Ummmmmm – that escalated quickly…

Jacinda Ardern makes nuclear plea to Nato, issues warning about China’s assertiveness

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern ended her visit to the Nato summit in Madrid warning that the unstable international environment was not limited to Europe – she called out China for its recent challenging of international norms and Russia for its information warfare in the Pacific.

“The shift in environment we are currently seeing is not limited to one region.

“In our neighbourhood, we see the mounting pressure on the international rules-based order. We see attempts to disrupt and destabilise – even New Zealand is targeted by Russian mis- and dis-information,” Ardern said.

She added that “China has in recent times also become more assertive and more willing to challenge international rules and norms”.

…don’t get me wrong, I agree with every word from the PM, but this is the most aggressive posturing against China that we’ve ever publicly annunciated and doing it at NATO will have enraged the Chinese.

We are over in Europe desperately making the case that if NZ is to decouple from China economically, we will need access to Western markets because currently China has total dominance over our trade.

In our desperation to make that point, we are calling China out internationally and my guess is that there will be a price to pay for that.

We are on the verge of a steep economic recession, watch for China to pounce at our weakest to slash trade and push that economic recession into a depression.

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