Roberto Rabel - a professorial fellow at Victoria University's Centre for Strategic Studies - says NATO representatives who expressed doubts a Trump presidency would signal any big strategic change in relations were 'overly optimistic'. Photo: Supplied
The New Zealand government is being urged to set up a Trump taskforce to get ahead of any policy ambushes for this country.
Defence Minister Judith Collins is today returning from Europe, where tectonic shifts in international security have taken place.
NATO representatives visited Wellington late last year and expressed doubts a Donald Trump presidency would signal any big strategic change in relations with the US.
But Europe is now scrambling to respond to several days of shocks - and the occasional garbled message - from the White House, which have been swirling around Brussels and the Munich security conference that Collins attended.
They all amount to the US giving Europe the cold shoulder on Urkaine, while doubling down on a pivot to defence in the Indopacific.
Roberto Rabel - a professorial fellow at Victoria University's Centre for Strategic Studies - was on a round table with the NATO representatives in November, just before the US election.
"They were overly optimistic," he told RNZ.
Rabel also spent half of last year in NATO member Poland, looking at security issues.
Poland was praised by new US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth for its high defence spending of 4.8 percent of GDP and rising, at the same time as Vice President J D Vance was castigating others in Europe for retreating from shared values on immigration and free speech.
Emeritus Professor Roberto Rabel Photo: Supplied
Rabel is urging the government here to take note, and resurrect the short-lived taskforce that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs set up in the first Trump term in 2017.
"If you don't, you can ask people around the world who have found you can be caught unaware by a sudden development that is completely unexpected," said Rabel.
MFAT said it undertook extensive planning to prepare for the change in US Administration, and it laid out various ways it has to constantly monitor and respond to events
However, these did not include a taskforce like the one in 2017.
"While a political transition in the United States invariably creates high demands for MFAT, this is business as usual," the ministry said.
In Europe, the "unexpected" from Trump has led to Ukraine now calling for the creation of a European army; and in the Middle East, to angst over his vision of Gaza as the 'Riviera'.
Rabel said the uncertainty would also be making Taiwan nervous, in case the Ukraine peace talks rewarded the aggressor Russia with territory.
"Obviously then the implication is - what will happen in the Indopacific if someone chooses to use military power to enforce their own sovereignty claims over another?"
On the other hand, Washington's pivot towards the Indopacific could mean it was more serious - not less - about confronting China.
"There are a whole set of other contingencies... in different domains of the world order that that taskforce would be trying to keep the New Zealand government informed about."
The NATO-Indopacific connections have also stood out in recent days. Collins was on a panel in Munich called 'Connected Theatres: Europe and Asia Security Spheres'.
America was "extremely irritated" at Europe - and justly so - for not pulling its weight, said NATO head Mark Rutte, who also alluded to the Indopacific also needing to do more.
Rutte said he had been on the phone to Japan about needing to work together.
If he has made the same call to this country, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Collins can point to some new talks and some new work, such as New Zealand recently following Australia and others in signing up to partnership programmes for military industrial collaboration with both the US (called PIPIR) and NATO, called the IP4.
The IP4 with New Zealand, Australia, Japan and Korea provided a "valuable opportunity to strengthen ties with NATO", officials said.
They could also point to actual work on emerging military technologies, which could be vital as the US is a big fan of these.
The very first message Hegseth had to US forces when he took the top job last month was that he intended to quickly field emerging capabilities to deter China and others.
New Zealand briefings released under the OIA called this "turbocharging" military capabilities, and NZDF officials have been at two military-industry-government meetings in Australia about this in recent months.
The work included "cutting edge work that Australia is collaborating on with NZ" that had "a focus on rapidly pulling through emerging and disruptive technologies and accelerating the delivery of minimal viable capability to the warfighter".
The Pentagon's own research and development agency DARPA was part of this.
Money was the usual barrier confronting the work, the papers said.
"The national fiscal situation... is requiring reconsidering of what activities we can support," said officials who had noted at the Adelaide meetings "a real interest in harmonising innovation systems across partner nations".
Another barrier is the US Defence Department (DOD), according to multiple official reports in the US.
The Pentagon put too many hurdles in the way of sharing military tech with partners, said a paper by the Defence Innovation Board in June.
"As the DoD's priority theater, and an integral source of economic prosperity, technological development, and military capability, the IndoPacific is an increasingly essential hub for co-innovation," it said.
"Despite this, outside of AUKUS, the DoD is not adequately integrating key allies and partners, thereby leaving significant resources and capabilities under-utilised."
It laid out a host of ways to engage allies - including New Zealand, -in bolstering America's military-industrial base, lead among them Aukus Pillar Two.
"Aukus Pillar II holds the ability to focus collective resources around the problem of China's tech rise if the political rhetoric behind it can be turned into practical deliverables that leverage the combined advantages of the Indopacific allied community."
Rabel said despite the mounting uncertainties under Trump, pressures were combining in a consistent way on New Zealand.
"What is coming in the current global environment and the way that it's being particularly affected by the change of presidency, [then] New Zealand's involvement in the IP4 is going to become more and more important, I think.
"And the IP4 are going to be playing a critical linking function between the transatlantic region and the Indopacific, and I think that just as there are the pressures both from countries like Poland... for Europe to increase defence spending, there is going to be more pressure within the IP4 environment to do things."
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