New Zealand International Review

New Zealand

International

eviewRSeptember/October 2013 Vol 38, No 5

PACIFIC GEO-POLITICS Chinese aid Australian defence

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New Zealand International Review1

New Zealand

International

ReviewSeptember/October 2013 Vol 38, No 5

Managing Editor: IAN McGIBBONCorresponding Editors: STEPHEN CHAN (United Kingdom), STEPHEN HOADLEY (Auckland)Book Review Editor: ANTHONY SMITHEditorial Committee: ANDREW WEIRZBICKI (Chair), ROB AYSON, BROOK BARRINGTON, PAUL BELLAMY, BOB BUNCH, GERALD McGHIE, MALCOLM McKINNON, JOSH MITCHELL, ROB RABEL, SHILINKA SMITH, JOHN SUBRITZKY, ANN TROTTERPublisher: NEW ZEALAND INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRSTypesetting/Layout: LOVETT GRAPHICSPrinting: THAMES PUBLICATIONS LTD

New Zealand International Review is the bi-monthly publication of the New Zealand Institute of Affairs. (ISBN0110-0262)Address: Room 507, Railway West Wing, Pipitea Campus, Bunny Street, Wellington 6011Postal: New Zealand Institute of International Affairs, C/- Victoria University of Wellington, PO Box 600, Wellington 6140Telephone: (04) 463 5356Website: www.vuw.ad.nz/nziia. E-mail: [email protected]: New Zealand $50.00 (incl GST/postage). Overseas $85.00 (Cheques or money orders to be made payable to the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs)

Michael Powles asks whether we need to choose between security, trade and our neighbours.

Jenny Hayward-Jones discusses China’s presence in the South Pacific and argues that long- established aid powers should co-operate with it.

Andrew Davies discusses the future of the Australian Defence Force.

Dimitry Shlapentokh discusses the implications of a weakening in American backing of the Jewish state.

Terence O’Brien reviews aspects of New Zealand’s approach to international affairs.

24 CONFERENCE REPORT

Peter Kennedy reports on discussion about the Syrian crisis at the recent Asia Pacific Model UN Conference.

Gerald McGhie comments on a book that posits 1979 as a key year in shaping our modern world.

28 BOOKS Harshan Kumarasingham: A Political Legacy of the British Empire: Power and the Parliamentary System in Post-Colonial India and Sri Lanka (Malcolm McKinnon). Ashley Ekins (ed): Gallipoli, A Ridge Too Far (Ian McGibbon). Peter Burness: The Nek, A Gallipoli Tragedy (Ian McGibbon).

30

Winston Peters launches a book by the late Michael Green, the former high commissioner in Suva.

The views expressed in New Zealand International Reviewwhich is a non-partisan body concerned only to increase understanding and informal discussion of international affairs, and especially New Zealand’s involvement in them. By permission of the authors the copyright of all articles appearing in New Zealand International Review is held by the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs


In the new Pacific geo-politics my argument when confronted with the question of whether we need to choose among security, trade and our neighbours is that we must avoid having to choose between them. Our security, our trade and our neighbours are all crucial to us and will remain so through the 21st century, and of course beyond. But it is also a theme of this article that in the new Pacific geo-politics of the 21st century, continuing to give priority to all three will be increasingly demanding, requiring significant resources and skill on New Zealand’s part.

Some of the challenges which will preoccupy the region in the 21st century are certainly new, like the emergence, or more accu-rately re-emergence, of China as a great power. Many challenges seem to be longstanding, like achievement of the Millennium De-velopment Goals and the whole question of development itself as well as the on-going search for improved trading arrangements in the wider Asia–Pacific region, but they are no less crucial for that. And others could appropriately be labelled ‘unfinished business’, a category that could include decolonisation in the region.

Geo-politics involves practical diplomacy. Indeed, elements of practical diplomacy can have as large an influence internationally as learned theories of international relations. Ninety per cent of diplomacy involves muddling along somewhere between war and peace or between success and failure. Dr Gerard Finn of Hawai’i made this point more eloquently when he quoted from the late Sir Paul Reeves: ‘We edge our way to a better situation’, which amounts to a kind of moral pragmatism.

