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.