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Dewey Sim

In the first few weeks of this year alone, the leaders of two of the five “eyes” in the world’s oldest intelligence-sharing alliance signalled they were ready to rethink their relationship with China.
First came Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and then this week it was the turn of his British counterpart, Keir Starmer.
And in both cases, the visits have prompted warnings from US President Donald Trump.
As Western economies grapple with the unpredictability and at times hostility of the White House’s policies, Canada and Britain have both sought to find a new way to work with China – a country that the Five Eyes has accused of espionage.
The shift is a “tough balancing act” for the alliance’s non-US members – which also includes Australia and New Zealand – but they are unlikely to pull out of the grouping just yet, according to observers.


The Five Eyes was formed in the aftermath of World War II, built on an agreement between the United States and Britain to exchange foreign intelligence. The grouping was expanded to Canada, Australia and New Zealand and continued throughout the Cold War.
Its scope has widened in recent years, going beyond intelligence to encompass security issues and human rights concerns. Under the Joe Biden administration, Washington pushed to strengthen the alliance, including closer alignment on policies related to China.
In particular, it issued coordinated warnings about Chinese espionage, stepped up cooperation on export-control enforcement involving sensitive technologies and criticised Beijing over the Hong Kong Legislative Council elections in 2021.
But with Biden gone and the Trump administration pursuing an “America first” policy, the other Five Eyes countries are reconsidering their options with the world’s second-largest economy.
Carney’s visit yielded several agreements, including a commitment from China to lower tariffs on Canadian canola seeds. Trump later threatened tariffs on Canada if it followed through on a trade deal with China and warned that “China will eat Canada alive”.


Similarly, Starmer said on Thursday that China and the UK were making “really good progress” on issues including Chinese tariffs on whisky, prompting Trump to warn that it was “very dangerous” for London to deal with Beijing.
But Trump is the only Five Eyes leader not to have visited China in the past seven months.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has made the trip twice since coming to power in 2022. Most recently, in July, Beijing and Canberra reaffirmed a commitment to a “mature, stable, and constructive bilateral relationship” in spite of confrontations on security issues and ownership of Darwin Port.
New Zealand has also maintained close trade ties with China. In June, Xi told visiting Prime Minister Christopher Luxon that China had “no fundamental conflict of interest” with Wellington.
Muhammad Faizal Abdul Rahman, a research fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, said the Trump administration’s transactional foreign policy, including the intimidation of US allies, had undermined the trust and norms of cooperation that formed the foundation of the Five Eyes alliance.
“Four of its members now face a tough balancing act of managing a mercurial member –the US – while striving to achieve the best outcomes for their national security and economic performance by possibly compartmentalising these two priority areas,” he said.
Muhammad Faizal said Washington’s actions had created opportunities for China to persuade US allies to reduce hostility and improve stability in their relations.
He suggested that “as long as the alliance members continue to share the same perception of China as a strategic threat and the US does not become an actual military threat to its allies, the alliance will continue” although it might be “shaky”.
Ivano di Carlo, senior policy analyst at the European Policy Centre in Brussels, said Five Eyes countries had operated in a relatively predictable US policy environment under the Biden administration. But with Trump in the White House, “that certainty has faded amid more erratic messaging and actions”.
According to Carlo, this shift was unlikely to prompt countries to turn away from the alliance but it may strengthen incentives for governments and businesses to pursue a more “pragmatic re-engagement with China”.
And while each country’s engagement with China did not mean that the alliance would be undermined, such contact could bring new sources of friction and strain internal cohesion, potentially limiting the alliance’s ability to operate at full strategic capacity.
“Increasing engagement with China by individual Five Eyes countries may complicate certain aspects related to intelligence cooperation,” he said, but added that it was “unlikely to fundamentally weaken the core mechanism of intelligence sharing”.


On the plane to China earlier this week, Starmer told reporters that Britain would not have to choose between closer ties with the US or China, adding its relations with the United States remained “one of the closest … we hold”, including in defence, security, intelligence and trade.
Zeno Leoni, assistant professor in defence studies at King’s College London, said Five Eyes countries had been through a “strategic reality check” regarding China since the first Trump administration, noting that countries had consistently sought to preserve functional economic ties with Beijing.
At this point, he suggested, “it is more a question of adaptation rather than a fundamental rupture” of the alliance.
“In this context, uncertainty emanating from Washington may actually be leveraged domestically to give greater visibility to pro-China voices and to justify the pursuit of business opportunities, rather than triggering a wholesale realignment,” he said.
Given that the Five Eyes focused on intelligence sharing rather than a broader political or economic alignment, deeper economic engagement between member countries and China was unlikely to undermine the alliance, Leoni said.
“That said, the rise of China does pose an existential challenge to the Five Eyes’ original raison d’être,” he added, citing a markedly different strategic environment today compared with its Cold War origins.
“Competition with China is less ideological, more geographically and militarily localised, and significantly complicated by deep economic interdependence compared to the competition with the USSR. This creates a degree of ambiguity that did not exist during the Cold War,” he said.
Leoni said he expected the Five Eyes to maintain robust intelligence cooperation even as its members continued to engage economically with China. But clear red lines remained, such as in strategically sensitive sectors.


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The White House’s ‘America first’ strategy is prompting alliance members to take another look at their relationship with Beijing


The White House’s ‘America first’ strategy is prompting alliance members to take another look at their relationship with Beijing.


As Canada and UK hit refresh on China ties, is this the end of Five Eyes?

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The White House’s ‘America first’ strategy is prompting alliance members to take another look at their relationship with Beijing

The White House’s ‘America first’ strategy is prompting alliance members to take another look at their relationship with Beijing