Amir Latif Arain<\/p>\n
23 July 2026\u2022Update: 23 July 2026<\/p>\n
New Zealand and Papua New Guinea signed a defense cooperation agreement late Wednesday that will expand defense dialogue, training, military exercises and personnel exchanges, an official statement said.<\/p>\n
New Zealand Defense Minister Chris Penk and his Papua New Guinea counterpart Elias Kapavore signed a Statement of Intent on Defense Cooperation for 2026-2029 in Papua New Guinea, as Wellington seeks to deepen security ties in the Pacific amid growing strategic competition and China’s growing foothold.<\/p>\n
\u201cPNG Defense Minister Elias Kapavore and I today signed the Statement of Intent on Defense Cooperation 2026-2029, which will further deepen our cooperation and engagement through more defense dialogue, training, exercises and personnel exchanges,\u201d Penk said in a statement.<\/p>\n
The signing builds on the New Zealand-Papua New Guinea Statement of Partnership 2025-2029, signed last year, which reaffirmed the two nations\u2019 security, defense and economic ties.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn an increasingly volatile world, Pacific nations like ours are stronger when we work closely together to respond to the complex security challenges affecting our region,\u201d Penk added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Amir Latif Arain 23 July 2026\u2022Update: 23 July 2026 New Zealand and Papua New Guinea signed a defense…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":539979,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[111,43,139,69,201078],"class_list":["post-539978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-sitekeywords"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=539978"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539978\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/539979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=539978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=539978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=539978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}