Just Defence is calling on the New Zealand Government to explain the New Zealand Defence Force’s (NZDF) active participation in Keen Sword 27, a massive US-led military exercise geared toward preparing for a regional war with China.
The biennial exercise involved a staggering 40 vessels, 260 aircraft, 45,000 Japanese Self-Defence Forces, 11,000 United States personnel, alongside forces from Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the Philippines, and New Zealand. The NZDF deployed defensive cyber operators and an aeromedical evacuation team to support the high-intensity war games.
Defence analysts and strategic reports have widely noted that the scale, location, and specific scenarios of Keen Sword 27 are an explicit rehearsal for a potential regional conflict involving China. The exercise featured intensive island-defence drills and the deployment of anti-ship missiles on southwestern Japanese islands like Yonaguni - situated a mere 110 kilometres from Taiwan.
Just Defence spokesperson Kevin Hackwell questioned the strategic sanity of the New Zealand Government’s decision.
"The New Zealand public needs to know why our government is having our military actively practicing a catastrophic war with China, our single largest trading partner," Hackwell said.
"By embedding NZDF personnel into an exercise explicitly designed around a Taiwan Strait conflict scenario, the Government is signalling that New Zealand is willing to be dragged into a devastating great-power war."
"Sending cyber operators and aeromedical teams into a war game specifically on the doorstep of Taiwan is not a neutral or defensive act. It signals a reckless compromise of our independent foreign policy.
Hackwell highlighted the extreme risks of aligning New Zealand security so closely with the United States.
"US foreign policy and military deployments are notoriously unpredictable. Tying our geographic and economic security to Washington's increasingly irrational geopolitical agenda is inherently dangerous”.
“New Zealand should not be giving any support to US anxieties that China is challenging it as an economic superpower. This is a trade and supremacy dispute between two giants, and New Zealand has absolutely no business positioning its military on the front lines of it."
Just Defence warns that embedding NZDF assets into a US-led command structure designed to contain China escalates regional tensions and directly undermines New Zealand's economic and diplomatic security.
"Rehearsing for a superpower war is a massive strategic misstep," Hackwell adds.
"Instead of acting as a supporting player in Pacific war games that edge us closer to a global disaster, New Zealand should be leveraging its diplomatic capital to de-escalate tensions and promote peace in the Indo-Pacific.”
“The government must halt this drift into full military entanglement with the US before it permanently damages our regional relationships."
Just Defence is calling on the Government to immediately halt NZDF participation in offensive regional exercises and to implement an independent, non-aligned foreign policy that prioritises diplomacy and de-escalation over provocative war planning.
"Our defence force should protect New Zealand’s actual security interests, not serve as a supporting act for a US strategy of containment that directly threatens our economic survival and regional peace," Hackwell said.
Contact:
Kevin Hackwell, Spokesperson, Just Defence
Yonaguni Island, just 110 km from Taiwan. For the first time, the U.S. Marine Corps forward-deployed its mobile, ground-based NMESIS (Navy-Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System) equipped with Naval Strike Missiles to the island to practice targeting hostile vessels and enforcing sea denial in strategic straits. Concurrently, the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force (JGSDF) integrated its own mobile anti-ship missile units, using Type 88 and deploying the long-range Type 25 surface-to-ship missiles outside their permanent base for the first time. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
