Antarctica rose to the surface of strategic competition this week. It appeared prominently in both the Australia–New Zealand Foreign and Defence Ministerial Consultations (ANZMIN) and in China’s new five-year plan.
Antarctic affairs have long been part of Beijing’s strategy. Now, an overdue but clear upward shift in Antarctic urgency in Canberra and Wellington is welcome.
The joint statement that followed the 2024 ANZMIN meeting noted a shared ‘history of cooperation’ on Antarctic issues. Leaders declared a firm focus on ‘upholding the principles of the Antarctic Treaty’.
The statement from this week’s ANZMIN, issued on 17 March, subtly signals a necessary change of tactics. It declared a commitment to ‘uphold and promote the Antarctic Treaty System’.
Australia and New Zealand further agreed to strengthen cooperation through an annual strategic dialogue. This should serve as a connective tissue for like-minded treaty parties, including the United States, Britain, France, Germany and Japan.
Leaders have rightly identified rapid strategic changes underway on the southern continent.
ANZMIN discussions in 2024 about Antarctica were framed more in terms of shared legacies of historical interest, stakes in Antarctica’s future, and proximity to the continent. Today, Antarctic pressures are important enough to necessitate a new standing process, the strategic dialogue, to monitor and track developments.
There is also a sense of urgency in contemporary consultations to approach Antarctica as a sub-set of Canberra’s and Wellington’s regional security interests. Promotion of the Antarctic Treaty System, beyond mere efforts to uphold it, will no doubt involve a shift in tactics on the ice.
Australia and New Zealand intend to treat Antarctica less as just humanity’s scientific commons and more as a strategic space. This reprioritisation is something that has been underway, behind the scenes, but public signalling speaks volumes.
Antarctica is mostly a footnote in global security affairs. Many actors continue to use international law, an enabler of the Antarctic Treaty System, as a mask to hide their absence of strategic judgement and perhaps, to an extent, their lacklustre capabilities.
Others use the Antarctic system to further long-term strategic interests. China’s latest five-year plan, its highest planning document, was handed down this week. For polar security watchers, a compelling element was deliberate recalibration of Antarctic strategy.
The previous five-year plan, for 2021 to 2025, was explicit in terms of Beijing’s polar and Antarctic interests. It elevated polar exploration (alongside the deep-sea and space domains) in priority terms to secure China’s prosperity. Further, pledges were made to ‘improve [China’s] ability to participate in the protection and utilisation’ of Antarctica.
Indeed, the new five-year plan has broken with planning precedent on Antarctica. Beijing has buried its polar objectives and Antarctic ambitions within a single construct: it will ‘improve the support and guarantee system for deep-sea and polar expeditions’. There are no longer specific references to the Antarctic (nor the Arctic) as singular theatres. For China, the poles are now officially operational domains.
Even Beijing’s language around the ‘utilisation’ of Antarctica has vanished. A framing of ‘blue partnerships’ has instead emerged—at once internationalising the polar domains and legitimising Beijing’s stakes.
It would be a mistake to assume China is abandoning or de-prioritising its Antarctic ambitions. This is a strategic narrative shift to reduce emphasis on China’s growing polar footprint. Station upgrades across the continent are underway and Beijing is on track to go from four all-year-round operational stations in 2024 to six by the end of 2027.
Implicit acknowledgement of Antarctica as a strategic issue for Wellington and Canberra is a welcome development in the ANZMIN framework. The priority must now be to institutionalise the Antarctic strategic dialogue. This mechanism must evolve quickly beyond coordination and consultative terms. A consensus-based decision-making ecosystem such as Antarctica will simply require more collective buy-in from like-minded partners.
Whether they’re in Moscow, Washington, Beijing or Santiago, stakeholders in the Antarctic Treaty System status quo can facilitate strategic competition and state interests effectively in its current form. Many stand by the notion that if it’s not broke, don’t fix it.
However, dual-track strategies often accompany this public-facing narrative. But not for Canberra and Wellington, and this must change.
Australia and New Zealand cannot continue to cite limited resources as an excuse to sit on the sidelines of strategic competition in Antarctica. Learned helplessness in Antarctica has infiltrated our national ecosystem of Antarctic policy generation, the polar higher education research sector, and political leadership.
Only so much advocacy for science and environment can be done. Proactive leadership in contemporary areas of interest, such as polar tourism, is useful to an extent, too. But all action should now be anchored in unashamed strategic framing. This is what makes an annual strategic Antarctic dialogue so promising.
Sustained physical presence in Antarctica will be the ultimate guarantor of influence. Allies should work towards more agile, cost-effective elevated burden-sharing presence on the ice. Of course, broader coalitions of Antarctic partners will be necessary.
In a swiftly released statement that rebuked 2026 ANZMIN talks, Beijing’s Wellington Embassy declared China’s concerns of a ‘manufacture[d] bloc-based confrontation’.
As they say, when you are getting flack, you are likely over target.
