The 2026 general election arrives at a moment when global conditions remain unsettled and in flux. Armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine persists, hostilities across Gaza and the West Bank have left both territories under strain, naval and air activity by China across the Pacific has expanded, tensions between the United States and Iran have translated into direct confrontations, and the pace at which the global climate is shifting continues to accelerate.
Delivering a three-year assessment of his government's foreign-policy record, Winston Peters addressed a period in which two longstanding principles — adherence to a rules-based international order and active participation in multilateral forums — had come under sustained pressure. In remarks delivered to the Institute of International Affairs, he described the external pressures facing the country as the most difficult the nation had encountered since 1945.
Among the pressures he identified were a resurgence of trade protectionism, a United Nations rendered largely ineffective by the repeated exercise of the Security Council veto, and what he described as unwelcome geopolitical manoeuvring across the Pacific. Peters characterised the prevailing geostrategic environment as one that had upended established norms, with authority and coercion displacing the frameworks that once governed international conduct.
The coalition led by the National Party settled on a foreign policy of restrained engagement, one that takes the world as it currently is rather than as any ideal framework might wish it to be. Peters put forward the view that the approach had left the incoming government with a broader set of options and greater autonomy, while also serving the nation's interests in a measured way.
Grounds for questioning that reading of the present global landscape are not in short supply. Distinctions between today's geopolitical tensions and Cold War-era rivalries remain a matter of analytical debate, given that the earlier period produced at least three documented moments when nuclear conflict appeared genuinely possible — the standoff over Cuba in 1962, the Middle East war of 1973, and NATO's Able Archer exercise in 1983.
Three of the five permanent UN Security Council members — the United States, Russia, and China — along with their respective allies, have driven a broader move away from rule-based international conduct toward the exercise of raw national power. Most nations on the planet fall into the small-to-middle-power bracket, and their foreign conduct tends to align with the established frameworks covering commerce, diplomatic relations, travel, and research cooperation.
Speaking at the Institute of International Affairs, Peters flagged unease over what he described as Russia's unlawful military action in Ukraine, raised concerns about China's naval drills and missile testing across the Pacific, and indicated openness to a greater US footprint in that region. Wellington has kept largely quiet on how Washington has been handling matters of international law, including its conduct toward Gaza, Ukraine, Venezuela, and Iran.
Defence cooperation between New Zealand and the United States has pressed forward even as analysts and observers debate whether the two countries still hold enough common ground to justify the relationship's trajectory. The approach taken by that administration treats cross-border challenges — the kind that have defined global affairs throughout this century — as though national boundaries were still sufficient to contain them.
Addressing those interconnected pressures — disease outbreaks, shifting climate patterns, cross-border extremist networks, and the fragility of worldwide supply chains — calls for nations to work together through shared institutions and coordinated policy. Rivalry among the three veto-holding permanent members of the Security Council has deepened at a point when each power's capacity to impose outcomes on its own has grown more limited.
A global order built around the concentrated influence of a handful of dominant states — an arrangement rooted in the decades following 1945 — is now undergoing a period of change. Eide, who serves as Norway's top diplomat, characterised the prevailing world order as one still straining to take shape.
Smaller nations, New Zealand among them, still hold meaningful room to act within this environment. Debate over the direction of foreign policy centres on whether to pursue closer alignment with small and middle powers that share an interest in upholding international rules, or to maintain an approach that analysts argue has not applied consistent legal and ethical standards across all major powers involved.
