Kalev Crossland
On 8 April 2026, after more than 100 days of war, the guns quietened across the Persian Gulf.
The ceasefire that stopped the fighting between the United States and Iran was not written in Washington. It was brokered in Islamabad. Pakistan’s army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, had spent weeks shuttling between the capitals. The Prime Minister who announced the deal, Shehbaz Sharif, told his Parliament that Munir “was awake all day and night”.[i]
Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and China stood behind the effort. The most consequential act of Middle Eastern diplomacy in a generation ran through Rawalpindi, not the US State Department.
The order that produced the ceasefire is multipolar, and in my view New Zealand’s foreign policy has not yet caught up with it. Many of our pollies still speak, by habit, as though the world has one centre and our task is to choose how close to sit to it. The world now has several centres. A small trading nation at the bottom of the Pacific has every reason to deal with all of them.
The record in West Asia this year shows the shape of the world we are entering. It also shows a role, unglamorous but real, for the middle powers that once waited in history’s anteroom. Not that I am saying Aotearoa is a middle power. We aren’t. But like the ABs, we punch above our weight when we set our minds to it, and we have before.
Brokered in Islamabad: the new shape of West Asia
The United States has spent a year learning the limits of its own power. It could bomb Iran. It could not defeat Iran, and it could not dictate the peace. Washington set out to divide the region, and it has helped, instead, to unite it. The clearest sign is the security architecture now forming without American help.
First, a word about names. The term Middle East is not the region’s own. It came out of British officialdom in the 19th century, describing the lands that lay between Europe and British India, and it fixes the region by its distance from London.[ii]
In New Delhi the same land is West Asia, and Indian scholarship prefers the Asian name. The label follows the map and increasingly the power. I use West Asia for both reasons. It places the region where it sits, at the western edge of the world’s most populous continent, rather than in the middle of someone else’s map.
Start with the pact that made Pakistan a broker. On 17 September 2025, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan signed a Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement. Its core promise is that aggression against either state will be treated as aggression against both.
Pakistan is a nuclear power. The obvious question, whether the pact stretches Islamabad’s nuclear umbrella over Riyadh, has no clear answer and the ambiguity is deliberate. Joshua White of the Brookings Institution warns against reading operational nuclear cooperation into political words yet notes that the ambiguity “generates its own kind of deterrence”.[iii] A Gulf monarchy has taken out insurance. The underwriter sits in South Asia, not North America.
This is a large change. For decades the security of the Gulf ran through a single guarantor. Oil flowed west, protection flowed east, and the United States kept the peace it profited from. A Saudi king who wanted cover once called Washington. Now Riyadh has a second number to ring, in Rawalpindi, and behind it a third, in Beijing. The monopoly is broken.
The scholarship saw this coming. In an edited study from Manchester University Press, the political scientist May Darwich describes a Gulf shaped by “the multipolarity of the regional structure and the decline of US hegemonic control of the region”. After 2003, she writes, “a multipolar regional system emerged” as the old centres of power lost their primacy.[iv] The long rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran runs through that structure. It is not the whole of it.
China sits behind the picture without standing in front of it. Beijing brokered the restoration of Saudi and Iranian diplomatic relations in March 2023, at no military cost to itself.[v] It has spent a decade tying Pakistan into its Belt and Road. It buys the oil that keeps the Strait of Hormuz commercially alive. This is what a multipolar region looks like in practice. No single power dictates and the middle powers do the brokering.
Consider what it means that the broker was Pakistan. Not a superpower, not a permanent member of the Security Council with a fleet in the Gulf, but a middle power of modest wealth and a nuclear deterrent, trusted enough in Tehran and in Riyadh to carry messages between them.
In the unipolar decades, that convening role was Washington’s alone. America has not left the region. It is simply no longer the only power that can bring the others into a room.
The ceasefire held long enough to be written down. On 18 June 2026, President Trump put his signature to a 14-point memorandum of understanding, mediated through Islamabad and signed at Versailles.
It promised an immediate and permanent end to hostilities on every front, including Lebanon (I know, I know, cue Tui ad “yeah, right” vibes on the IDF and Hezbollah bit). Anyways, Washington would lift its naval blockade within 30 days. Iran would let commercial vessels pass through the Strait of Hormuz without charge and would downblend its enriched uranium under international inspection. In return, the United States would wind back its sanctions and support some US$300 billion in reconstruction.[vi] For a fortnight, it kinda looked like peace.