Unique challengesBut today some of the challenges that face us are indeed unique. For our whole history New Zealand has relied for both its security and its prosperity on our relations with Western powers. That has been the centre-point of our place in the world. Today, however, while our principal security partners continue to be Western, Chi-na has become our biggest trading partner.

Having a security foot in one camp and an economic foot in another has the potential to be both difficult and painful. Aus-

Michael Powles asks whether we need to choose between security, trade and our neighbours.

Michael Powles is a senior fellow of the Centre for Strategic Studies, Victoria

Foundation. This article is the edited text of an address he gave to the Otago Foreign Policy School in June 2013.

tralia’s position is similar, of course, but we would be foolish to think that our situation is really comparable to that of a major middle power with enormous resources that are in high demand. Rivalry between China and the United States has shown signs of intensifying in recent years, and this situation is complicated by America’s alliance relationship with Japan, particularly, with which China’s relations are becoming increasingly tense.

It is not my purpose to try to predict how the situation in East Asia is likely to develop in the years ahead. But I do want to emphasise its complexity to indicate how preoccupying and demanding it will be for a country like New Zealand. I am very conscious of the comment by Foreign Minister Murray McCully that there was no doomsday scenario to be feared and he was not being kept awake at night by talk of potential conflict between the great powers.

But I suggest we would be foolish not to keep in mind that Japan’s former prime minister Taro Aso has said, ‘Japan and China have hated each other for a thousand years, what should be differ-ent now?’ Commenting on this, Richard Rosecrance of Harvard University has said: The main problem with Asia is not its population or its eco-

nomic importance — which was initially great 200 years ago and is growing now. It is its manifest and lasting divisions. Like 19th century Europe whose Britain, France, Germany and Russia grew rapidly but eventually exploded in war, con-temporary Asia is a region without unity. Europe eventually outgrew its divisions, but only after two world wars.1

New Zealand will have new challenges in the decades ahead because of its unique situation: some security dependence still on the old great power and increasing economic dependence on the new great power. Rivalry between China and the United States is increasing. Moreover, Sino-Japa-

honouring longstanding obligations in our own neighbourhood, including greater recognition of -


China’s riseOne of Australia’s leading strate-gic thinkers, Hugh White of the Australian National University and a frequent visitor to New Zealand, argues that China’s power is already such that any at-tempt by either Beijing or Wash-ington to dominate will lead to sustained and bitter strategic ri-valry, imposing huge economic costs and a real risk of catastroph-ic war.2

White goes on to argue in his recent book The China Choice: Why America Should Share Power

The pivot is a very stupid choice. The United States has achieved nothing and only annoyed China. China can’t be contained.4

Chinese perceptionChina believes that the West, the United States in particular, is trying to contain China, to inhibit its re-emergence as a great power. This strong Chinese perception of Western and Japanese antagonism towards China dates back to what it calls its ‘century of national humiliation’ that began with the first Opium War in the mid-19th century and lasted through the end of the Sino-Jap-anese War in 1945. A Chinese professor teaching in the United States says: ‘China’s memory of this period as a time when it was attacked, bullied, and torn asunder by imperialists serves as the foundation for its modern identity and purpose.’5

It is hardly surprising, then, that many influential Chinese see the American pivot or rebalancing as aimed directly at China. And this suspicion of the West goes beyond obviously strategic matters. In this situation, there could be a crucial role for medium and small powers, like New Zealand, in ‘speaking truth to power’, telling both the United States and China plainly and bluntly that the world has no stomach for another Cold War. This would be no more popular with other Western powers than our anti-nucle-ar stance was in the 1980s, but I suggest this should not deter us.

Would such an effort have any influence? I believe it could, if a sufficient number of medium and small powers were brave enough to be involved.

Meanwhile, the United States is currently pushing hard for the adoption of a Trans-Pacific Partnership. The suggestion is that it should include all major Asia–Pacific countries — Japan has just joined the negotiations — but not China. There is specula-tion as to whether this is also aimed at reinforcing relations among American allies and friends — at the expense, of course, of China. But at least New Zealand, through Trade Minister Tim Groser, has emphasised that New Zealand would not have anything to do with a TPP that excluded China. (Of course, it may never come into being, given the controversy on sovereignty issues that it has caused so far.)

