Jacinda Ardern was eight years old when the People’s Liberation Army rolled its tanks into Tiananmen Square, but this doesn’t excuse her speech to the Lowy Institute last week.
“While we all have a concern, and rightly so, about any moves towards militarisation of our region, that must surely be matched by a concern for those who experience the violence of climate change,” Ardern told her audience.
It was wrong to see geopolitics “in black and white terms”, wrong to force Pacific nations to “pick sides” between China and the West, and wrong to characterise Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as “the West vs Russia” or “democracy vs autocracy”.
Having criticised the supposedly simplistic foreign policy of others, Ardern came to what she presumably regards as a more sophisticated conclusion: “The honest reality is that the world is bloody messy.”
If Ardern’s speech was a genuine reflection of her country’s foreign policy and not an early draft by a junior official she picked up by mistake, we’re in trouble. New Zealand is resuming the position in the latest cold war as it assumed in the final decade of last – the fetal position, with its hand over its ears and its eyes buried in the pillow. David Lange’s ill-judged 1984 declaration that NZ would be a nuclear-free zone would have offered some comfort to the communists in Moscow, who even then were engaged in an underreported hot war between nuclear submarines in a theatre that included the Tasman Sea.
Ardern’s declaration will have been similarly well received in Beijing; indeed, it was the kind of reception she presumably intended to elicit, soothing Chinese concerns over her uncharacteristically feisty joint declaration with US President Joe Biden about China’s ambitions in Solomon Islands.
Ardern has fallen for the same isolationist delusion as Lange, believing plucky NZ can choose whether to be an active participant in the new cold war – which is, in any case, merely a continuation of the last with the power balance between Beijing and Moscow.
Yet things are decidedly worse this time. The Soviet Union was not actively seeking to establish a military presence in our backyard.
It was not NZ’s second largest source of foreign investment, nor did its people lick up the lactose yielded by two in five NZ cows.
Even in his crazy moments, Lange would not have imagined signing the Russian equivalent of the Belt and Road agreement Ardern inherited from her National Party predecessor in 2017 and has no intention of renouncing.
In other words, NZ is closer to becoming a client state of China than any other Western nation, which perversely puts it in a strong position should it decide to push back. Anchored in firm strategic alliances in the Pacific with the US, Australia and France, retaining close ties with Britain, an affinity with Canada, and looked on fondly as the home of simple hobbity folk, NZ should be a solid partner in the Western alliance against Russia-China. Instead, it appears to be vacillating in a most disturbing manner, in desperate need of a leader prepared to toughen up.
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As it happened, just such a leader was assassinated in Japan within hours of Ardern’s speech.
President Xi Jinping’s expression of “deep regret” over the brutal death of former prime minister Shinzo Abe was probably the least sincere tribute of any global leader.
Abe has spent the best part of two decades trying to alert the West to the danger posed by China. He sought to re-arm Japan and build strategic partnerships with freedom-loving nations.
These instincts found concrete form in the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue between Australia, India, Japan and the US, signed in 2007 by Abe, John Howard, Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh and US vice-president Dick Cheney. The Quad appeared to implode when India got cold feet and Australia pulled out under Kevin Rudd, a decision he made without notifying Washington.
The path to its revival was laid by Rudd’s successor, Tony Abbott, who built a close relationship with Abe and initiated joint naval exercises with Japan in 2015, much to Beijing’s displeasure.
Abe’s insistence that, in effect, the Cold War never ended was rather too easily dismissed by the Rudd and Gillard administrations.
Abe to them was another Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese intelligence officer who spent 29 years hiding in The Philippines jungle fighting World War II until his former commander travelled from Japan to formally relieve him from duty in 1974.
Yet with the arrival of Xi’s more pugnacious communist administration, the scales have fallen from the eyes of most Western leaders. America’s pivot against China may well be Donald Trump’s greatest legacy. In Boris Johnson’s case, his role in securing US co-operation in AUKUS together with the decision to end Huawei’s role in installing the UK’s 5G network vie with Brexit as his greatest achievements.
As the ledger now stands for Biden, the AUKUS agreement and the decision to stick by Trump’s China policy may well be the only worthwhile things he does. Which makes NZ’s equivocation even more puzzling since it’s clearly not a conservative thing and underlines how important it is that Anthony Albanese puts an end to the curious love affair between the ALP and Chinese communists in China that has existed since Gough Whitlam went to Beijing almost a half-century ago.
However, the Prime Minister has a chance to redeem himself on foreign policy by nudging the Kiwis back into the fold. If Howard was Bush’s deputy sheriff, Albanese must be Biden’s kelpie.
Nick Cater is executive director of the Menzies Research Centre.