But it didn’t hold (hope you all filled up your cars last week!). Within three weeks the deal was in ruins and each side blamed the other for breaking it. By 9 July, President Trump had declared the ceasefire “over”. On 13 July, American aircraft were bombing Iran again, and Washington reimposed its blockade, this time with a 20% toll on non-Iranian cargo passing through the Strait of Hormuz, charged, in the President’s words, for “providing safety and security” to the waterway.[vii]
Many of the reported Iranian strikes on the Gulf states rest on claims by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard that other governments partly contradict. Iran has threatened to leave the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, yet it remains a party to it.[viii] The particular claims will be argued over for years. The structural shift beneath them is not. Power in the region has spread outward, to several capitals, and one of them is a middle power with a bomb and a talent for mediation.
The decline that is real and the decline that is not
As a ton of breathless YouTube pseudo historians are declaiming, it is tempting to read all this as proof of an American empire in accelerating collapse. That reading is common now and not only among America’s rivals.
It is a thesis to test, not a fact to adopt.
There is a serious case for decline and it is not new. Amy Chua, in her study of history’s dominant powers, argues that hyperpowers rise through tolerance and fall when they turn against it.
“The decline of empire,” she writes, “has repeatedly coincided with intolerance, xenophobia, and calls for racial, religious, or ethnic ‘purity’.”[ix]
Arnold Toynbee, whose civilisational history I have studied for much of my adult life, put the point in a harder form. A civilisation, he held, “died not by murder, but by suicide”.[x] Breakdown for Toynbee was a failure of response to a challenge, not a sentence passed by fate. Wars are lost by great powers that go on to thrive, so the war itself is not exhibit A. The conduct around it is the better one. The challenge before Washington is multipolarity itself. The response, so far, has been tariffs on friends and a signature abandoned within a month.
The signs of internal strain are not hard to find. Anne Case and Angus Deaton have charted a fall in American life expectancy driven by what they call deaths of despair – a collapse of health and hope among working people that no rival inflicted from outside.[xi] A power can be wounded from within while its armies are still abroad.
But I reckon there is also a plainer arithmetic, and it reaches into our own ocean. The war is consuming American munitions faster than American industry can replace them.
Analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies calculate that stocks of Tomahawk cruise missiles will not be rebuilt until late 2030 and interceptor stocks not before 2029. They warn that “the depleted inventories have created a window of vulnerability for a potential Western Pacific conflict”.[xii]
Every interceptor fired over the Gulf is one that no longer underwrites deterrence in the Pacific. Beijing is already probing that window. On 6 July, China fired a nuclear-capable ballistic missile from a submarine into the Pacific, the first launch of its kind into open international waters. It came down between Nauru and Tonga, within the South Pacific’s declared nuclear-free zone, as China’s navy opened its annual exercise with Russia.[xiii] A guarantee is only as deep as the magazine behind it, and the magazine is being spent in a war the guarantor cannot win.
There is a subtler decline, too, and it does not show up in the size of a fleet. It is the loss of the thing the Americans once traded on most profitably, their word.
When a great power signs a peace and abandons it within a month, taxes the exports of a friend, or muses aloud about annexing a neighbour, it spends that belief. Allies do not stop dealing with such a power. They stop relying on it. They take out insurance, as Riyadh has, and as Ottawa now must and is doing (Carney fanboy here). The erosion of trust is a real decline, whatever the balance sheet says.
Now for the counter-case, which is equally serious and must be met head on. A bad war in one theatre is not the fall of Rome. The US still holds (for now) the world’s reserve currency and its deepest capital markets. It still fields the most powerful military on earth and leads in the technologies that will shape the century. Middle powers spreading their bets is not the same thing as American primacy ending. It is what prudent states have always done when a single guarantor starts to look less certain. Decline, on this reading, is a mood as much as a measure and moods have been wrong before. Toynbee himself was fairly accused of reading collapse into every difficulty.
I do not need to settle that quarrel and neither does New Zealand. The case for looking beyond the West does not depend on the strong claim that America is finished. It depends only on the safer claim that the world now has more than one centre of gravity and that a country like our little Godzone trading in every direction should keep lines open to all of them.
If the decline is real, diversification is protection. If the decline is exaggerated, diversification still buys resilience at little cost. The prudent policy is the same either way. A litigator who can win an appeal on the narrow ground does not solely stake it on the wide one.
New Zealand’s reset and its unfinished logic
New Zealand has begun to move, though it does not yet say so obviously.