Leaders and their advisers in New Zealand, and indeed in numbers of other countries, are going to have their hands — and brains certainly — full in this century, wrestling with the diffi-culty of helping maintain a peaceful Asia–Pacific environment. Murray McCully may not be kept awake at night but I would bet many others will be.

Good effortSo far New Zealand has done pretty well for itself. As we are fre-quently reminded, and enjoy reminding others, we were the first developed country to conclude a comprehensive free trade agree-ment with China, the result of decades of energetic diplomacy — and some luck. At the same time we have developed as good a relationship with the United States as we have had since the nuclear row of the 1980s. And more recently, we have signalled that we welcome China’s increased involvement in the Pacific by co-operating with China on a development project in the Cook Islands — another historic first. Sensibly, our government prefers the possibility of influencing China in the Pacific through co-op-eration rather than through the blandishments of a bystander.

But today there is some recognition that protecting and pro-moting New Zealand interests as tensions continue in North

New Zealand seafood on show at the China Fisheries and Seafood Expo in Dalian, Asia’s largest seafood event, in November 2012

that as neither China nor America can hope to win a competition for primacy outright, both would be best served by sharing pri-macy. He believes that East Asian countries are seeking a pathway that avoids taking sides — he quotes leaders in Indonesia and Sin-gapore to this effect — and that the best approach for the United States is a strategy that helps them achieve that goal.

Hugh White is regarded as something of a pessimist because of his doubt that the United States will in fact be prepared to ‘share power’ with China. But he does believe that Australia’s ap-proach has become more sophisticated recently and quotes the new head of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Peter Varghese: Australia does not want to be put in the position where we

have to choose between the US and China… . China has every right to seek greater strategic influence to match its economic weight. The extent to which this can be peacefully accommodated will turn ultimately on both the pattern of China’s international behaviour and the extent to which the existing international order intelligently finds more space for China.3

And fortunately, there is some recognition in Washington that the pivot, or rebalance to Asia, is seen in Beijing as potentially hostile to China and, therefore, in the long run also potentially harmful to long-term American interests. The highly respected Harvard professor Joseph Nye has reported that on a recent visit to China he was told by a prominent Chinese academic:

Hugh White


Asia and rivalry between China and the United States intensifies will be increasingly demanding for us. There is a risk that these geo-political preoccupations will suck oxygen away from on-go-ing priorities that relate to our neighbours in the region and to our position in our own neighbourhood. We must not allow that to happen.

Not all will agree with this. There is indeed a genuine problem of what might be called finite diplomatic resources, which I will touch on again below. But for a start we need to get our perspec-tives right. Over the years, I have heard friendly foreigners, usually Americans or Australians, speak in terms of New Zealand ‘playing its part’ or ‘doing its job’ or simply ‘looking after’ the South Pacif-ic. In addition to their patronising implications, these comments denigrate New Zealand’s role in our immediate neighbourhood. In truth our home neighbourhood is far too important to New Zealand for us to be acting in it for or on behalf of other countries.

For sure, our immediate neighbourhood is important to us for geo-political reasons, as is any country’s neighbourhood, but prac-tically that neighbourhood is far more important to us for other reasons — the family links, the large number of Pasifika people in New Zealand, the obligations on New Zealand which flow from our having chosen to be a colonial power in the Pacific, even the simple straightforward obligations of one neighbour to another.

I suggest we must not be so dazzled by the exciting new geo-political challenges that we forget our on-going neighbour-hood responsibilities. Without apology, therefore, I shall list just some of them.

More than half a century since winds of change, arising in part in New Zealand itself, began to give Pacific peoples the right to self-determination, we still need to remind ourselves of the par-amount importance of paying attention to Pacific Islands wishes and concerns. Gone are the days when New Zealand or for that matter Australian views as to what is best for the Pacific should, or indeed could, dominate.

other options. If so, fine, but it is surprising that we have not more unequivocally offered New Zealand as a refuge of last resort for displaced fellow Pacific Islanders.

