New Zealand’s strategic environment is deteriorating, and security threats are increasing 1. New Zealand faces a substantially more challenging and complex strategic environment than it has for decades. The COVID-19 pandemic has intensified, not displaced, the impacts of other, longer-term strategic trends. Amidst this complexity, we judge the principal challenges to New Zealand’s security interests, now and over the coming decades, will be: • strategic competition; and • the impacts of climate change.

2. These challenges are playing out globally, including in New Zealand’s immediate neighbourhood (from Antarctica through to the South Pacific), with direct implications for New Zealand’s security and wellbeing.

3. New Zealand faces a world in which strategic competition is increasingly the background for states’ relationships. China’s rise is the major driver for this competition. Globally, strategic competition is most visible between China and the United States, but all other states are involved to varying degrees