Losing the Pacific to the Anglosphere: AUKUS and New Zealand’s regional engagement

New Zealand's potential involvement in AUKUS poses a generational foreign policy decision, engaging competing commitments to Pacific and Anglosphere-centred security. This discussion paper identifies implications for New Zealand's regional engagement, and its previous independent, nuclear-free, and Pacific-led policy approaches. It suggests that the Blue Pacific narrative and Indo-Pacific Strategy are irreconcilable and that AUKUS involvement would undermine support for Pacific priorities of climate, development, and disarmament. We should not underplay what is at stake. New Zealand risks losing the Pacific to the Anglosphere.