Any list of current and on-going challenges in the Pacific today invariably includes the need for governance improvements. Pa-cific leaders have often spoken on the subject and development co-operation programmes commit significant resources to im-proving governance standards. Often this involves attempts to impose Western standards and traditions in the Pacific. Perhaps not surprisingly, progress has been slow and troubled. Meanwhile, some Pacific academics and others are questioning whether in fact appropriate values and standards are being propagated in the Pa-cific. Elsie Huffer and Ropate Qalo argue that in this field Pacific custom and values should be accorded much more importance: Using concepts understood by people at all levels of society

will help make leaders more accountable. While terms such as good governance, the rule of law, democracy, human rights, development and so on are largely seen as impositions from outside and are seldom understood, long-standing local con-cepts embody ideals of social justice… and other values in ways that make sense to and empower local people.

And they make the further observation: Where good development and governance are occurring, it is

usually through the direct initiative of local communities us-ing their knowledge base. These indigenous knowledge bases must be better understood and made nationally accessible so that more can benefit. To achieve this requires a great deal more theoretical and action research into Pacific values and worldviews. Ultimately it means listening to the communities around us and giving them a chance to express their under-standings of the world.6

The case is strong for promoting significant further research into the relevance to governance practices of custom and traditional values; and equally strong for providing resources to help govern-ments and institutions in the region promote relevant customs and traditional values.

There is another aspect of governance in the Pacific that brings to mind the exhortation used in medical ethics: ‘Above all, do no harm’. Many outside powers have failed to observe this and, in some instances have caused governance harm and even worse, in fragile political systems.

For example, we could usefully remember that current ortho-doxies or accepted practices in our own country are not necessar-ily desirable or welcome with our neighbours. In the 1980s and

Terence Wesley-Smith of the University of Hawai’i made a powerful argument at the 2004 Otago Foreign Policy School on ‘Redefining the Pa-cific’. He argued that if there was any redefining to be done it should be done by Pacific Islanders, not by outsiders. I suggest we still need to re-member that today, as there are quite a few areas in which we have been slow to acknowl-

edge and support Pacific countries’ own wishes and priorities. One example is the development of sub-regionalism, where

we in New Zealand may have been rather slow in under-standing the strength of some Pacific leaders’ wishes to as-sociate more closely with their own sub-regions, their own immediate neighbours.

And there are also issues regarding the plight of Pacific Is-landers likely to lose their home islands to rising oceans. New Zealand leaders have indicated that affected people from say Tuvalu and Kiribati might be accommodated in New Zea-land if necessary. Of course, affected people could well prefer

Terence Wesley-Smith


1990s, when neo-liberal economics was all the fashion in New Zealand, we persuaded one or two of our Pacific Islands neigh-bours to implement neo-liberal policies that many felt were clear-ly inappropriate. Much later, Australia has used Pacific Islands countries Papua New Guinea and Nauru to help with a curious solution to its aversion to receiving refugees from Asia in Australia itself. Probably greater harm was done by the chequebook diplo-macy — a euphemism for the bribery of politicians — of Taiwan and China when they were at the height of their competition for diplomatic supporters. Fortunately, a truce in that competition between Beijing and Taipei brought that to an end, helped per-haps by strong criticism from Canberra and Wellington.

Depopulation challengeAnother issue in our neighbourhood, one which New Zealand played a part in causing, is the depopulation challenge faced by Pacific peoples living in some of the smaller island countries and territories, mostly in the former and present New Zealand and American territories of the Cook Islands, Niue and Tokelau and the Federated States of Micronesia, Palau, the Marshall Islands and American Samoa. Few of these countries or territories can

you go around in the villages in all the states of FSM, some of the villages are like ghost villages. Very few people re-main. The number of people staying in the FSM is decreas-ing… I think right now we seem to be falling into a space where we don’t expect any-thing to be done any more… . The most popular thing now is to go to the United States…But I can always go fishing.8

I suggest it is not our role now to

maintain their population levels because their peoples have access to their former administering powers.

