Category: NZ foreign policy

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The Liberal Internationalist Delusion.

Now that the football World Cup is over and I have sated my thirst for the beautiful game for the time being, albeit with a very bitter taste at the end of the tournament given my background and team loyalties, I figure it is time to return to the real world. So let’s begin that effort by dispelling some misconceptions about what is and is not the global geopolitical and strategic situation at the moment.

As I have consistently written and said for some years now, liberal internationalism, the foundation of the Western-centric global order created during the Cold War and continued into the first decades of the post-Cold War era, is dead. Part of this is due to the shifts in the last four decades from a bipolar to a unipolar to a multipolar and now polycentric international system where emerging and declining great powers compete for influence and control. This long transitional moment (again, one that I have written and spoken about extensively on this blog and elsewhere), has been characterised by two major features: 1) rules and norms violations by an increasing number of actors; and 2) as a result, the resort to conflict as the systems regulator. The combination leads to uncertainty and a corresponding turn to self-interested national geopolitical strategies as a hedge against it. This has been likened to a return to the “state of nature” or international anarchy as Thomas Hobbes and many of his successors have referred to the core aspect of the international system.

The combination of these two features has fundamentally undermined the liberal international order because its very premise was to use international and multinational organisations as the basis for conflict resolution and adjudication of cross-border disputes as well as arbiters and mediators of international negotiations and agreements. An entire institutional edifice was constructed to this end, spanning agencies as diverse as the UN, WHO, ILO, International Whaling Commission (IWC), IAEA, ICC, and many more. This edifice was constructed on a latticework of laws, rules, regulations, treaties, agreements, compacts, and other instruments that are designed to regulate the interactions of actors in the fields in which they are situated. This includes defining what is acceptable and proper and unacceptable and improper behaviour in the subject areas where international and multinational institutional jurisdiction was applied (via conventions, treaties and ratifications).

What is notable about the liberal international order was that it operated on the basic premise that nation-States and other global actors would enter into collective agreements that in essence were self-binding in nature. As Jan Elster so eloquently pointed out in his book “Ulysses and the Sirens,” (which has nothing to do with current adaptations of the Homeric Epic) democracies and their rules, and by extension international organisations founded on a system of rules and norms that are designed to mediate conflict and lend predictability and regularity to international interactions amongst equals, were akin to nation-States strapping themselves to masts so as to avoid the temptation of pursuing immediate self-interests that could result in deleterious longer-term results, especially when other actors do the same. The wreckage of the League of Nations and other failed international experiments in collective governance prior to WW2 served as vivid reminder to the architects of the Cold War and post-Cold War orders that unfettered pursuit of national self-interest in a world without rules was a recipe for disaster. But adherence was always voluntary and sanctions were limited, porous and few.

However, as enlightened as the liberal international perspective was (“liberal” in the sense of being based on a belief in the perfectibility of human kind and the “civilising”” effects of rules and norms on individual and collective behaviour rather than as a political ideology), it suffered from an innate flaw. The entire institutional edifice that supported it was, beyond various fines and sanctions imposed on violators in specific areas, dependent on voluntary national enforcement of universal rules. This not only is an infringement on national sovereignty (presumably accepted by those involved), but also meant that in practice many international institutions lack the enforcement capability that otherwise would compel non-compliant actors to adhere to established rules and norms governing their behaviour. It is therefore left to individual nation-States and non-State actors, occasionally acting in concert with one another, to punish transgressors. But when doing so runs contrary to perceived national interests or diplomatic and military ties that otherwise bind compliant and non-compliant actors together, then the rules become unenforceable because no state will be capable or wiling to do so.

Consider the case the International Criminal Court (ICC). It has issued warrants for several senior Israeli officials, Russian president Vladimir Putin, and assorted human rights violators from various parts of the world. Yet the US, Israel, China, India and Russia, among others, are not party to the Rome Statute that created the ICC. They offer various justifications for this stance, most often boiling down to their fear that their citizens could be targeted for malicious prosecutions for activities that otherwise should consider to be reasons of State (raison d’état). The US is very explicit in rejecting ICC jurisdiction (and in fact is working to have it disbanded) because it fears that US military personnel will be arrested and tried for war crimes committed while in the service of US interests. It argues that if criminal investigations and prosecutions are to happen, they should happen in US courts, including military courts if necessary because justice in the US is universal, neutral and blind. (although Trump’s pardon of convicted war criminal Eddie Gallagher and many others puts paid to the notion of impartial justice for military and certain civilian defendants).

Whatever the merits of such arguments, in practice it means that the entire enforcement power of the ICC depends on individual nation-States and other actors willing to enforce its warrants and extradition requests. Besides various African countries that have surrendered former officials for assorted crimes against humanity, the Philippines recently agree to extradite former president Rodrigo Dutarte to The Hague for human rights violations when he was in office. He is now awaiting trial on those charges. In all of these cases, the political leaders that followed the accused in power made the decisions to permit their arrests and extraditions did so for what can charitably described as murky reasons rather than out of strong commitment to universal justice.

Conversely, although warrants are outstanding on them, Putin, Netanyahu and other Russian and Israeli officials remain at large because, well, who is going to arrest them? While it is true that they risk arrest if they travel outside their home States and allied countries (such as what happened to former Chilean dictator Agusto Pinochet when he traveled to the UK in the late 1990s), the truth is that they basically have impunity from prosecution. Putin has travelled to China and India and other states, including the US, and received red carpet welcomes. Netanyahu regularly visits the US. In fact, when New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani suggested that Netanyahu be arrested the next time he travels to the US, a chorus of indignation rose from across the political spectrum and civil society. To put it in personal terms: Friends do not let friends get hunted by the ICC.

