Overview
- Explains how major international security developments augur a new era for NZ foreign policy and grand strategy
- Focuses on New Zealand’s geopolitics; it’s geostrategic position, capabilities, vulnerabilities and interests
- Shows how a shift in the balance of power from US-centric unipolarity to multipolarity has implications for Oceania
Part of the book series: Global Political Transitions (GLPOTR)
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About this book
This book advances the establishment of a contemporary New Zealand geopolitical tradition. It details and examines New Zealand’s geopolitical reality in an increasingly fractured global security (dis)order defined by interdependent strategic competition and emerging multipolarity. A centrepiece is the multidimensional US-China Great Power Competition that has the makings of a Second Cold War. This has immense implications for New Zealand’s greater region, the Indo-Pacific, and its immediate area, the South Pacific. The latter is of existential importance to New Zealand, becoming an active area of strategic competition as China projects its influence southwards, and New Zealand, Australia and the United States respond. In this context, New Zealand’s location is increasingly geopolitically relevant and the idea it occupies a ‘benign security environment’ has now been cast into the dustbin of history. The decisions it makes presently will determine the country’s prosperity and geostrategic security for decades.
Geopolitical theory, along with a detailed empirical account of strategic competition in the Indo-Pacific and South Pacific, offers a clear exposition of the implications of US-China competition for New Zealand. This directs us to the nation’s material characteristics and imperatives that flow from it. The book also appraises the country’s strategic options and indicates how and why Wellington’s approach has shifted over time from hedging between the US and China to, increasingly, balancing against Beijing’s efforts to alter the global and regional status quo.
Through analysis and provocation, this book marks a major new contribution that will interest policymakers, academics, students and everyday citizens.
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Table of contents (9 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Reviews
“This is a book that any scholar would be proud to have written. It is comprehensive, theoretically consistent and readable. Reuben Steff has produced a book that will be one of the standard texts on New Zealand’s place in the international order and in the ways it could (and should, according to Steff) respond to China’s rise as a major power. ... This is a book that all those interested in New Zealand’s security should read.” (Jim Rolfe, New Zealand International Review, Vol. 50 (4), July-August, 2025)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Dr Reuben Steff is a Senior Lecturer of International Relations and Geopolitics at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. His research encompasses US-China Great Power Competition, emerging technologies, missile defence and nuclear deterrence, and the foreign policies of the United States and New Zealand. He has publications in multiple journals and is the author of four books, including Emerging Technologies and International Security: Machines, the State and War (Routledge, 2020) and US Foreign Policy in the Age of Trump: Drivers, Strategy and Tactics (Routledge, 2021).
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Bibliographic Information
Book Title: New Zealand's Geopolitics and the US-China Competition
Authors: Reuben Steff
Series Title: Global Political Transitions
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-0282-7
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Singapore
eBook Packages: Political Science and International Studies, Political Science and International Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2024
Hardcover ISBN: 978-981-96-0281-0Published: 01 February 2025
Softcover ISBN: 978-981-96-0284-1Due: 15 February 2026
eBook ISBN: 978-981-96-0282-7Published: 31 January 2025
Series ISSN: 2522-8730
Series E-ISSN: 2522-8749
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XXI, 353
Number of Illustrations: 5 b/w illustrations, 15 illustrations in colour