Former leaders of Niue and of the Federated States of Microne-sia have recently expressed bitter disappointment at their countries’ plight in remarkably similar terms. Niue’s former Premier Young Viv-ian said: Our big problem is we don’t

have the people to increase productivity… . Most of our

highly trained people are not in Niue, they are in New Zea-land… . People are leaving our little country… . You cannot have a nation with very few people and we are not able to keep our people in our little country. We are trying to keep alive our language and traditions — but what for?7

And a former president of the Federated States of Micronesia, John Haglelgam, said: Our problem seems to be similar to the problem in Niue and

the Cook Islands. We’re heading in the same direction. When

Young Vivian

the problem in the South-east Pacific. Did we realise how a right of access to New Zealand would destroy societies on the islands concerned — just as the right of access to the United States is de-stroying life in parts of the former US Territories? Of course, this is what the islands leaders of the day wanted. Today some of them regret that they gave in to their own people on the point. Former Niue Premier Young Vivian told Ian Johnstone: At first, I thought we should sacrifice our right to live and

work in New Zealand and become completely independent, but the people in the villages didn’t like that. They were ap-prehensive about decolonisation and they wanted to secure the relationship with New Zealnd. So I had to modify my view and work to achieve the sort of self-government my peo-ple wanted.9

Today we should at least be encouraging and facilitating debate by those affected on ways of mitigating the problem; and be ready to support ways forward when they have been agreed.

Largest challengeTurning now from the region’s smallest countries and their par-ticular challenges to the region’s largest, Papua New Guinea, the challenge here is for New Zealand and other countries in the re-gion and it is posed by Papua New Guinea’s obvious climb to regional leadership. This is backed by its enormous wealth and resources. Perhaps the best indicator of this is that the first phase of the Exxon Mobil LNG project, Exxon Mobil’s biggest develop-ment project anywhere in the world at the time it was started, is moving towards completion, on schedule and only slightly above budget.

Papua New Guinea’s pursuit of leadership ambitions and its commitment of significant resources to that end also present sig-nificant opportunities to regional partners. Fifty million kina has been promised for Fiji’s election, and funds and scholarships are being given to Solomon Islands. Regionally, Papua New Guinea is starting to drive trade agendas in the Pacific. It is taking a leading role in the US tuna treaty negotiations and also with the Europe-an Union on an economic partnership agreement.

Papua New Guinea’s private sector is also increasing its re-gional involvement. PNG investment across the Pacific is grow-ing rapidly. Fifty-one PNG companies have registered to invest in Solomon Islands (although to date only 23 have actually taken up the registration). An investment promotion and protection agreement is being negotiated. Papua New Guinea is also invest-ing in hotels across the Pacific, including in Fiji and in Samoa. A return trade and investment mission to Fiji is planned, following on from a large group that went to Papua New Guinea recently with Bainimarama.

But it is probably fair to say that in our south-eastern end of the Pacific, we have been fixated on Fiji and its problems, and slow to recognise the massive changes taking place in the west. In many ways, the biggest questions in the region today are when Papua New Guinea will be fully recognised as the Pacific’s leader and the extent to which its leadership will reduce the roles of New Zealand and even Australia.

Painful historyWest of Papua New Guinea, of course, are East Timor and Indo-nesia. East Timor has a good deal in common with Pacific Islands countries, despite its much more painful history. New Zealand played a role in East Timor’s fraught move into independence.

John Haglelgam

come up with suggestions as to how the depopulation challenge might be met. But New Zealand is at least partly responsible for


That involvement is no longer necessary, but we need to remem-ber it and continue to take a supportive interest in the country’s development.

Beyond East Timor is the colossal archipelago of Indonesia. We are accustomed to putting Indonesia in the Asian pigeon-hole and, except where there are political issues in which Pacific Island-ers take an interest — such as the status of West Papua and the treatment of its people — we seldom mention Indonesia in a Pa-cific context. Yet the natural boundaries between the Pacific and Asia bear little relation to today’s political boundaries. The Wallace Line showing the southern boundary of Asian fauna goes through Indonesia, of course. And any traveller in the south-eastern prov-inces of Indonesia, or among the Batak people of North Sumatra, quickly becomes conscious of affinities between the population and Pacific Islanders who today live thousands of miles to the east.