On another front, it is now clear that the notion freedom of navigation is under serious threat. A cornerstone of the liberal international order institutionalised during the Cold War by the 1958 Convention on the High Seas and its sequels, it is now apparent that countries can and will interfere with commodity supply routes if and when they can. It is not just Iran that is flexing its muscle in the Strait of Hormuz, or the US replying with its counter-blockade, or the Houthis moving to close the Bab El Mandeb strait leading to and from the Red Sea. Chinese interference with shipping in the South China Sea and Taiwan Straits are a regular occurrence, especially involving vessels from regional neighbours, and government officials in Indonesia have expressed interest in imposing trilateral “maintenance fees” (i.e. Iranian-style tolls) along with Malaysia and Singapore in the Moluccan Straits. Others could well follow, including in the Bosphorus Strait and the Northern Passage across the Arctic. So far, although there is more talk than action, the era of unrestricted freedom of navigation appears to be ending because there is neither the will or capability to bring littoral or even remotely-based transgressors to heel.

The point of these digressions is to illustrate how weak the enforcement mechanisms are in the liberal international. order. While voluntary self-restraint and adherence to norms may be possible during times of relative peace and stability, those conditions disappear in moments of international systemic transition marked by conflict. In other words and to bring things back into contemporary focus: what was possible then is no longer possible now.

There is another factor that must be considered. The liberal international order was created by and for Global North white men. It is a product of imperialism and colonialism by the North in the Global South that was a means to keep order in the post-colonial moment during a time of Great Power competition. Although it never lacked for lackey’s and proxies in the South (say, people like Kofi Annan), the institutional edifice that I mentioned above was created to serve the interests of a Northern and Western-centric status quo. The rules and norms were Western ones. The major beneficiaries of the outcomes these institutions produced were Northern ones. The entire combine was posed in contraposition to Soviet alliance networks. Think of the activities of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and other international “aid” and development agencies. They may have done some good but ultimately whose interests did they serve first and foremost? At best, their record is mixed.

That is where the rise of the Global South, encapsulated in the creation of the so-called (and now expanded) BRICs bloc of countries, basically heralded the death knell of that North and Western-centric institutional bias. If the international institutional order is to preserve itself it will have to accommodate, genuinely this time, the interests of the Global South. That means more fairness, transparency and regional, national, ethnic and religious diversity in their decision-making structures. The Global South is here to stay as an international “player” given that the revolution in telecommunications and capital flows in an increasingly technopolar systemic constellation no longer finds exclusive root in the North. It will take time for these trends to crystallise, but the era of Western dominance of the international order, at least as we have known it since the end of WW2, is coming to an end.

Regrettably, in my opinion, the New Zealand foreign policy establishment (including academics, government officials, civil society organisations and interest groups) overwhelming adhere to the belief in liberal internationalism. It makes sense at one level because small countries need protection from the “might makes right” logics of Great Powers. Self-binding international institutions, rules and laws offer that to them but constrain the prerogatives of the strongest actors when measured by hard power variables. Large states are prevented from applying their full weight against smaller or weaker states because of the buffering effect of international institutions that cannot be easily manipulated (although they have been and are in practice). That imposed collective restraint poses a problem for Great Powers in times of flux.

At another level there is a delusional aspect to this. Along with the fiction of NZ’s foreign policy independence (Malaysia says the same thing about its international position), NZ elites involved in foreign-policy making continue to speak of the liberal international order as if it was a universal good (when it was demonstrably not regardless of its many positive features) and is still viable in spite of the obvious challenges and changes that are undermining it. Some speak of “reform” of international institutions, while others nod towards Canadian Prime Minster Mark Carney’s call for a compact of Middle Powers to balance Great Power competition and its trickle down, ripple or spillover effects (the US has outright rejected the proposal and instead asserted its unilateral America First “Donroe” Doctrine as the basis for its engagement with the world. Similarly giants like China and India prefer to exercise their power in a traditional self-interested way with or without international institutions, so their support for a Middle Power alliance network is lukewarm at best).

I assume that the support base for liberal internationalism in the 21st century is comprised of constructivists (those who believe that institutions shape behavior and when reproduced via norms, rules, laws and procedures create a form of bureaucratic inertia that make some behavioral outcomes unthinkable, much less acceptable–say, like genocide), and idealists who believe that appeals to the better angels of human nature can be encouraged via institutional means. There is also a more darker interpretation of intellectual motivation behind the liberal internationalist worldview, which is to cloak Western post-colonial dominance in a web of “enlightened” organizational networks self-ratified as legitimate at the global level.

The majority consensus in support of liberal internationalism in NZ is led by Professor Robert Patman of Otago University, many of his students in government and academia, and people like former PM (and Patman associate) Helen Clark. Professor Patman is erudite and knowledgeable, and is conscious about where his strengths lie. To his credit, he knows his stuff and also knows what he does not know (which is a sign of intellectual maturity, in my opinion). But he seems to be loathe to see, or at least admit, what sits before him: when it comes to liberal internationalism, the thrill is gone. Recently he has shown signs that he recognises that there is a problem with the “rules based system” and has added that angle to his analytic repertorie, suggesting that institutional reform (rebirth?) is not only possible but necessary. A gaggle of other pundits echo and megaphone his thoughts without the analytic depth or breadth that he displays, but the effect is magnified. Most of those who talk and do foreign policy New Zealand remain in the liberal internationalist camp.

There are two exceptions to this rule when it comes to local foreign policy expertise (as I see it). Dr. Rueben Staff (a Patman student) is a realist who decamped to Europe when opportunities for academic advancement in NZ got limited. He accepts Great Power competition as given and has a pro-Western “bias” that dovetails at times with the local liberal internationalists. But he is more focused on hard power rather than soft power and the need for small countries to make hard choices rather than straddle the fence between opposing Great Power orientations. He is not naive about what happened when voluntary consensus and mutual self-restraint break down. Although he and I differ on various things, he is very worth reading and listening to when he does feature in the NZ media (Patman is ubiquitous on that score).

