and rivals. It does not mean leaving Canberra, Washington or London. It certainly does not mean swapping one patron for another, which is the answer this essay has already refused. It means rejecting the idea that a single friendship can do the work of all the others.
The conduct is already there, running ahead of the vocabulary. Ministers announce each agreement as a separate piece of trade news. Read them together and they describe a country widening its options with some deliberation.
The comprehensive economic partnership with the United Arab Emirates came into force on 28 August 2025. A high-quality agreement with the Gulf Cooperation Council was concluded in 2024. New Zealand signed its free trade agreement with India in April 2026 and Narendra Modi’s visit in July lifted the relationship to a strategic partnership.26
On the hardest security question the government has kept still, sitting in what officials call a holding pattern over the second pillar of AUKUS, the partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.27 That caution is right: it keeps a door open without walking through it.
Set against that, the cost of the old dependence is on the record. In August 2025 the United States imposed a 15% tariff on New Zealand goods and the Prime Minister ruled out retaliation.28 A friendly power taxed our exports, and we took it on the chin, which has had plenty of practice lately. That is what a narrow market base costs when the market’s mood turns.
What would the policy look like if we named it? A standing rule that no single market carries more than a set share of our exports. Ministerial travel that treats Jakarta and New Delhi as seriously as Canberra. Money for the multilateral machinery that gives small states a vote, because that machinery is our defence budget by other means. And a public account, given in Parliament, of what each of our security arrangements would require of us in a crisis.
None of that is exotic. It is what a country does when it decides to keep its options rather than inherit them.
The Canadian mirror, one year on
Mark Carney
Canada is the same argument conducted at gunpoint, and it has moved fast since I last wrote about it. Ottawa’s trade talks with Washington broke down in late August. Mark Carney addressed the European Parliament in Strasbourg earlier this month and attended the State of the European Union address the day before.29 Canada has signed a run of new partnership agreements with the European Union. It also became the first non-European member of the bloc’s Security Action for Europe programme, which provides 150 billion euros in loans for defence spending.30
None of that was chosen in calm weather. Canada is retooling in a crisis, at speed, at cost, with its main market still holding it by the wrist. We can still do the same thing deliberately and cheaply, while the choice is ours. That is the whole advantage of being early, and it expires.
The view from the edge
Return to the C-17 on the runway at Riga. Ratcliffe may have gone to Moscow to divide the world, or to warn a rival off NATO, or to manage a difficult month before an election. Either way, the flight tells us something we can act on. The great powers are talking to each other about arrangements, in the dark, and nobody in that conversation speaks for us.
New Zealand has watched the powerful from the edge for as long as it has existed, and the edge is a good place to see from. It teaches that no empire is permanent and no guarantee unconditional. It teaches that the map is always drawn by people who are not in the room with you. Toynbee’s warning was not that the number of great powers was rising again. It was that in a world run by power alone we count for nothing, and in a world run by rules we count for far more than we weigh.
New Zealanders vote on 7 November. Americans vote four days earlier, and their result will do more to shape the next three years than anything said on the hustings here.
All the more reason to spend the campaign on the right question. The question is not whether to stand with the West or apart from it. It is whether a small trading country at the bottom of the Pacific intends to keep company with the whole world while the lines are still being drawn.
They are being drawn now.
Kalev Crossland
Kalev Crossland is the litigation principal at Righteous Law and a member of The Law Association’s Civil Litigation Committee. He has written for LawNews on law, geopolitics and international relations, and has been a student of Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History for his adult life.
Endnotes
1 Zachary Cohen and others “CIA Director John Ratcliffe was in Moscow to warn Russia against attacking NATO and encourage cutting off Iran” CNN Politics (27 August 2026) https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/27/politics/john-ratcliffe-cia-moscow-visit. The visit was also reported by Axios (25 August 2026) https://www.axios.com/2026/08/25/cia-director-ratcliffe-visits-moscow and the Washington Post (25 August 2026) https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/08/25/cia-director-moscow-rare-unannounced-trip/.