But quite apart from that consideration, Indonesia’s proxim-ity, its enormous population, its growing wealth and its increas-ingly democratic stability will almost certainly make the country a massive influence in our Pacific Islands region in the future. Moreover, the opportunities for the Pacific will be immense, both economically and initially culturally, where there is so much in common. (I was in Indonesia at the time of the country’s first foreign ministerial visit to the Pacific Islands in 1983. On his re-turn to Jakarta, the minister told me that what struck him most was how much there was in common between the Indonesian archipelago and the Pacific Islands region: ‘They are like us but just a little smaller.’ Incidentally, I would not have predicted in 1983 that Indonesia would move ahead of some Pacific Islands countries in developing democratic institutions and practices.)

Looking some distance into the 21st century, two of the most dramatic changes that will impact on the Pacific Islands region are likely to be Papua New Guinea’s burgeoning influence from inside the region and Indonesia’s burgeoning influence from out-side, but only just outside, the region. Are we doing enough to prepare for these changes?

Decolonisation issueA longstanding issue in the region, on which New Zealand has tak-en a leading role in the past, is decolonisation in the Pacific. Rep-resenting New Zealand at the United Nations in the late 1990s, I was berated by the then US ambassador to the United Nations. She complained about the trouble New Zealand had always caused major Western powers like the United States, Britain and France through our support of decolonisation. Her particular gripe was that New Zealand, alone of all former or present colonial powers, had consistently co-operated with and supported the UN Decolo-nisation Committee, the C24, as it is called. The C24 causes par-ticular angst to continuing colonial or administering powers.

New Zealand’s support for the committee and co-operation with it had its genesis in Peter Fraser’s strong views on self-deter-mination and his involvement in the drafting of the Trusteeship chapter of the UN Charter. That flowed through to Samoa being the first Pacific Islands country to achieve independence, in 1962. And, of course, our co-operation with the C24 leads to much more relaxed discussions than we might otherwise have on devel-opments in our own remaining territory, Tokelau.

In the past New Zealand has been a strong supporter of self-determination in the Pacific. We would have agreed emphat-ically with Sir Peter Kenilorea, who led the Solomon Islands to independence, when he told Ian Johnstone in an interview:

There were comments and songs about ‘We’re not ready’ and ‘We don’t have enough money’. But I felt then that independence is not about money, but deciding about being yourself — which is your right… . every human being is born free and to be shackled by a system which is outside of yourself is not hu-man, in my view.10

Colonial holdoversBut today there is still a significant number of colonial territories in the Pacific, mostly French and American. I hope that support for self-determination has not slipped from our list of Pacific pri-orities — overshadowed perhaps by a focus on bilateral relations with the United States and France. In the past we have managed to balance relationships with these important powers with our support for self-determination. I would hope we will continue to do so.

In fact the issue of self-determination for French Polynesia seems set to become controversial again. In May this year the is-sue of French Polynesia was re-inscribed on the list of territories considered by the Special Committee on Decolonisation. France reportedly reacted to the decision with anger and will clearly con-

Sir Peter Kenilorea

Richard Marles

from France on decolonisation issues in the Pacific would be a most remarkable policy U-turn. Hopefully such a proposition might at least be debated before it becomes policy.

People’s mobility Another region-wide topic which is likely to become increasingly important in the near future is the subject of people’s mobility. This is often called labour mobility or ‘work schemes’ because so far that is largely what it has involved. But I prefer ‘people’s mobil-ity’ because in time, and very gradually, one could see possibilities beyond the mobility only of workers. It is only a short time since trial schemes were begun by New Zealand and then also Australia. Many critics were initially doubtful that they would be successful. Today there is talk in the Pacific of schemes by which workers might move and work among and within Pacific Islands countries, as well as New Zealand and Australia.

As vulnerable Pacific Islands countries face new challeng-es from climate change and the rise of ocean levels, and others

tinue to contest a role for the De-colonisation Committee.