The other “contrarian” or “non-conformist” (my labels) is Van Jackson at Victoria University of Wellington. I do not know him personally but I understand that he held a position similar to mine (different regional focus) in the Pentagon during the Obama years (my tenure happened under Clinton), and he has been quite prolific turning out academic publications, opinion pieces, policy reports, videos and sub stack essays since he entered academia. He also has a progressive activist orientation, something that is rare in any foreign policy circles, much less those in NZ. If I had to pigeonhole him I would call him a neo-Marxist globalist. It is a clumsy term and he may not approve of it, but to me it captures his working class orientation and big picture comprehension. As with Steff and Patman, his is a voice worth listening to.

Beyond them and not including defense specialists and intelligence/security analysts who do not focus on the theoretical and conceptual bases of approaches to foreign policy and international relations, the bench gets thin when it comes to comparative foreign policy and international relations analysis. Although the corporate media has a habit of featuring lesser lights, it does not matter because all in one way or another embrace liberal internationalist mantras and parrot the rationales offered by more notable defenders of the liberal international status quo. The trouble, again, is that with the exception of the likes of Steff and Jackson (coming from different perspectives), they live in a world that is more magical realism than realistic and where things are assumed rather than critically evaluated. I have not asked Patman and his liberal international colleagues this question directly since I no longer travel in their professional or social circles, but I wonder if their ongoing faith in and and support for liberal internationalism is more an aspirational expression of hope rather than a recognition of real time fact.

In any event, the international system does need re-ordering. But like alcoholism, there has to be a recognition of the problem of before a solution can be soberly offered. For the moment we are stalled at denial, and when not that, at the stage where cosmetic changes are thought to suffice if people would just coalesce round the wish that it be so.

Alas, that is not to be. As The Raven quoth in E.A. Poe’s 1845 poem,

“Nevermore.“

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Playing with numbers.

Reaction to US Secretary of Defense (he prefers to call it “of War”) Pete “Kegseth” Hegseth’s comments that NZ was “freeloading” on the US because it does not spend 3.5% of GDP on defense was predictable if shallow for the most part. Most reasonable commentators, including–surprisingly–Don Brash, found the figure to be ludicrous on the face of it, and as someone said, perhaps intended to be aspirational rather than realistic. That is a very polite way of phrasing things. Predictably, the government responded by pointing to its pledge to spend 2%GDP on defense in the next decade, although it was vague on the how and why’s of the increase other than repeating the recent mantra that NZ is located in an increased threat environment.

The impolite way of phrasing things is that the call for NZ to spend 3.5% of GDP on defense is a mastubatory pipe dream by a sweaty-palmed war fetishist white nationalist alcoholic “Alpha male” wanna-be by the name of Pete Hegseth. It has no basis in any discernible fact and it bears no relationship to any known strategic reality. Like most of what he says, Hegseth’s demand is a blustery babble of bullying rhetorical incontinence, much like his purported US war plan for its attack on Iran.

So let’s consider the facts.

The only countries that spend 3.5% of GDP on “defense” are authoritarian, war-mongering and/or garrison states (a garrison state is one that is besieged by hostile adversaries, like Ukraine, Iran and Taiwan). Most liberal democracies come nowhere close to that benchmark, and in fact until MAGA madness overtook US defense policy, the so-called “2 percent standard” where NATO members contributed that amount of their GDP to their collective defense was considered to be on the high end of the scale, especially for smaller states and particularly for those that did not have frontline borders with hostile actors like Russia. Two percent is already a stretch for most countries. 3.5% is untethered to the realities of most national security calculations.

A brief look at global GDP expenditures on defense tells the story: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS

Anyone with a modicum of understanding of democratic politics knows that (unlike the US) most democracies prioritize domestic policy areas that immediately affect voting constituencies. These include health, welfare, housing, education, retirement benefits and other public goods that maintain the material bases of public support for a given government, and more generally for democracy as a form of governance (as opposed to, say, various types of authoritarianism). Expenditures on defense and security (including on intelligence services) tend to be of lower priority and directly related to exposure to threats to national interests, including but not limited to the physical integrity and sovereignty of a given democratic state. Since threats can be indirect, distant or too large to be handled alone, many democracies forge security alliances and pacts with larger like-minded or strategically-aligned partners. NATO is an example of that, as is the Australian-New Zealand bilateral defense pact and various regional security agreements.

One of the advantages of such collective security agreements is that it reduces the need for individual countries to increase their defense spending to levels that draw resources away from non-security domestic spending. In military terms, collective security agreements are supposed to be a form of force multiplier in which smaller partners exchange the mantle of protection from larger partners by assuming roles in support of common objectives and interests that the larger partners cannot or prefer not to do by themselves (say humanitarian assistance or peacekeeping missions).

What the US is demanding, therefore, is contrary to the spirit as well as intent of democratic collective security. It threatens to withdraw its security “cover” from countries unless they spend more on defense than the US does itself (the US is at 3.4% of GDP spent on defense while actively involved in several conflicts of its choosing). Moreover, this one-size-fits-all spending baseline not only ignores the reality of domestic politics in most liberal democracies other than the US. It also ignores the geopolitical realities of different states. The US is a continental country surrounded by blue water and non-threatening land neighbours that has a neo-imperialist foreign policy and war-mongering constituencies that drive it to pursue continuous wars that it does not necessarily fight to win: instead, it must find foreign enemies to fight in order to justify its international behaviour and provide sustenance to its military-industrial complex (which is a motor force of the US economy). It fights not to win but because it can, and because it has domestic actors that materially benefit from perpetuating the suffering of others.

