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US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth speaks during a plenary session of the 23rd Shangri-La Dialogue summit in Singapore on 30 May 2026.
Analysis - In the long list of 10 countries the US Secretary of War has praised for "stepping up" to "changing the playbook" on military strength in Indo-Pacific, New Zealand was nowhere to be seen.
"Freeloading" was the term Pete Hegseth instead applied to a country that had just put another couple of billion dollars from Budget 2026 towards the bipartisan goal set last year of doubling spending on defence to 2 percent of GDP by 2032.
Hegseth had used his speech at the Shangri-La Dialogue security summit at the weekend to dangle a carrot and a stick.
