Pacific nations ‘threatened by great power contest over deep sea minerals’

New Zealand’s defense minister Judith Collins

New Zealand’s defense minister warned in an interview that small countries in the South Pacific face growing pressure from great power competition for their rare minerals and fisheries wealth, and that more action was needed from regional neighbors to help in preserving island nations’ sovereignty.

Judith Collins, who also oversees New Zealand’s intelligence and space portfolios, spoke to The Associated Press yesterday before departing for Washington D.C., where she will meet Trump administration officials including Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem.

New Zealand, a nation of 5 million in the South Pacific, is part of a vast region of mostly small island countries once seen as remote from global tensions. But Collins cited China’s encroaching presence in the region in recent months as evidence of its global security importance.

“I also say to the U.S. that you are a Pacific nation,” Collins told the AP, speaking in her parliamentary office in Wellington. “And it’s not just that you have Guam, it’s not just that you have Hawaii, as lovely as it is. It’s the fact that your entire California is on the Pacific Ocean, that Alaska is on the Pacific Ocean, that Russia is a Pacific nation.”

Mineral riches make Pacific vulnerable

The seabed across the South Pacific is rich in rare earth minerals that are increasingly in demand for technologies such as electric vehicle batteries and defense systems, but mining has yet to begin at scale because international rules governing access are still being established

Collins said the potential wealth of the region’s small island nations left them exposed to exploitation by powerful interests.

She didn’t cite China specifically. But her government expressed alarm in February when Beijing signed an agreement to collaborate on deep sea mining research with the Cook Islands, a nation of 17,000 people, which has close military, diplomatic and citizenship ties to New Zealand.

“The Pacific has enormous wealth but it’s just not in the hands of the people,” Collins said yesterday. She added that she didn’t want to see the promises of mineral wealth for those countries being “basically raped and pillaged off them.”

Collins said other recent moves by Beijing are evidence of a changed security landscape. They included Chinese naval live-fire drills near New Zealand in February, Beijing’s plans for a sixth base in Antarctica despite not being party to the treaty governing operations on the continent, and the launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile into the Pacific Ocean last September.

Pacific defense on a budget

Collins may still face a challenge showing her counterparts in D.C. that New Zealand can contribute to regional security and to the work of the Five Eyes intelligence sharing group of countries, of which New Zealand is a member, along with the U.S., Britain, Canada and Australia.

The country’s military struggles with rundown hardware and recruitment woes, as illustrated in an embarrassing 2024 episode when one of New Zealand’s nine navy ships ran aground on a reef off Samoa, caught fire and sank.

Collins will meet an administration that wants its allies to do more and ask for less. President Trump has urged European nations to commit to big hikes in defense spending, warning that U.S. help in defending its allies in case of invasion was no longer guaranteed.

Collins said her government’s announcement in April that it would double defense spending to 2% of GDP in the next eight years was evidence that New Zealand was “not just people saying ‘gimme, gimme, gimme.’” But she admitted that the country could not afford enough ships and planes to patrol its sprawling oceanic zone and that of its nearest island neighbors, and said a more agile approach was needed.

“What we can use is new technology, like satellite surveillance, like for instance drones,” she said. “We have businesses in New Zealand who are producing drones now and other uncrewed aircraft that is just astonishing.”

Loosened military trade

Collins will ask Trump administration officials for changes to help those companies grow. The country’s defense industry and space sectors are hampered by strict U.S. import and export controls on military technology, she said.

New Zealand in 2024 ranked third in the world for verified successful vertical launches into space, behind the U.S. and China, partly due to the country’s latitudinal location and uncongested airspace.

But Collins said U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations prevented the sharing of products and knowledge between New Zealand and American space sector firms and more could be done if they were loosened.

She planned to seek an exemption to those rules, which she said had already been granted to other Five Eyes countries, although her chances of success at a time of U.S. trade tariffs were “not enormously huge,” Collins added. CHARLOTTE GRAHAM-McLAY, WELLINGTON, MDT/AP