Once the formalities of honouring the late Pope wrap up in two to three weeks time, the conclave of Cardinals will go into seclusion. Some 253 of the current College of Cardinals can take part in the debate over choosing the next Pope, but only 138 of them are below the age of 80, and eligible to cast a vote.

Some 110 of those 138 electors were appointed by Pope Francis, but not all of them can be assumed to vote for someone (e.g. the acting Vatican secretary of state Pietro Parolin) likely to continue his work. To prevent such an outcome, bloc voting is expected – e.g. with European plus US conservatives uniting say, behind conservative African contenders Peter Turkson of Ghana, or Fridolin Ambongo Besungu of the Congo Republic. Peter Erdo of Hungary is a perennial conservative choice in the unlikely event of the conclave deciding to revert to the JP II/Benedict era.

If a dead-locked conclave is forced to look around for a moderate option, then Mario Grech of Malta would fit the bill, as would the Italian patriarch of Jerusalem, Pierbattista Pizzaballa. All of which suggests that a pontiff less liberal than Francis is likely to be chosen, even if it is Parolin.

God knows who the next Pope will be, but hasn’t spoken on the subject yet.

India, our new best friend

Reportedly, the global uncertainty being triggered by the US tariff wars has been motivating India to speed up its bilateral trade dealings with many countries, including New Zealand. After decades of reliance on its huge domestic market, India has recently signed trade deals with Australia, the UAE, and Oman, and is said to be “about 90%” of the way to concluding the FTA deal with the United Kingdom that it began to negotiate back in January, 2022.

All of India’s FTA deals come with special conditions and exemptions, with many of them aimed at protecting India’s small farmers. So New Zealand – which began its own FTA talks only in March – will need to temper its expectations about the content and the timing of an eventual deal. Side by side with India finally becoming a potential trade partner, India’s role as a potential defence player in the wider Indo-Pacific region has also come under scrutiny.

Basically, since the US is no longer a reliable defence partner, India has been presented with an opportunity to serve as a significant counterweight to China in the future defence alignments now taking shape in the Indo-Pacific.

Again though, the wider world – including New Zealand – will need to temper their expectations of India on defence issues as well. India has got some unfriendly neighbours – China and Pakistan – plus there has always been a potential for unrest to spill over from Myanmar, a country with which India shares a 1,600 kilometre long border to the north east. None of this is reflected in the amount – and the pattern – of India’s defence spending, or lack of it.

Thanks to PM Narendra Modi’s fiscal conservatism, defence spending has been nominally increasing, but – in reality – has been hitting historical lows as an overall share of the country’s budget. Thanks also to Modi’s populism, much of these nominal increases in defence spending have been spent on salaries, repairs, maintenance and on a remarkably lavish pension scheme. Taken together, these items eat up 72% of India’s annual defence budget. Weapons procurement has lagged badly as a result, with the budget for new weapons estimated to be actually running at below the inflation rate.

India is belatedly trying to play catch up, mainly by boosting its maritime capacity in the Indian Ocean region that it regards as its neighbourhood. The country also has been developing a homegrown defence industry and recently succeeded in landing its (a) one of its Russian MIG-29k planes and (b) one of its home-built light combat aircraft (LACs) on one of India’s two aircraft carriers. (A US company (General Electric) provided the jet engine and up to 80% of the LAC’s componentry.)

Significant shortfalls exist. As Professor Ian Hall of Griffiths University in Queensland recently pointed out: “India desperately needs drones, air defence systems, better tanks and fighting vehicles, fighter aircraft, and especially helicopters.” Bureaucratic delays have also reportedly stymied even the early selection process for major systems, such as those for fighter aircraft and conventional submarines.

Enter Trump

Donald Trump’s push for friends and allies to spend more on their own defence also comes with an expectation that this spending will be on US weapons systems. The US will be pressuring Modi to buy – for instance – American F35s fighters to counter the surprise announcement last December that Pakistan is about to buy 40 of China’s advanced J-35 fighters.

If India still wants to avoid blowing out the country’s overall budget by spending up large on defence, it could offer the Americans some non-cash equivalents (e.g access to bases). Yet at the very least, the US pressure to buy American (or else be punished with tariffs) will inhibit the growth of India’s indigenous arms industry, a sector that Modi has been touting as a centre of IT expertise, and a potential driver of future economic growth.

The US is putting the same kind of pressure on South Korea and Japan to step up as regional defence players. The point of all this to New Zealand? Yes, we do have to diversify away from our trade dependency on China, but India is not going to have anything like the same appetite for our dairy products. Ditto on defence. If we’re looking for a defence counterweight to China in this part of the world – since the US can no longer be relied on – then similarly, India has only a limited ability to play that role in the Indian Ocean, and even less capacity to add much of significance in the wider Indo-Pacific.

Surely, we need to be talking about these shifting alliances as we dutifully line up to spend $12 billion over the next four years on Defence. What should we be buying, from whom, in order to be interoperable with whom, to do what to which conceivable enemies – real or imaginary? At best, the likes of India, South Korea and Japan can fulfill only a fraction of the role from which an increasingly erratic and isolationist United States is withdrawing.

At present, we are surrendering most of these decisions to Canberra. This default setting looks like a vital strategic vulnerability in itself, even before we start talking about this or that piece of ageing equipment. As the Strategic Analysis Australia think tank put it in an extensive report released earlier this month: “An Australia that’s...clear about what it wants from America and what it’s willing to do to get that, is likely to be far more successful than an Australia that acts as if nothing has changed, and just sticks with older plans and approaches.”

New Zealand hasn’t taken that message on board. We seem more than happy to leave the hard Defence decisions to our old friends in Canberra, to fixate on staying inter-operable with Australia, and to act as if nothing has changed in Washington, either.

Waiting, on a silver cloud

Over the past few years, I’ve tried to push the great honky tonk singer/writer Gary Stewart onto anyone who has never heard of him. The sense of doom and tragedy in his music was matched by the cascading personal tragedies that led to his death in mid-December 2003.

Here, from his commercial high point in 1979 – not 1981, as it says on Youtube – is a TV clip of a song that he never recorded. Even its opening lines could come from a 19th century ballad (“Jesus make up my dying bed/ For I’ve been stung with a kiss of death”) but the theme is timeless. For hardcore Gary Stewart fans, the entire TV session from which this track is taken got up-loaded to Youtube only last year. The interview segment is worth it – despite the atrocious visuals – and the stop/start performances that precede it are incredible.

Amidst a whole raft of great singles (“Out of Hand” “Ten Years of This” “She’s Actin’ Single” “Drinking Thing” “Your Place Or Mine” “ etc etc) here’s another personal favourite:

© Scoop Media