New Zealand is now “uncomfortable” in the “Five Eyes” intelligence group, the Voice of America News reports, and has “expressed reluctance” to sign joint statements from partners United States, Britain, Australia, and Canada on human rights issues in China.

Last year, New Zealand was absent from a Five Eyes joint statement on Hong Kong, and some intelligence officials perceive New Zealand “on the edge of viability,” as a member of the alliance, because of a “supine” attitude toward China. As other critics put it, New Zealand sold out to China, a charge that might better apply to other Five Eyes members.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police once handled Canada’s intelligence matters, but during the 1980s, the RCMP gave way to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), which in 1989 destroyed files on Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. Back in 1952, with Joseph Stalin still in power, Trudeau traveled to the USSR and touted the Soviet regime.

The CSIS also destroyed files on former Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson. As James Barros explained in “No Sense of Evil: The Espionage Case of E. Herbert Norman,” former Communist Elizabeth Bentley named Pearson as a collaborator with Soviet intelligence. An intelligence service that destroys such crucial files can hardly be regarded as reliable.

As prime minister, Pierre Trudeau took an anti-American stance while praising Communist dictatorships in Cuba and China, establishing diplomatic relations with China in 1970. His son, Justin Trudeau, shows similar affection for China. In 2013, Justin Trudeau expressed “a level of admiration I actually have for China” because “their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime.”

The Trudeau government invited the People’s Liberation Army for joint training exercises at a Canadian Forces base in the province of Ontario. On Justin Trudeau’s watch, Chinese scholars and students enjoyed unfettered access to Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) in Winnipeg. There, Dr. Xiangguo Qiu transferred a load of deadly pathogens to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), all without the slightest interference from the CSIS. Qiu and her husband Keding Cheng are now missing, and the RCMP won’t say if it knows where the couple might be.

In addition to the deadly pathogens, the WIV received funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, channeled through the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci since 1984. With evidence mounting that the WIV is the source of the virus that causes COVID-19, President Joe Biden ordered American intelligence to investigate. For Angelo Codevilla, a former staffer with the Senate Intelligence Committee, this was “a comical attempt to avoid being discredited by the unraveling narrative that China’s role in the pandemic is another manifestation of racism,” but there is more to it.

“U.S. intelligence does not possess hard facts to prove exactly what happened in that lab,” contends Codevilla, a former professor of international relations at Boston University. “Nor does U.S. intelligence have sources in China, human or technical, placed and uncompromised, capable of yielding such information.” So when it comes to China, U.S. “eyes” do not exactly boast 20/20 vision. That is true of the entire Five Eyes alliance, which goes back some 70 years.

As Mark Steyn recalls, in the 1990s, when communism was on the ropes, the United States committed “perhaps the biggest strategic miscalculation by any great power in human history.” Instead of closing ranks with democratic allies and cracking down on China, the United States gave favored status to the Communist regime. This came after the Tiananmen Square massacre, with no demand for free elections and no accounting for the scores of millions murdered during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, as “The Black Book of Communism” (pdf) recounts.

The Chinese regime was supposed to become more democratic but remains more repressive and expansionist than ever. Five Eyes member Australia seems most aware of the threat. Prime Minister Scott Morrison is on record that, “our challenge is nothing less than to reinforce, renovate, and buttress a world order that favors freedom.” That is not the message from Joe Biden as senator and one of the loudest voices to include China in the World Trade Organization, with no demand for democratic reforms.

After New Zealand, Mark Steyn predicts, Canada might be “the next to go” from the Five Eyes, but in practice Canada is already dysfunctional, or worse. Justin Trudeau is every bit as anti-American as his father and the prime minister admires China for its “basic dictatorship.”

Canada invited the People’s Liberation Army for joint exercises on Canadian soil, and looked the other way while Dr. Qiu transferred deadly pathogens to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That such a nation would also collaborate with China as an “eye” on the United States is not much of a stretch.