Winston Peters, Minister of Foreign Affairs
In June 2025, Foreign Minister Winston Peters set out a “foreign policy reset”. He argued that in conditions of great uncertainty and disorder, prudence is “both a logical and necessary guiding principle for a small state like New Zealand”.[xiv] He named China as “New Zealand’s largest trade relationship”, mutually beneficial and worth protecting. He pointed to a deliberate turn towards South and Southeast Asia. The instinct is sound. The vocabulary lags behind it.
The reset was more than a speech. Its priorities, read together, describe a country quietly widening its options. What the reset has not done is name the strategy out loud. Ministers still present each new agreement as a separate piece of good trade news, rather than as parts of a single design. The design is there in the conduct. It deserves to be stated as a principle and defended as one.
Todd McClay, Trade Minister
Look at what New Zealand has done as the deeds speak louder than the words. In August 2025, the United States imposed a 15% tariff on New Zealand goods, a market worth about NZ$9 billion a year in exports.
The Trade Minister, Todd McClay, called the direct cost, around half a billion United States dollars, “really not significant or meaningful” in the scale of the American economy. The Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon, ruled out retaliation.[xv] A friendly power taxed our exports, and we absorbed the blow. That is what dependence on a single market costs when the market’s mood turns.
Narendra Modi, Indian Prime Minister, with Christopher Luxon
Set against that, the diversification is concrete. New Zealand’s trade agreement with the United Arab Emirates entered into force on 28 August 2025. A high-quality agreement with the Gulf Cooperation Council was concluded in late 2024. The free trade agreement with India was signed in April 2026, and in July 2026 Narendra Modi became the first Indian Prime Minister to visit in decades, lifting the relationship to a strategic partnership.[xvi]
These are not gestures towards the West. They are working ties with West Asia and the wider Indian Ocean, built while the traditional partners looked elsewhere. On the hardest security question, the government has chosen to wait, sitting in what officials call a “holding pattern” over the second pillar of the AUKUS partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, exploring participation without committing to it.[xvii] That caution is wise. It keeps a door open without walking through it.
Two corrections follow to my argument. First, New Zealand is led by Christopher Luxon. Winston Peters holds foreign affairs, but he has not been Deputy Prime Minister since the coalition rotated that role to David Seymour in May 2025.[xviii] The point is not pedantry. The foreign policy is a government’s, not one person’s, and it will outlast any single minister.
Second, the word for what I am urging is not “non-aligned” but “multi-aligned”. New Zealand should keep its old friendships, in Canberra, Washington and London, and add new ones, in Islamabad, Riyadh, New Delhi, Jakarta and deepen it with Beijing. Multi-alignment is a term used of middle powers such as India, and it fits us. Keep the West, but do not be confined to it.
The obvious objection must be met, because I know there are some pretty smart cookies who read this publication. Multi-alignment means keeping company with governments whose values are not ours, and a profession built on the rule of law is right to flinch.
Over the past 12 months my own thinking has shifted. I was one of the flinchers. The objection is too purist and perhaps naïve. Let’s face it: our largest trade relationship is already with a one-party state. Our oldest friend has just taxed our exports and walked away from a peace it signed.
Alignment has never been a certificate of good character. It’s risk management and works best when spread. The real choice is not (as equity lawyers might submit) between clean hands and dirty ones. It is between a country that deals widely with its eyes open and a country that deals narrowly and calls the narrowness virtue. Trade with all, illusions about none.
A legal readership will feel the next point in its bones. The case for standing exclusively with the West has always leaned on the rules-based international order.
Watch, then, how the anchor power now handles the rules. Washington styles itself the guardian of the Strait of Hormuz and tolls the shipping that passes through it, invoking the freedom of navigation. Yet, get this, the United States Senate has never consented to ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the treaty in which that freedom is written down.[xix] A power that tolls a strait under a treaty it declined to join is not enforcing the rules but quoting them.
None of this makes the rules-based order worthless. It makes the narrower point that the order does not belong to one capital and that a small state serves the rules best by keeping company with all the states they are meant to protect.
New Zealand’s own scholars have seen the vice tightening. In 2022 Nicholas Ross Smith assessed our long, quiet strategy of hedging, security friendships with the West alongside deep trade with China and concluded that the room for it shrinks as the great powers’ rivalry hardens, even if New Zealand still held “arguably the most strategic wiggle room of any state in the Indo-Pacific super-region”.[xx]
Last year he pressed the point harder. Our independent foreign policy, he argued, has always been “dependently independent”, possible because the regional setting permitted it, and Wellington now appears to be shelving its old hedge “for something more akin to a conventional balancing strategy”.[xxi]
The drift he describes runs toward Washington. I really think the past three months is a reason to pause on that path. A balancing strategy stakes everything on the reliability of the power you balance toward and reliability is what the abandoned MOU has put in question (Vance basically said it was buying time).