Liberal democracies like NZ are cut from a different cloth. Their threat environments are often different to that of the US and, for that matter, from each other in most instances. So the cookie-cutter approach to security and defense spending demanded by Kegseth and his minions, as well as parallel demands that defense policy of US partners dovetail and overlap in the interest of “interoperability” and strategic integration, falls short of recognizing the specific threat environments that other States may have to cope with, and therefore the strategic perspectives that they need to adopt in response. The international community, both in peace and in conflict, is not as US-centric as some might think. Force integration and joint operations is not a “ready to wear” clothes rack, either in terms of objectives as well as capabilities. This reality is lost on the MAGA administration.

Beyond the issue of a blunderbuss approach to defense spending in the aggregate, something that perhaps is because of the US’s own history of weapons development and procurement, it is not the total amount of GDP spent on defense that matters but what that money is spent on. Spending money on soon-to-be obsolescence platforms like the recently announced “Trump class” battleships (actually, non-battleship surface warships), is utter folly and often driven by non-military or non-strategic considerations like providing jobs to local constituencies (as is the case with the AUKUS nuclear submarine project in Australia). In an age of AI, minituarization and automated weapons technologies like drones, satellites and submersibles, military procurement and replenishment policies must be driven not by some arbitrary financial baseline but by literally getting more efficient bang for the buck. Threat environments and internal resource constraints should determine what weapons systems and support infrastructure are needed and what strategic policies should be used to deploy them. After that, the guiding principle should be to maximize value per dollar, not reach some arbitrary spending threshold.

All of this presumably happens against the background of a well thought-out geopolitical and geostrategic perspective. “Strategic culture” refers to a State’s historical approach to its external environment, one that weaves political, diplomatic, economic and military theory and capabilities into concrete practice. In this light NZ represents a somewhat odd case, as it has a Army-centric military despite being a maritime state (with a very weak Navy and virtually no Air Force), responds more to allied threat assessments than its own, adopts contradictory if not juxtaposed trade and security policies (trading preferentially with an emerging Great Power while aligning itself with a declining Great Power that is an avowed adversary of the former), professes to be idealist and pacifist in orientation (self-styling as a “champion” of the international rules based order and having an “independent” foreign policy) when in fact it behaves in an internal interest group-driven and externally clientalistic, ethically-agnostic fashion governed by short-term objectives. Some might say that this is a pragmatic approach; others might call it amoral, unprincipled and opportunistic.

Although many Defense White Papers and other policy papers have been produced outlining NZ’s purported vision of its place in the world, the threats it believes it must confront and the means by which it proposes to do so, what emerges from reading them is something more akin to strategic incoherence. We get much description of events and conditions that are influenced by the perceptions of larger partners, but we are not told precisely why we configure that NZDF and intelligence services in the way that we do. For example, the PRC is clearly considered by NZ and its security partners to be the major extra-regional threat to the South Pacific, but we are never told exactly why (Influence operations? “Dollar diplomacy?” Security pacts with Pacific Island nations? Other covert activities? Different value systems?). Much is alluded to but little is presented in the way of concrete evidence.

The same was true for the nearly two decades of NZ intelligence community intelligence assessments that jihadists, both foreign and domestic, were the greatest terrorist threat to NZ and its interests. This responded more to the expectations of NZ’s intelligence patrons in the 5 Eyes network and beyond rather than the probability of a jihadist attack in NZ. In fact, not a single such thing occurred in spite of many media-driven scares and episodic arrests, during a period in which rightwing neo-Nazi extremism, including a well documented presence in NZ that remains to this day, were virtually ignored in annual intelligence threat assessments. Until March 15, 2019, that is.

Recent NZ threat assessments like those mentioned are presented as fact at a time when the US has gone rogue under Trump, killing hundreds of civilians on the open seas without warrant or evidence, kidnaping the leader of a sovereign state, threatened to annex NATO allies, launched an opportunistic war of aggression under false pretences against Iran at the behest and in conjunction with another, in fact genocidal rogue state, kowtows to an authoritarian neo-imperialist aggressor in Europe, threatens the overthrow of the Cuban regime while subjecting that country to a total fuel blockade, slaps punitive tariffs for political reasons on governments that do not come to the US heel and spends US taxpayer money on openly influencing foreign elections in favour of its preferred candidates–who exactly is the clear and imminent threat here? And yet the US is not mentioned in NZ threat assessments once–not once–other than in oblique mentions of “Great Power Competition” affecting our part of the world. Yeah right. Meanwhile our military brass and civilian defense establishment court favour with US weapons manufacturers and government security officials without a shred of light cast on their activities and the reasons for them. So US good, PRC bad–but we trade more with the bad guys than the supposed good ones.

There are no parliamentary debates about these issues, much less public discussion of things like why the 2%GDP spend on defense criteria must be followed by NZ in the first place. Is it because NZ is a NATO partner? Is it because Trump threatens us with sanctions or tariffs if we do not obey? Or is it because in order to provide for some measure of self-defence we need to increase budgetary allotments for specific weapons systems and their logistical infrastructure? What, in fact, is the purpose of our defense forces? Territorial resistance against foreign invasion and occupation? Expeditionary service to our security masters? Global good citizen participation in multinational operations? What should be the emphasis of our forces? Peacekeeping and/or humanitarian operations (using military engineers and medics)? Special forces? Infantry without armor or air support? Coastal defense? Regional policing? Force support to Australian or other partner militaries? Civil defense?

In sum, there is much more to drawing up a defense budget than using some drunk US official’s number blocks as a guideline. But because the toddler’s math logic is strong with that one, and because he sits atop a very powerful death machine to which NZ is connected in multiple ways, NZ must be very calibrated in its response. For that it needs to truthfully know exactly what it needs to defend against, for how long given current and near future government resources and threat scenarios, and what tools are best suited to the task once national security priorities are honestly defined and operationalised given the fluid context of the times.

Having done that, and only then, can NZ tell Hegseth to shove his 3.5%GDP demand where the sun don’t shine.

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Cowardice disguised as prudence.

