Reaction to US Secretary of Defense (he prefers to call it “of War”) Pete “Kegseth” Hegseth’s comments that NZ was “freeloading” on the US because it does not spend 3.5% of GDP on defense was predictable if shallow for the most part. Most reasonable commentators, including–surprisingly–Don Brash, found the figure to be ludicrous on the face of it, and as someone said, perhaps intended to be aspirational rather than realistic. That is a very polite way of phrasing things. Predictably, the government responded by pointing to its pledge to spend 2%GDP on defense in the next decade, although it was vague on the how and why’s of the increase other than repeating the recent mantra that NZ is located in an increased threat environment.
The impolite way of phrasing things is that the call for NZ to spend 3.5% of GDP on defense is a mastubatory pipe dream by a sweaty-palmed war fetishist white nationalist alcoholic “Alpha male” wanna-be by the name of Pete Hegseth. It has no basis in any discernible fact and it bears no relationship to any known strategic reality. Like most of what he says, Hegseth’s demand is a blustery babble of bullying rhetorical incontinence, much like his purported US war plan for its attack on Iran.
So let’s consider the facts.
The only countries that spend 3.5% of GDP on “defense” are authoritarian, war-mongering and/or garrison states (a garrison state is one that is besieged by hostile adversaries, like Ukraine, Iran and Taiwan). Most liberal democracies come nowhere close to that benchmark, and in fact until MAGA madness overtook US defense policy, the so-called “2 percent standard” where NATO members contributed that amount of their GDP to their collective defense was considered to be on the high end of the scale, especially for smaller states and particularly for those that did not have frontline borders with hostile actors like Russia. Two percent is already a stretch for most countries. 3.5% is untethered to the realities of most national security calculations.
A brief look at global GDP expenditures on defense tells the story: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS
Anyone with a modicum of understanding of democratic politics knows that (unlike the US) most democracies prioritize domestic policy areas that immediately affect voting constituencies. These include health, welfare, housing, education, retirement benefits and other public goods that maintain the material bases of public support for a given government, and more generally for democracy as a form of governance (as opposed to, say, various types of authoritarianism). Expenditures on defense and security (including on intelligence services) tend to be of lower priority and directly related to exposure to threats to national interests, including but not limited to the physical integrity and sovereignty of a given democratic state. Since threats can be indirect, distant or too large to be handled alone, many democracies forge security alliances and pacts with larger like-minded or strategically-aligned partners. NATO is an example of that, as is the Australian-New Zealand bilateral defense pact and various regional security agreements.
One of the advantages of such collective security agreements is that it reduces the need for individual countries to increase their defense spending to levels that draw resources away from non-security domestic spending. In military terms, collective security agreements are supposed to be a form of force multiplier in which smaller partners exchange the mantle of protection from larger partners by assuming roles in support of common objectives and interests that the larger partners cannot or prefer not to do by themselves (say humanitarian assistance or peacekeeping missions).
What the US is demanding, therefore, is contrary to the spirit as well as intent of democratic collective security. It threatens to withdraw its security “cover” from countries unless they spend more on defense than the US does itself (the US is at 3.4% of GDP spent on defense while actively involved in several conflicts of its choosing). Moreover, this one-size-fits-all spending baseline not only ignores the reality of domestic politics in most liberal democracies other than the US. It also ignores the geopolitical realities of different states. The US is a continental country surrounded by blue water and non-threatening land neighbours that has a neo-imperialist foreign policy and war-mongering constituencies that drive it to pursue continuous wars that it does not necessarily fight to win: instead, it must find foreign enemies to fight in order to justify its international behaviour and provide sustenance to its military-industrial complex (which is a motor force of the US economy). It fights not to win but because it can, and because it has domestic actors that materially benefit from perpetuating the suffering of others.
Liberal democracies like NZ are cut from a different cloth. Their threat environments are often different to that of the US and, for that matter, from each other in most instances. So the cookie-cutter approach to security and defense spending demanded by Kegseth and his minions, as well as parallel demands that defense policy of US partners dovetail and overlap in the interest of “interoperability” and strategic integration, falls short of recognizing the specific threat environments that other States may have to cope with, and therefore the strategic perspectives that they need to adopt in response. The international community, both in peace and in conflict, is not as US-centric as some might think. Force integration and joint operations is not a “ready to wear” clothes rack, either in terms of objectives as well as capabilities. This reality is lost on the MAGA administration.
Beyond the issue of a blunderbuss approach to defense spending in the aggregate, something that perhaps is because of the US’s own history of weapons development and procurement, it is not the total amount of GDP spent on defense that matters but what that money is spent on. Spending money on soon-to-be obsolescence platforms like the recently announced “Trump class” battleships (actually, non-battleship surface warships), is utter folly and often driven by non-military or non-strategic considerations like providing jobs to local constituencies (as is the case with the AUKUS nuclear submarine project in Australia). In an age of AI, minituarization and automated weapons technologies like drones, satellites and submersibles, military procurement and replenishment policies must be driven not by some arbitrary financial baseline but by literally getting more efficient bang for the buck. Threat environments and internal resource constraints should determine what weapons systems and support infrastructure are needed and what strategic policies should be used to deploy them. After that, the guiding principle should be to maximize value per dollar, not reach some arbitrary spending threshold.
