About the event:

New Zealand is out of runway. It is no longer watching great power competition from a safe distance but being drawn into what increasingly looks like a Second Cold War: an Eurasian entente of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea; hardening alliances; a shifting balance in the South Pacific; and widening proxy conflicts. Add a second Trump administration recalibrating its alliance commitments, and the assumptions New Zealand has relied on for a generation look threadbare.

This talk argues that New Zealand's strategic insecurity is three compounding problems. On the digital frontier, AI and advanced technologies are dissolving the distance that once substituted for strategy, and New Zealand runs an industrial-age Cabinet in an age of intelligence — a gap rivals and allies alike are racing to close. The defence deficit is decades of underinvestment colliding with urgency via a multi-billion-dollar Defence Force rebuild, a frigate decision, and deepening alignment with Australia, the United States and Japan as Washington's Pacific commitment is questioned. The home front - stagnant productivity, a brain drain, and little material resilience to absorb shocks - limits what strategy can achieve.

The argument is not that New Zealand is doomed. It is that the country has fewer choices than it thinks and less time to make them - and that a small state choosing well can still generate real advantage: in space and autonomy, in sovereign data and decision-making, in a geography others cannot replicate, and in the partners it decides to invest in. New Zealand votes in November, and whoever governs inherits all three fronts. The talk sets out what a serious response would look like, and what it costs us if one doesn't arrive.

Bio:

Dr Reuben Steff is an Assistant Professor of Geopolitics and International Relations at Mendel University, Brno, Czech Republic. His research includes great power competition, emerging technologies, deterrence theory, and New Zealand geopolitics. His latest report is Small Force, Big Data: Defense AI in New Zealand (Hamburg: Defense AI Observatory, 2026) and he has published five books including New Zealand’s Geopolitics in the US-China Great Power Competition (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) and Emerging Technologies and International Security: Machines, the State and War (Routledge, 2020).

Recent publications

(2026) Small Force, Big Data: Defense AI in New Zealand (Defense AI Observatory): https://defenseai.eu/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/daio_study2635_small_force_big_data_reuben_steff.pdf

(2025) New Zealand Geopolitics and the US-China Competition (Palgrave-Macmillan): https://link.springer.com/book/9789819602810

(2024) 'The Strategic Case for New Zealand to Join AUKUS Pillar 2,' Australia Journal of International Affairs, open access: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10357718.2024.2399338

(2024) '"Our region is now a strategic theatre": New Zealand’s balancing response to China', Pacific Review, open access: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09512748.2024.2314764(2023)

New Zealand’s Strategic (In)Security: Accelerating Digital Frontier, Defence Deficit, Eroding Home Front

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