Here is a short re-post from my other social media. It is a question about foreign policy incompetence, cowardice and coalition politics.

After much public hinting, 5 Eyes partners Australia, Canada and the UK delayed announcing recognition of the Palestinian right to Statehood in order for NZ join them against an intransigent US stance. NZ has not, so they have now gone ahead with the announcement before the UN General Assembly this week. That begs the question: What favour does NZ expect to curry from its supine obsequiousness to the US and Israel and from who, exactly? Or are internal NACTFIRST politics and/or interest group lobbying steering its approach (against the advice of the diplomatic corps)? Either way, the position is untenable as well as indefensible.

There is a tail-wags-the-dog aspect to this, with David Seymour being the tail. The NACTCFIRST leaders may have been waiting to see how the non-US 5 Eyes partners formally announced their stance (moral cowardice masquerading as pragmatism) , but Seymour’s loose talk about non-recognition (conflating Hamas with Palestine while doing so) undermined that. Now NZ looks gutless on the world stage even if Winston voices the eunuch’s lament about his DPM usurper. Real pragmatic logic would have been to read the global room (not hard), see the 5 Eyes non-US partner hints and UN condemnations of Israeli genocide as directional cues and go with the flow, ride the coattails, recognise the obvious and be on the right side of history.

But NACTFIRST did not. They are an omnishambles on their way to becoming a clown car dumpster fire that is now not only negatively impacting the material and spiritual lives of voters and residents on the domestic front, but, pragmatically, on NZ’s image abroad.

NZ has gone from being clean and green to ethically lean and mean.

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Some comments on NZ politics.

I had some time on my hands the past few days so spent more attention than usual consuming news about NZ domestic politics. My interests tend to lie further afield, but recent government assaults on Maori rights, women’s pay equity, constitutional neutrality, environmental, health and safety regulations, equitable taxation policy, state sector employment, Labour’s pandemic response and assorted other lesser insults have drawn me, perhaps like a moth to flame, to seek some illumination on the local political scene. These are a few tidbits that I took away this week., translated into social media posts.

  1. Chloe Swarbrick’s remarks about the government’s cowardice on the issue of Palestinian statehood in the wake of Israeli actions in Gaza.:

First all, Swarbrick is correct. If only six coalition MPs had some moral-ethical courage, then NZ could join the majority of the international community, including three of the 5 Eyes partners, in condemning Israel’s collective punishment of all Palestinians for the sins of Hamas on October 7, 2023, including the IDF’s use of ethnic cleansing and mass starvation as a means to that end. For that she was told to apologise by the Speaker (and National MP) for using the phrase “if six…members had a spine” and when she did not, ordered to leave the debating chamber. and later “named.” This is my comment on social media: “Peters, Jones and Seymour voice ugly boorish insults against their opponents (including racist taunts) and are allowed to remain in the House. Swarbrick correctly points out the spineless behaviour of government MPs regarding Gaza and gets thrown out. So much for Speaker impartiality” (referencing routine remarks made by the NZ First and Act leaders).

Also, as an aside to the particulars of this case, I should note that in light of prior history by Brownlee and other conservative MPs when it comes to progressive female members, there is a whiff of misogyny in the ruling. As a relative said to me (paraphrased here), male MPs can be loud, rude, condescending and bombastic when speaking to the House, but women cannot get angry or raise their voices even in defense of universal values. Now, I realise that Brownlee fashions himself as “old school” when it comes to parliamentary ethics and protocols, but if these boy’s club unwritten rules are part of the “old school” way of doing parliamentary politics, I say that he and others of his ilk need to be woken from their Rip Van Winkle stupor and shown the door.

By way of a broader backdrop, we should be clear that for all of its talk about foreign policy independence and having stood up to the US and its Anglophone allies with the 1985 non-nuclear declaration, NZ is a diplomatic follower, not a leader. It waits until other States make a move or show initiative on sticky international issues or events, then coattails on whatever seems most beneficial over the short-term. It pays lip service to international rules and norms but sniffs the wind when foreign policy smoke is in the air.

This syndrome has been accentuated in recent decades, particularly by National-led governments, and is now at rock bottom when it comes to NZ supination to other’s interests. The governing coalition’s current lack of resolve when it comes to denouncing the Palestinian catastrophe and upholding the right to Palestinian self-determination can be attributed to slavish obsequiousness to the US (Trump) position on the matter, perhaps abetted by the influence of the NZ Israeli lobby. Whatever ulterior ends the coalition of chaos may think that this approach may serve vis a vis the bilateral relationship with the US, they are sorely mistaken. NZ is just another squirrel looking for that elusive US nut.

2) On the decision to remove Maori words from schoolbooks :

I wrote “a main tool of cultural erasure is to remove all public references in a language other than that of the dominant social group. The CCP does it to the Uyghurs in the PRC. The excuse for doing so is usually to promote assimilation and social cohesion. The real motive is darker.”

I could go on about the attempts to erase indigenous languages and dialects in the public sphere is a host of places, particularly in Latin America, the region I am most familiar with, but also in Canada, the US, Africa and parts of the Pacific. The practice was so common in the colonial past that some linguists have written about the cultural genocide that follows erasing of a native language. When ti comes to identity and cultural preservation, language (and words) matter.

What is also remarkable is that it is well accepted that, rather than “confusing” in the Education Minister’s words, learning other languages at an early age promotes brain development and complex thought. Defending the removal of Maori words from children’s books is therefore doubly retrograde: it is the first step of an attempt at cultural erasure (at least in the public space), bookending similar attempts to remove te reo from public buildings and signage; and it is counter-productive (and counter-factual) as a pedagogical approach. Shame on Erica Stanford and her acolytes! And if a few Maori words are confusing, why not remove all non-English words from school books? Sacre bleu!

