Empire In The Antipodes: Why The FBI's Wellington Office Is A Threat ToAotearoa
This move is not about safety or justice but about extending the reach of capital and control through surveillance and soft occupation. The narratives of 'cybercrime' and 'child exploitation' are being used to justify foreign policing on Indigenous land, while drawing historical and contemporary connections to colonialism, Five Eyes hegemony, and capitalist control.
Policing Beyond Borders
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is, by legal definition, a domestic agency. It exists to enforce U.S. federal law on U.S. soil. Yet the FBI now operates over 60 Legal Attaché offices around the world, and the new Wellington branch has been upgraded to become one of them, tasked with responsibility not only for Aotearoa but also for Niue, Samoa, the Cook Islands, Tonga, and even Antarctica. This is a global policing project masquerading as international cooperation.
The FBI has been present in New Zealand since 2017, managed through its Canberra office. What has changed is that now, the FBI is no longer a guest, it is a tenant with its own office, its own staff, and its own extraterritorial power. FBI Director Kash Patel's visit to New Zealand was not just administrative, it was ideological. At a press conference, he made clear that the new office was about 'countering the influence of the Chinese Communist Party in the Indo-Pacific.' While New Zealand ministers such as Winston Peters and Judith Collins quickly distanced themselves from this overt geopolitical framing, the cat was already out of the bag. The FBI is not just here to stop online paedophiles or drug traffickers. It is here to enforce the strategic goals of the American empire.
The backlash was immediate. Beijing condemned the comments as provocative and destabilising. Thousands of Kiwis expressed their anger online. Some posted furious responses on social media. This is not a fringe reaction. It is the instinct of people who know, whether consciously or intuitively, that what is being done in their name is not for their protection but for their submission.
Five Eyes, Many Lies
To understand the danger of this moment, one must understand the Five Eyes. Formed as a post-war intelligence alliance between the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, the Five Eyes has become a sprawling surveillance machine. It is a central pillar of what Edward Snowden exposed as the modern panopticon, a world where the internet is weaponised to track, manipulate, and suppress populations in the name of 'national security.'
In this context, the FBI's expansion is not a bureaucratic upgrade, it is an insertion of another gear in the machine. It deepens the convergence of policing, intelligence, and military strategy across the Anglosphere. It makes Aotearoa even more complicit in the surveillance of its own people and of Pacific nations long exploited by Western colonial powers.
It also deepens our vulnerability. New Zealand has tried to maintain a strategic balance in its foreign relations – reliant on China as its biggest trading partner, aligned with the U.S. and UK through Five Eyes. This tightrope walk has always been fraught, but the FBI's presence risks turning it into a fall. Patel's anti-China statements not only escalated diplomatic tension, they forced New Zealand to pick a side in the increasingly dangerous theatre of U.S.- China competition.
And that choice is being made without democratic consent. The FBI was not invited by the people of Aotearoa. It was welcomed in by a political class eager to please its imperial friends while hiding behind the language of public safety.
The Carceral Smokescreen
The official justification for the FBI's expansion rests on the pillars of 'transnational crime' – cyber intrusions, child exploitation, organised crime, and drug trafficking. These are serious issues. But serious problems do not justify authoritarian solutions. What we are witnessing is the use of moral panic to expand surveillance infrastructure and carceral logic.
The FBI has a long and brutal history, not just of policing crime, but of repressing dissent. From the COINTELPRO operations that targeted civil rights leaders, Black radicals, and Indigenous activists, to the post-9/11 entrenchment of racial profiling and entrapment, the FBI has always served the preservation of white supremacist, capitalist, and imperial power.
Its arrival in Aotearoa is not neutral. It is not humanitarian. It is not apolitical. It is the expansion of a violent institution that answers to a violent empire.
Moreover, the notion that transnational crime is best tackled through foreign intelligence agencies ignores the real roots of harm. Why is organised crime flourishing? Because economic systems create desperation, exclusion, and inequality. Why are children exploited? Because patriarchal capitalism commodifies bodies and thrives on secrecy and silence. Why is cybercrime rampant? Because capitalism digitised the economy without care for consent, justice, or digital sovereignty.
To address these harms, we do not need more spies. We need more justice, real, transformative, community-rooted justice. The FBI is not the answer. It is part of the problem.
Pacific Subjugation, Again
That the FBI's jurisdiction includes Niue, Tonga, Samoa, and the Cook Islands is not a coincidence, it is a strategy. The Pacific is being recolonised under the guise of security. With China increasing its presence in the region through economic partnerships and infrastructure projects, the U.S. is rushing to reassert dominance, not through aid or diplomacy, but through militarisation and surveillance.
The FBI in Wellington will act as a regional hub, not just for information gathering, but for soft coercion. These nations, many still grappling with the legacies of colonisation and neo-colonial governance, are now being brought into the orbit of American law enforcement without meaningful consent or reciprocal benefit.
This is not security. This is soft occupation. And it must be opposed.
The People Say No
One of the few hopeful elements in this bleak development has been the public response. Aotearoa is not asleep. Many see this for what it is, imperial overreach dressed in bureaucratic clothing. The protests, online and offline, speak to a population that still values sovereignty, autonomy, and transparency.
As anarcho-communists, we believe in people power. We believe that real security comes not from surveillance but from solidarity. We believe that no foreign agency should operate on these lands without the consent of the people who live here, and that even then, true justice is built from the ground up, not imposed from above.
The anger is growing, and it is righteous. But we must go beyond protest. We must organise.
A Call to Resistance
This moment is a call to action. The FBI's presence is only the most visible layer of a deeper system that treats Aotearoa and the Pacific as pawns in a geopolitical chess game. To resist this system, we must connect the dots.
We must link the FBI to the NZ Police, to the SIS, to the Five Eyes, to the prison-industrial complex, to colonial land theft, to capitalism's extraction and surveillance economies. We must say not just 'No FBI', but also 'No prisons. No cops. No empires. No bosses.'
We must demand an end to foreign policing and a beginning to something else, something rooted in mana motuhake, tino rangatiratanga, and collective liberation.
The opening of an FBI office in Wellington is not an isolated event. It is a sign of a system expanding, a machine tightening its grip. But every expansion carries the seeds of its own opposition.
The future we want will not be built by diplomats or directors. It will be built by us, together, from below, in defiance of the states and empires that seek to divide and dominate us.
Let this be our line in the sand. We were not born to be watched. We were born to be free.
https://awsm.nz/empire-in-the-antipodes-why-the-fbis-wellington-office-is-a-threat-to-aotearoa/
AOTEAROA WORKERS SOLIDARITY MOVEMENT
aotearoa_anarchism@riseup.net
AWSM.NZ
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