Democracy Project<\/a>, <\/i>said the deal could become a “self-fulfilling prophecy” for conflict.<\/p>\n“Indo-Pacific countries all around the region are re-arming and spending more on their militaries,” Miller said.<\/p>\n
Japan approved its biggest military buildup since the Second World War last year and Dr Miller said New Zealand was reviewing its defence policy which would likely lead to more spending.<\/p>\n
“I worry that the AUKUS deal will only make things worse,” he said.<\/p>\n
“The more of these kinds of power projections, and the less dialogue we have, the more likely it is that we are ultimately going to bring about this conflict that we’re all trying to avoid.<\/p>\n
“I think we do need to think about de-escalation even more and let’s not talk ourselves into World War III.”<\/p>\n
Miller said tensions had grown since Russia invaded Ukraine and analysts had changed their view on how likely China was to invade Taiwain.<\/p>\n
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.<\/em><\/span><\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Koroi Hawkins, RNZ Pacific editor, and Caleb Fotheringham, RNZ Pacific journalist A Pacific elder and former secretary-general of the Pacific Islands Forum says Pacific leaders need to sit up and pay closer attention to AUKUS and the Indo-Pacific strategy and China\u2019s response to them. Speaking from Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea, Dame Meg<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":400,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[789,35380,175,14627,190,4332,6804,8393,432,5,495,6,16161,58932,58945,10,10994,10098,54227,30595,35557,12,368,49852,417,1743,1395,1,631],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1033745"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/400"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1033745"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1033745\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1035341,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1033745\/revisions\/1035341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1033745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1033745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1033745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}