3) On the refusal of former Labour Ministers to front up to a public hearing of the Royal Common of Inquiry into the Pandemic Response:

“Why front up to a kangaroo court when the kangaroo judges are the political opposition? Especially after providing written answers to documented questions supplied by the kangaroos about events long in the public domain? Smacks of an ex-post political beat-up best avoided.” The fact that the Inquiry was instigated by ACT and NZ First as a partisan bludgeon after listening to conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers appears lost on the corporate media (partisan media like Plunket, Bridges and Hoskings just megaphone the anti-Labour lines). In fact, Labour should be pushing back harder at the political instigators, for example by questioning how they came to get involved in the witch hunt after actively supporting Labour’s pandemic response at the time, and who feeds them their talking points.

4) On a serving NZDF member is standing trial for espionage.

“The espionage charge against a serving NZ soldier is remarkable. The defendant is accused of working for, at the behest, or on behalf of a foreign State. Many questions arise from soldier’s court martial/trial. 1st: Which State? 2nd: what motive(s)? 3rd: what was compromised?”

Charging an active duty NZDF member with spying is remarkable because that charge–espionage– is only brought if the accused is suspected of working as a covert foreign agent. It does not refer to any domestic interlocutor., patron or client. I seem to recall at the time of the arrest that the soldier was detained for having objectionable material, presumably extremist literature (the military does not court martial people for having porn unless it is of the illegal variety). The soldier was also said to have links to right wing white supremacist groups. So it would be premature and very possibly wrong to finger the PRC as the puppet master (as the usual suspect). Given its other dark activities in NZ, Russia is a possibility. Or some other State. What should be clear is that it would not be an ally of the NZDF like the US, UK, Australia, Canada, France or other countries that routinely share higher-level intelligence with the NZDF (say, on operations, deployments, capabilities and tactics) that the soldier could not easily access unless s/he was in a military intelligence billet.

There could be a mix of motives involved, including money, sex and ideology. The counter-intelligence aspects of uncovering the suspected spy are also worth considering. In that light the trial should be interesting and revelatory, assuming that coverage is not effectively shut down for reasons of national security (yeah, right).

Should it be your inclination, feel free to weigh in within the KP rules of discourse.







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Kash Patel comes to town.

This week FBI Director Kash Patel arrived in Wellington to open a full time Legal Attache office (previously Legal Attaches rotated from offices at the US embassy in Canberra depending on need). Like excited children government ministers lined up for photo ops and the corporate media breathlessly reported on what Patel had to say. What he had to say, and how it was reported, was a mixture of circus side-show and fawning toadying, all uncritically covered by click-bait obsessed media scribes.

In view of that, please allow me to correct the record.

To begin with, the FBI is a law enforcement agency with powers of arrest, not an intelligence agency that does not have arrest powers. It is not a secret spy agency. Its NZ partner agency is the NZ Police, not the SIS or GCSB. In that role the FBI is a consumer of intelligence streams coming from 5 Eyes agencies (in NZ, the GCSB) as well as the NZ Police and SIS, but is not part of the 5 Eyes network. 5 Eyes is a signals and technical intelligence gathering and sharing network to which the FBI does not belong. INTERPOL is an international law enforcement partnership that the FBI is a member of. Although INTERPOL may share intelligence that originates in 5 Eyes, it has a distinct organisation, function and role. As 5 Eyes partners, the GCSB counterpart in the US is the NSA, and the US partner of the SIS ( a human intelligence agency) is the CIA.

In short, the FBI is an altogether different type of security agency and should not be confused with intelligence agencies properly defined.

Patel’s talk of direct FBI/5 Eyes links is therefore PR spin pushed by the US and Trump’s entourage that has no actual basis in fact. Using the LEGAT office ribbon-cutting ceremony in Wellington as an excuse, Patel’s visit was an overdue “show the flag” exercise by a US senior official more than 6 months after Trump entered office, and rather than Secretary of State Marco Rubio the US sent a conspiracy theorist-turned-second tier executive branch official instead, who then ran the anti-PRC/5 Eyes line even if Legal Attaches (FBI agents) deal with transnational crime, not strategic balancing or geopolitical competition and do not participate directly in 5 Eyes activities. (Note to readers: the FBI director is not a US cabinet position and is subordinate to the Attorney General in the US Department of Justice, so trotting out NZ cabinet ministers for a meet-and-greet, including those involved in intelligence matters, was obsequious in the extreme).

Be that as it may, Patel engaged in a bit of diplomatic performance art using the NZ government and media as props with which to push Trump’s anti-PRC agenda rather than focus on the relatively mundane business of opening a stand-alone LEGAT office, which are common in most US embassies and which, again, other than intelligence sharing on transnational crime via INTERPOL and partner agencies in foreign countries like the NZ Police,, do not directly engage in espionage or other forms of intelligence gathering (the fact that the office is outside the main US embassy complex and has undergone a slight name change does not mean anything particularly significant other than the need for more dedicated space and Trump’s obsession with putting his branding on everything. But a “law enforcement attache” is just a LEGAT by another name, and having separate office space may simply be a matter of re-allocating physical resources).

Patel’s remarks about the LEGAT office opening being a counter to the PRC that bolstered the 5 Eyes was a purposeful distraction from what should have been a low-key affair and should have been treated as such because for NZ bringing in an adversarial take on the PRC in an otherwise unremarkable and unrelated matter makes for disproportionate diplomatic discomfort. Neither the US embassy or MFAT press releases mentioned the PRC or 5 Eyes., so the cringe factor must have been high amongst the diplomatic corps. Then again, Patel likely knew that, but since hype and showmanship is what Trump is all about and Patel’s main audience was the one in the Oval Office, the NZ government and corporate media dutifully obliged by indulging the dog-and-pony show about the PRC and 5 Eyes. It was a pitiful display of diplomatic supination that may well have adverse consequences down the road.