Geoffrey Miller points out that even a distant war in the Gulf reaches us through oil prices and inflation, and that New Zealand has built real interests in the region through its trade agreements.
“New Zealand is far from the Middle East,” he writes, “and I do not overestimate our influence over events there”; yet “the option to take a greater role in dialogue, diplomacy and de-escalation efforts remains on the table”.[xxii]
He adds that New Zealand “is well thought of across the wider Middle East region, in part due to its compassionate response to the 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks”.[xxiii] That reputation is an asset no great power can lend us. This is the multi-aligned instinct in its modest, practical form. A small country cannot move the great powers. But it can widen the circle of those it talks to, trades with, and helps.
The practical map is not hard to draw. Pakistan, now a broker, keeps ties to Iran (Shia-led) and Saudi Arabia (Sunni-led) at once, and behind it stands China. India, our newest partner, is the world’s most populous country and a pole in its own right. The Gulf states buy our food and want our services. Southeast Asia sits astride the sea lanes our trade depends on.
And we bring something of our own. Smith notes that New Zealand has earned a reputation as an “honest broker”.[xxiv] In a world where the brokers are doing the work the empires once claimed, that is not a small reputation to hold.
None of this asks New Zealand to abandon Canberra, Washington or London. It asks the opposite, that we cultivate many capitals at once and refuse the false comfort of believing that one friendship can stand in for all the rest.
The Canadian mirror
Mark Carney, Canadian Prime Minister
If New Zealand can still choose diversification calmly, Canada, a fellow Commonwealth democracy, shows what the same choice looks like when it is forced. It is a mirror held up to our own dependence.
Canada did not drift from the United States. It was pushed. After Washington imposed heavy tariffs and its President spoke of annexing the country as a “51st state”, Prime Minister Mark Carney declared in March 2026 that “the old relationship we had with the United States … is over” and that the United States was “no longer a reliable partner”.[xxv]
The words were a strategy, not a tantrum. Canada moved to reduce its reliance on the American market and to build elsewhere.
The building is real, not merely rhetorical. In December 2025 Canada joined the European Union’s SAFE defence-procurement programme, a fund of some €150 billion. It was the first non-European country to do so, in a move its own government framed as a pivot away from United States systems.[xxvi]
Ottawa reopened relations with China in January 2026 and reset a badly frayed relationship with India. It put its planned purchase of American fighter jets under review. A country that had organised its whole strategic life around one neighbour began, under pressure, to spread its weight.
But for completeness – the counter-evidence. Canada did drop most of its retaliatory tariffs in August 2025. By mid-2026 it still had no trade deal with Washington and most American tariffs remained in place.[xxvii] Diversification runs alongside continued dependence, not instead of it.
That is the true lesson for New Zealand. Canada is retooling in a crisis, at speed, at cost, with its main market still holding it by the wrist. Far better to diversify by design, in calm weather, than to be driven to it by a friend who has stopped behaving like one.
The view from the edge
Return to Islamabad, and to Field Marshal Munir moving between the capitals while the bombs fell.
A generation ago, no one would have looked to Pakistan to stop (temporarily) a war between the United States and Iran. That they did is the measure of how far the ground has shifted. That Washington could sign their peace in June and unmake it in July is the measure of something else. It is the cost of leaning on a guarantor whose word has become negotiable. Power has spread outward, to the middle, to the places once told to wait their turn.
New Zealand has always watched the great powers from the edge, and the edge is not a bad place to see from. It teaches that no empire is permanent and no guarantor unconditional.
Toynbee’s warning was that civilisations fall by failing to respond, and a response begins with seeing the world as it is. The world is now multipolar. Our friendships in the West are worth keeping and our new ties beyond it are worth building, and neither task should wait on the other.
New Zealanders go to the polls on 7 November 2026.[xxviii] Foreign policy rarely decides an election here, and it will not decide this one. It should still be argued honestly in the campaign, because the choices made in the next term will outlast it.
The question is not whether to stand with the West or against it. The question is whether a small country, trading in every direction, will have the confidence to keep company with the whole world. The peace was brokered in Islamabad and Washington unmade it within a month. Both halves of that story point the same way, and we should take the hint.
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 much of his adult life.