2 Above n 1.
3 Above n 1.
4 Above n 1, reporting remarks of the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
5 Above n 1.
6 Above n 1.
7 Marco Rubio, Secretary of State “Remarks at the Munich Security Conference” (Hotel Bayerischer Hof, Munich, 14 February 2026) United States Department of State https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/02/secretary-of-state-marco-rubio-at-the-munich-security-conference.
8 Above n 7, in the moderated question session following the remarks.
9 Above n 7.
10 Arnold J Toynbee Civilization on Trial (Oxford University Press, New York, 1948) “The Dwarfing of Europe” at 124.
11 Toynbee, above n 10, “The International Outlook” at 145.
12 Toynbee, above n 10, at 127.
13 Toynbee, above n 10, at 127.
14 Toynbee, above n 10, at 137.
15 Toynbee, above n 10, at 137.
16 Toynbee, above n 10, at 137.
17 New Zealand Security Intelligence Service
(13 August 2026) ch 3 “New Zealand’s espionage environment” https://www.nzsis.govt.nz/our-work/new-zealands-security-threat-environment/security-threat-environment-2026.
18 Above n 17, ch 3, case study on ground based space infrastructure.
19 Above n 17, ch 3.
20 Above n 17, ch 3.
21 Above n 17, ch 2 “Security challenges facing New Zealand”, under “A highly contested region”.
22 Above n 17, ch 3, under “Espionage activities linked to the wider Pacific”.
23 Above n 17, ch 3.
24 “China lodges protest over Peters’ ‘go back to your own country’ remark” 1News (30 July 2026) https://www.1news.co.nz/2026/07/30/china-lodges-protest-over-peters-go-back-to-your-own-country-remark/.
25 Tommy Koh “The United States and the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea” US-Asia Law Institute (21 December 2022) https://usali.org/usali-perspectives-blog/the-united-states-and-the-un-convention-on-the-law-of-the-sea. On the July 2026 toll and the renewed blockade, see “The US strikes Iran after Trump announces a renewed blockade and tolls in Hormuz” NPR (13 July 2026) https://www.npr.org/2026/07/13/nx-s1-5891746/us-iran-strait-of-hormuz-updates.
26 New Zealand-United Arab Emirates Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement, in force 28 August 2025, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade https://www.mfat.govt.nz/en/trade/free-trade-agreements/free-trade-agreements-in-force/new-zealand-united-arab-emirates-free-trade-agreement; “New Zealand concludes high quality trade deal with Gulf Cooperation Council” Beehive https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/new-zealand-concludes-high-quality-trade-deal-gulf-cooperation-council-gcc; New Zealand-India Free Trade Agreement, signed 27 April 2026, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade https://www.mfat.govt.nz/en/trade/free-trade-agreements/free-trade-agreements-concluded-but-not-in-force/new-zealand-india-free-trade-agreement; “Modi’s New Zealand Visit Closed a 40-Year Gap” The Diplomat (July 2026) https://thediplomat.com/2026/07/modis-new-zealand-visit-closed-a-40-year-gap/.
27 “New Zealand in holding pattern over AUKUS in wake of US review” Radio New Zealand (19 May 2026) https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/politics/595644/new-zealand-in-holding-pattern-over-aukus-in-wake-of-us-review.
28 “NZ hit with 15 percent Trump trade tariff, trade minister says he will push back” Radio New Zealand (1 August 2025) https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/568698/nz-hit-with-15-percent-trump-trade-tariff-trade-minister-says-he-will-push-back; “Luxon says New Zealand won’t launch reciprocal tariffs against US” Radio New Zealand https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/557061/luxon-says-new-zealand-won-t-launch-reciprocal-tariffs-against-us.
29 Marina von Stackelberg “Carney to give speech to European Parliament in September” CBC News (26 August 2026) https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/mark-carney-european-parliament-visit-september-9.7321117.
30 Above n 29. See also “Canada joins key EU defence programme as PM Carney pivots away from US” Al Jazeera (2 December 2025) https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/12/2/canada-joins-key-eu-defence-programme-as-pm-carney-pivots-away-from-us.
31 Christopher Luxon “General Election to be held on 7 November” (21 January 2026) Beehive https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/general-election-be-held-7-november.
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