To be clear. The significance of Patel’s visit to open a dedicated full time LEGAT office in NZ lies in the fact that it is official recognition that transnational crime is now a major problem in the Southwest Pacific and hence a priority for the US and other Western security agencies. In the measure that the PRC is involved in things like drug smuggling and cyber crimes in the region, it will be on the radar of these agencies, but in that regard it is just one of many state and non-State actors operating in what are known as “grey area” zones where criminal organisations and some State actors cooperate out of mutual interest. North Korean and Russian use of South-Pacific flagged ships to circumvent sanctions and smuggle oil is one example of this, as is the cyber-hacking activities of criminal entities tied to the Kremlin, Iran and PRC (among others). Likewise, transnational crime networks presence in island States like the methamphetamine trade in the Samoas (where drugs sourced in the US and Mexico are smuggled from American Samoa to Samoa across their common land border) require better resourced and coordinated regional law enforcement responses. The new US LEGAT office in Wellington is part of that effort.

As for terrorism and people smuggling (other designated priority areas announced by the US embassy during Patel’s visit), the role of the PRC is marginal at the very worst. And yet Patel placed it front and centre in his remarks at the opening ceremony

Regardless of the US spin so slavishly reported in NZ, opening a dedicated LEGAT office in Wellington is not about countering the PRC or bolstering 5 Eyes. It is about strengthening bilateral crime-fighting capabilities between the US and NZ in the Southwest Pacific. And if there is anyone other than criminals tracked and caught by the enhanced inter-agency law enforcement cooperation and regional presence of the FBI in the SW Pacific who have most to fear by the upgrade, it is those who may have extradition warrants issued by the US for their arrest. That is because Legal Attaches are the main vehicle for executing US warrants in any given country.

Kim Dotcom, are you paying attention?

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About that PLAN flotilla in the Tasman Sea.

Here are some thoughts about the hysteria surrounding a Chinese Peoples Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) flotilla conducting freedom of navigation exercises in the Tasman Sea, including live fire drills.

1) The flotilla has been tracked for over a week by New Zealand and Australian forces. The tracking began when the flotilla was well NE of the Australian northeastern coast.

HMAS Arunta shadowing PLAN vessels in the Tasman Sea. Source: ADF handout/AFP.

2) The flotilla is operating in accordance with international law and maritime regulations regarding military operations in international waters.

3) The flotilla has no air cover deployed with it and therefore no effective means to defend itself against a coordinated air assault. It is basically a sitting duck for Australian air defences and even NZDF air defences (because the NZDF P8s and Seasprite helicopters carry air to surface munitions as well as torpedos).

4) The flotilla may have a submarine deployed with it.

5) The presence of the PLAN ships in the Tasman is a form of military diplomacy, showing the flag in a distant body of water as a demonstration of blue water power projection capabilities.

6) The PLAN freedom of navigation (FON) exercise in the Tasman Sea may well be a response to a joint Australian-New Zealand FON exercise in the Taiwan Strait in September 2024. Those waters are far more disputed than the Tasman Sea (because the PRC claims them as territorial waters), so the PRC objected to the exercise at the time and declared that it would formulate an appropriate response in due course. This could be it. But the PLAN vessels are far from Australian and NZ territorial waters, so the legality of their presence in open seas is indisputable.

7) The presence of the PLAN flotilla conducting live fire drills (5 conventional surface to surface rounds fired from the Type 055 destroyer Zunyi’s main gun at a floating target, as observed by personnel on the HMNZS Te Kaha) and other exercises is an excellent opportunity for Australian and New Zealand to hone their naval counter-force capabilities, including tactical signals and technical intelligence intercepts and collection from the flotilla. If a submarine is involved then the Antipodean allies can refine their anti-submarine warfare (ASW) capabilities as well, which is exactly what their P8 patrol and ASW aircraft are designed to do. As it stands, Australia and NZ are using air and surface platforms to shadow the PLAN boats.

8) Much has been made about the lack of warning given by the PLAN before the live fire drills. Such warnings are a courtesy, not part of any formal protocol. They are usually issued 12+ hours prior to the drill in order for interested parties such as civilian aviation and maritime operators to plan accordingly and clear away from the target area. The PLAN gave 15 minute warnings, forcing a few planes to adjust course away from the no-fly zone. That was perhaps rude as far as courtesy goes, but nothing more.

9) Most of the hysteria about the flotilla is led by Australian opposition figures in politics and media in an election year. Most of the alarm in New Zealand is led by Sinophobic media commentators or people with little knowledge of military affairs or the nuances of military diplomacy, much less naval operations (especially in NZ). All of them want to tie the exercises to broader Chinese moves in the Southwest Pacific such as the recent bilateral strategic agreement between the PRC and the Cook Islands. For their part, Ministry of Defense officials on both sides have been muted in their response and military officials have been largely silent (presumably because they know what is really happening).

10) It is clear that the PRC is “flexing” its military might in more and more distant places, as any Great Power would do. But not every display of power capability constitutes an imminent threat. Should Australia and NZ pay attention to the exercise? Absolutely, especially because it can be used as a learning tool for their respective naval counter-force platforms. Should they feel threatened by the exercises? Absolutely not. Claims of the exercise posing a threat, being a provocation or an act of intimidation by the PRC betray the biases of those who make such claims. The PRC is just doing what Great Powers do, and if anything it is reminding others of its capabilities while testing them in front of foreign eyes.

Sailors aboard an Australian navy ship look out at Chinese vessels on February 13, picture by the Australian Defence Force

Sailors aboard the HMAS Arunta observe the PLAN flotilla in the Tasman Sea. Source; AFD handout/AFP

11) In the end, if the US, UK, French or other Western navies conducted the exact same exercise in the Tasman Sea, there would be little controversy about it. Because it is the PLAN, however, anti-PRC elements in Australia and New Zealand want to use the occasion to stir up trouble in pursuit of their own agendas. But the truth is that the PRC is not designated as an adversary or hostile state by either Australia or New Zealand, who in fact enjoy largely cordial and beneficial trade relations with the Asian giant. Although there have been moments of friction between Australia and New Zealand, on one hand, and the PRC on the other over a number of political, diplomatic and military strategic issues, and the PRC remains a major concern for the Australian and NZ security communities for a number of reasons, none of this justifies turning what is a relatively small display of power projection into an international incident.