All of this presumably happens against the background of a well thought-out geopolitical and geostrategic perspective. “Strategic culture” refers to a State’s historical approach to its external environment, one that weaves political, diplomatic, economic and military theory and capabilities into concrete practice. In this light NZ represents a somewhat odd case, as it has a Army-centric military despite being a maritime state (with a very weak Navy and virtually no Air Force), responds more to allied threat assessments than its own, adopts contradictory if not juxtaposed trade and security policies (trading preferentially with an emerging Great Power while aligning itself with a declining Great Power that is an avowed adversary of the former), professes to be idealist and pacifist in orientation (self-styling as a “champion” of the international rules based order and having an “independent” foreign policy) when in fact it behaves in an internal interest group-driven and externally clientalistic, ethically-agnostic fashion governed by short-term objectives. Some might say that this is a pragmatic approach; others might call it amoral, unprincipled and opportunistic.
Although many Defense White Papers and other policy papers have been produced outlining NZ’s purported vision of its place in the world, the threats it believes it must confront and the means by which it proposes to do so, what emerges from reading them is something more akin to strategic incoherence. We get much description of events and conditions that are influenced by the perceptions of larger partners, but we are not told precisely why we configure that NZDF and intelligence services in the way that we do. For example, the PRC is clearly considered by NZ and its security partners to be the major extra-regional threat to the South Pacific, but we are never told exactly why (Influence operations? “Dollar diplomacy?” Security pacts with Pacific Island nations? Other covert activities? Different value systems?). Much is alluded to but little is presented in the way of concrete evidence.
The same was true for the nearly two decades of NZ intelligence community intelligence assessments that jihadists, both foreign and domestic, were the greatest terrorist threat to NZ and its interests. This responded more to the expectations of NZ’s intelligence patrons in the 5 Eyes network and beyond rather than the probability of a jihadist attack in NZ. In fact, not a single such thing occurred in spite of many media-driven scares and episodic arrests, during a period in which rightwing neo-Nazi extremism, including a well documented presence in NZ that remains to this day, were virtually ignored in annual intelligence threat assessments. Until March 15, 2019, that is.
Recent NZ threat assessments like those mentioned are presented as fact at a time when the US has gone rogue under Trump, killing hundreds of civilians on the open seas without warrant or evidence, kidnaping the leader of a sovereign state, threatened to annex NATO allies, launched an opportunistic war of aggression under false pretences against Iran at the behest and in conjunction with another, in fact genocidal rogue state, kowtows to an authoritarian neo-imperialist aggressor in Europe, threatens the overthrow of the Cuban regime while subjecting that country to a total fuel blockade, slaps punitive tariffs for political reasons on governments that do not come to the US heel and spends US taxpayer money on openly influencing foreign elections in favour of its preferred candidates–who exactly is the clear and imminent threat here? And yet the US is not mentioned in NZ threat assessments once–not once–other than in oblique mentions of “Great Power Competition” affecting our part of the world. Yeah right. Meanwhile our military brass and civilian defense establishment court favour with US weapons manufacturers and government security officials without a shred of light cast on their activities and the reasons for them. So US good, PRC bad–but we trade more with the bad guys than the supposed good ones.
There are no parliamentary debates about these issues, much less public discussion of things like why the 2%GDP spend on defense criteria must be followed by NZ in the first place. Is it because NZ is a NATO partner? Is it because Trump threatens us with sanctions or tariffs if we do not obey? Or is it because in order to provide for some measure of self-defence we need to increase budgetary allotments for specific weapons systems and their logistical infrastructure? What, in fact, is the purpose of our defense forces? Territorial resistance against foreign invasion and occupation? Expeditionary service to our security masters? Global good citizen participation in multinational operations? What should be the emphasis of our forces? Peacekeeping and/or humanitarian operations (using military engineers and medics)? Special forces? Infantry without armor or air support? Coastal defense? Regional policing? Force support to Australian or other partner militaries? Civil defense?
In sum, there is much more to drawing up a defense budget than using some drunk US official’s number blocks as a guideline. But because the toddler’s math logic is strong with that one, and because he sits atop a very powerful death machine to which NZ is connected in multiple ways, NZ must be very calibrated in its response. For that it needs to truthfully know exactly what it needs to defend against, for how long given current and near future government resources and threat scenarios, and what tools are best suited to the task once national security priorities are honestly defined and operationalised given the fluid context of the times.
Having done that, and only then, can NZ tell Hegseth to shove his 3.5%GDP demand where the sun don’t shine.