Endnotes
[i]Al Jazeera “How Pakistan mediated a US-Iran agreement after more than 100 days of war” (15 June 2026) https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/6/15/how-pakistan-mediated-a-us-iran-agreement-after-more-than-100-days-of-war.
[ii]Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (New Delhi) “What is the difference between ‘West Asia’ and ‘Middle East’ from the Indian perspective?” https://idsa.in/askanexpert/suchak-patel-asked-what-is-the-difference-between-west-asia-and-middle-east-from-the-indian-perspective-2. See also Deccan Chronicle “Amid Iran Conflict, Debate Grows Over ‘Middle East’ vs ‘West Asia'” (4 March 2026) https://www.deccanchronicle.com/amp/world/amid-iran-conflict-debate-grows-over-middle-east-vs-west-asia-1941398.
[iii]Joshua T White “The signal and substance of the new Saudi-Pakistan defense pact” Brookings Institution (24 September 2025) https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-signal-and-substance-of-the-new-saudi-pakistan-defense-pact/. See also Chatham House “Saudi Arabia and Pakistan’s mutual defence pact sets a precedent for extended deterrence” (September 2025) https://www.chathamhouse.org/2025/09/saudi-arabia-and-pakistans-mutual-defence-pact-sets-precedent-extended-deterrence.
[iv]May Darwich “The view from Riyadh: A neoclassical realist perspective of Saudi foreign policy towards Iran in the post-2011 Middle East” in Edward Wastnidge and Simon Mabon (eds) Saudi Arabia and Iran: The Struggle to Shape the Middle East (Manchester University Press, 2022) at 15 and 18.
[v]On the China-brokered restoration of Saudi-Iranian diplomatic relations in March 2023, see Atlantic Council “A year ago, Beijing brokered an Iran-Saudi deal. How does détente look today?” https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/iransource/iran-saudi-arabia-china-deal-one-year/; Al Jazeera “China-brokered Saudi-Iran deal driving ‘wave of reconciliation’, says Wang” (21 August 2023) https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/8/21/china-brokered-saudi-iran-deal-driving-wave-of-reconciliation-says-wang.
[vi]On the fourteen-point US-Iran memorandum of understanding signed on 18 June 2026, see Al Jazeera “What the Trump-Iran 14-point plan says about Lebanon, Hormuz and uranium” (18 June 2026) https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/6/18/what-the-trump-iran-14-point-plan-says-about-lebanon-hormuz-and-uranium; the full text is reproduced at NPR “Read the full text of Trump’s preliminary US-Iran agreement to end the war” (18 June 2026) https://www.npr.org/2026/06/18/nx-s1-5863027/us-iran-trump-memorandum-of-understanding-full-text and Time “Read the Full Text of the 14-Point Agreement Between the U.S. and Iran” (17 June 2026) https://time.com/article/2026/06/17/us-iran-peace-deal-agreement-leaked-draft-text/.
[vii]On the collapse of the memorandum and the resumption of fighting, see NPR “The US strikes Iran after Trump announces a renewed blockade and tolls in Hormuz” (13 July 2026) https://www.npr.org/2026/07/13/nx-s1-5891746/us-iran-strait-of-hormuz-updates; Al Jazeera “March to July: What’s different as US-Iran fighting escalates again” (13 July 2026) https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/7/13/march-to-july-whats-different-as-us-iran-fighting-escalates-again; and, on Iranian claims of strikes on Gulf bases, Al Jazeera “New Iran strikes on Gulf as US attacks escalate: What we know” (13 July 2026) https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/7/13/new-iran-strikes-on-gulf-as-us-attacks-escalate-what-we-know.
[viii]On Iran’s continued NPT membership and threatened withdrawal, see Foundation for Defense of Democracies “Analysis of IAEA Iran verification and monitoring and NPT safeguards reports, June 2026” https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2026/06/09/analysis-of-iaea-iran-verification-and-monitoring-and-npt-safeguards-reports-june-2026/, discussing International Atomic Energy Agency report GOV/2026/8.
[ix]Amy Chua Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance—and Why They Fall (Doubleday, 2007), Introduction, at xxi.
[x]Arnold J Toynbee Civilization on Trial (Oxford University Press, 1948), “Christianity and Civilization”, at 227. On challenge and response, see “My View of History” in the same volume at 12.
[xi]Anne Case and Angus Deaton Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton University Press, 2020) at 33.
[xii]Mark F Cancian and Chris H Park “Rebuilding U.S. Missile Inventory: A Multiyear Project” Center for Strategic and International Studies (27 May 2026) https://www.csis.org/analysis/rebuilding-us-missile-inventory-multiyear-project.