Everyone needs to calm down and relax.

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A reminder about soft power.

Waste and fraud certainly exist in foreign aid programs, but rightwing celebration of USAID’s dismantling shows profound ignorance of the value of soft power (as opposed to hard power) in projecting US influence and interests abroad by non-military/coercive means (think of “hearts and minds,” “hugs, not bullets,” “honey versus vinegar,” etc.). Soft power is also a component of “smart power” and “sharp power” strategies in which a combination of foreign policy instruments are used in concert in pursuit of a variety of non-kinetic ends (i.e. objectives short of war).

This razor-gang approach is short-sighted at best and stupid at worst given that the humanitarian/developmental aid vacuum left by US withdrawal from such efforts opens up the field to potential inroads by US rivals. Add to that the fact that USAID pays US farmers around $2 Billion for surplus rice, soy, corn and other agricultural commodities that otherwise would not be grown or go to waste, and the MAGA/DOGE move against USAID is a double-sided own-goal.

The NZ government, which currently is under the sway of MAGA/DOGE-style public policy ideologies, might do good to remember this when it deals with soft power competition in the South Pacific. Waving a (thornless) stick (say, in the form of withdrawal of foreign aid) at Pacific Island Forum countries when they negotiate bilateral economic, diplomatic and developmental aid agreements with non-“traditional” (non-Western/colonial) partners is likely to elicit some blowback of its own.

After all, regardless of the specific compacts agreed to in the past, sovereign States, whatever powers and protections they may have ceded to “traditional” partners, ultimately are autonomous agents of their own destinies. Foreign aid is a good way to remind them that that may be true but destinies can often be intertwined for mutual benefit even if other parties come late to the table.

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Media Link: AVFA on Israel going rogue.

In this episode of the “A view from Afar” podcast Selwyn Manning and I discuss Israel’s expansion of its war in Lebanon as part of a “six front” strategy that it thinks it can win, focusing on the decision-making process and strategic logic at play that led to the most recent turn of events. Plus some game theory references just to place things in proper context.

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Media Link: ” A View from Afar” on multidimensional hybrid warfare and the ineffectiveness of multilateral institutions.

This week’s “A View from Afar” podcast addresses the issue of multidimensional hybrid warfare using the Israeli pager attacks in Lebanon as a starting point before moving on to discuss the failures of multilateral institutions, the UN in particular, when it comes to handling war crimes and crimes against humanity. It is a sad state of affairs.

The Murky World of Israel’s Booby-Trapped Pagers and Walkie-Talkies

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Excerpting “Security Politics in Peripheral Democracies.”

In the late 2000s-early 2010s I was researching and writing a book titled “Security Politics in Peripheral Democracies: Chile, New Zealand and Portugal.” The book was a cross-regional Small-N qualitative comparison of the security strategies and postures of three small democracies on the global geopolitical periphery, both physically and in terms of their involvement in the major strategic decisions of modern times. I set the time frame for the study as the period 1990-2020 because it covered the end of the Cold War as a starting point and included 9/11, the so-called War on Terror and the transition from bipolarity to unipolarity to multipolarity in the International system (the latter which remains ongoing). Its original endpoint will require some extension to account for developments since 2020, but the conceptual apparatus and analytic framework underpinning the study remains valid as a methodological approach (more on this later).

As some readers may know, I departed NZ academia in 2007 and after spending three years at the National University of Singapore I returned to NZ to follow my wife (who took an academic job in her homeland) and to help raise a family. I resurrected and rebranded a consultancy that I had started in the US prior to my arrival in NZ and left academia for good. That was a bittersweet decision to make, since I enjoyed teaching and research, but I am told and have seen that the academic Taylorism and market-driven managerialism that I butted heads with in the 2000s has gotten much worse since my departure from the academe.

Unfortunately, without the institutional support of a university and needing to monetarize my knowledge and experience via the consultancy in order to help pay the bills, I had to abandon the book project. I already had 13,000 words written by way of an introduction outlining the rationale behind and methodological approach to the project, but needed follow up research funds to undertake field research in the countries being studied. That was impossible given my new “business” orientation, plus I had already been turned down for a Marsden Research Grant while still at the NZ university where I used to work (it turns out the Marsden Fund award committee at that time was uninterested in security topics, much less a cross-national comparative study in which NZ was just one case study rather than the focus of attention). In fact, even such basic things as not being able to access a university library greatly impended my ability to do the secondary research required for the book to be comprehensive and thorough in its analysis. If one thinks of the cost of buying specialised books and subscriptions to professional journals and other pertinent material (for example, a single individual subscription to one political science journal can cost US$400/year), then it should be clear that writing academic books involving in-depth research in a social science discipline requires institutional support that I no longer had. Confronted by that reality, I shelved the project even as I thought of resurrecting it later or at least eventually writing an academic article that summarised my findings.

Ten years or so later, I have started to look at what I wrote and decided that I am going to except the introduction here at KP in order to share the conceptual premises and analytic framework used in it. I am hoping that some readers will find the argument of interest and if so inclined, offer critiques, comments and suggestions. I am not sure that the book will ever come to fruition but perhaps I can get that academic article out or simply publish it on the consultancy website even if it is more of a think piece than a targeted assessment of a matter relevant to paying client interests. Most importantly, it gives me a reason to re-visit the original argument and make updates as part of the review and revision process.

The excerpts will begin to appear in the next post. I shall try to keep them relatively short but true to the original book narrative.