[xiii]“China Tests Submarine-launched Ballistic Missile, Kicks Off Annual Exercise With Russia” USNI News (6 July 2026) https://news.usni.org/2026/07/06/china-tests-submarine-launched-ballistic-missile-kicks-off-annual-exercise-with-russia (the test missile carried a dummy warhead). See also Joseph Rodgers, Bonny Lin and Leon Li “China’s SLBM Test Underscores the Importance of a Ballistic Missile Launch Notification Agreement” Center for Strategic and International Studies (7 July 2026) https://www.csis.org/analysis/chinas-slbm-test-underscores-importance-ballistic-missile-launch-notification-agreement.
[xiv]Rt Hon Winston Peters “New Zealand’s Foreign Policy Reset: Progress & Reflections” (17 June 2025) Beehive https://www.beehive.govt.nz/speech/new-zealand%E2%80%99s-foreign-policy-reset-progress-reflections.
[xv]Radio New Zealand “NZ hit with 15 percent Trump trade tariff, trade minister says he will push back” (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. On non-retaliation, see RNZ “Luxon says New Zealand won’t launch reciprocal tariffs against US” https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/557061/luxon-says-new-zealand-won-t-launch-reciprocal-tariffs-against-us.
[xvi]New Zealand-UAE 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-Gulf Cooperation Council FTA, concluded 2024: Beehive https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/new-zealand-concludes-high-quality-trade-deal-gulf-cooperation-council-gcc. New Zealand-India FTA, signed April 2026: MFAT https://www.mfat.govt.nz/en/trade/free-trade-agreements/free-trade-agreements-concluded-but-not-in-force/new-zealand-india-free-trade-agreement. On Modi’s July 2026 visit and the strategic partnership, see “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/.
[xvii]Radio New Zealand “New Zealand in holding pattern over AUKUS in wake of US review” (19 May 2026) https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/politics/595644/new-zealand-in-holding-pattern-over-aukus-in-wake-of-us-review.
[xviii]On the rotation of the Deputy Prime Minister role from Winston Peters to David Seymour on 31 May 2025, see Radio New Zealand “Deputy PM handover” (May 2025) https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/562595/deputy-pm-handover-seymour-vows-straight-talk-peters-fires-up-campaign. Peters’ current portfolios: https://www.beehive.govt.nz/minister/rt-hon-winston-peters.
[xix]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 Hormuz toll, see above n 7.
[xx]Nicholas Ross Smith “New Zealand’s grand strategic options as the room for hedging continues to shrink” (2022) 41(3) Comparative Strategy https://doi.org/10.1080/01495933.2022.2057748 at 1 and 10.
[xxi]Nicholas Ross Smith “Dependently Independent: Theorizing New Zealand’s ‘Independent’ Foreign Policy via a Neoclassical Realist Lens” (2025) 5(3) Global Studies Quarterly ksaf056 https://doi.org/10.1093/isagsq/ksaf056 at 8 and 10.
[xxii]Geoffrey Miller “New Zealand’s next steps as Middle East war escalates” Democracy Project (8 March 2026) https://democracyproject.nz/2026/03/08/new-zealands-next-steps-as-middle-east-war-escalates/.
[xxiii]Miller, above n 22.
[xxiv]Smith, above n 20, at 10.
[xxv]Euronews “Era of close US-Canadian relations is over, warns Prime Minister Mark Carney” (28 March 2025) https://www.euronews.com/2025/03/28/era-of-close-us-canadian-relations-is-over-warns-prime-minister-mark-carney.
[xxvi]Al Jazeera “Canada joins key EU defence programme as PM Carney pivots away from US” (2 December 2025) https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/12/2/canada-joins-key-eu-defence-programme-as-pm-carney-pivots-away-from-us.
[xxvii]BNN Bloomberg “Bad trade deals for Canada have been on the negotiating table for months, says PM Carney” (26 June 2026) https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/tariffs/2026/06/26/bad-trade-deals-for-canada-have-been-on-the-negotiating-table-for-months-said-pm-carney/. On the removal of most retaliatory tariffs, see NPR “Trump says ‘We want to be very good to Canada,’ as its leader drops some tariffs” (22 August 2025) https://www.npr.org/2025/08/22/nx-s1-5511357/canada-carney-tariffs-us.
[xxviii]Beehive “General Election to be held on 7 November” (21 January 2026) https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/general-election-be-held-7-november.
Excellent article, thankyou.