Interestingly, in 2012 Austral-ia’s then parliamentary secretary for Pacific Island affairs, Rich-ard Marles, is reported to have described France as a long-term stable democratic partner in the Pacific and to have said that, on inscription on the C24 list, ‘We absolutely take our lead from France on this.’11

I have not seen any public statement of the New Zealand position. For us to take our lead


wrestle with the despair of depopulation, it is not impossible that increased mobility of people within all Pacific Forum member countries could be part of trial solutions. We should never forget the region’s pre-colonial history famously described in the stirring words of the late Epeli Hau’ofa: Nineteenth century imperialism erected boundaries that led

to the contraction of Oceania, transforming a once bound-less world into the Pacific islands states and territories that

Neil Walter

day in the Pacific region we have a higher proportion of political appointees — and obviously a lower proportion of career foreign service diplomats — heading our embassies and high commis-sions.

Vital needAnother former diplomat, Terence O’Brien, now a regular con-tributor on foreign relations issues, recently wrote a column whose headline neatly summarised his point: ‘More than ever, NZ needs a strong, professional diplomatic corps: Outsiders in charge of skeletal embassies may not be very fruitful’. O’Brien describes what has been an effective and well-regarded foreign ser-vice and points to the increasing challenges facing New Zealand in the years ahead.15

The resource and capacity issue affects our diplomacy global-ly, including other priority areas besides the Pacific. As successful New Zealand businessman in China David Mahon pointed out in The Listener in June, in the past few years costs have been cut in the ministries of foreign affairs and primary industries, leaving them under-resourced for China.16

It seems New Zealand’s overall international capacity will be affected, at least in the short term. But I am optimistic that it will not be long before the facts of international life convince us of the need to re-create a professional foreign service. Similarly, I am optimistic that our Pasifika community, not least their voting power, will help ensure we give priority to our Pacific neighbours and our Pacific neighbourhood.

NOTES1. Richard Rosecrance, The Interpreter, Lowy Institute weblog,

14 May 2013.2. Hugh White, ‘China: Our Failure of Imagination’, ibid., 3 Jul

2012.3. Hugh White, ‘America wants to know whose side Australia is

on: Could the US and China share equal billing in Asia?’, The Age, 5 Mar 2013.

4. Joseph S. Nye Jt, ‘Work with China, Don’t Contain It’, New York Times, 25 Jan 2013.

5. Zheng Wang, ‘Not Rising, But Rejuvenatiing: the “Chinese Dream”’, The Diplomat, 5 Feb 2013.

6. Elise Huffer and Ropate Qalo, ‘Have We Been Thinking Upside-Down? The Contemporary Emergence of Pacific Theoretical Thought’, The Contemporary Pacific, vol 16, no 1 (2004), pp.87–116.

7. Ian Johnstone and Michael Powles (eds), New Flags Flying: Pacific Leadership (Wellington, 2012), pp.116–17.

8. Ibid., pp.226–9.9. Ibid., p.113.10. Ibid., p.155.11. Nic Maclellan, ‘Self-determination on Pacific Agenda’, The

Interpreter, 4 Jun 2013.12. Epeli Hau’ ofa, ‘Our Sea of Islands’, in A New Oceania: Redis-

covering our Sea of Islands (Suva, 1993).13. The Interpreter, Lowy Institute, 23 May 2013.14. Neil Walter at book launch for New Flags Flying: Pacific Lead-

ership, Wellington, 27 Nov 2012.15. Terence O’Brien, ‘More than ever, NZ needs a strong profes-

sional diplomatic corps’, Dominion Post, 13 Apr 2013.16. David Mahon, ‘The China Challenge’, The Listener, 29 Jun

2013.

we know today. People were confined to their tiny spaces, isolated from each other. No longer could they travel freely to do what they had done for centuries.

…the ocean is theirs because it has always been their home. Social scien-tists may write of Oceania as a Spanish Lake, a Brit- Epeli Hau’ofa

ish Lake, an American Lake, and even a Japanese Lake. But we all know that only those who make the ocean their home and love it, can really claim it theirs.12

Meeting challengesThis article has focused on the need for policy solutions to new and emerging challenges in and affecting our region. I shall con-clude with some comment on New Zealand’s capacity to pursue effective diplomacy in the Pacific region. In a recent column head-ed ‘NZ Diplomacy: The budget buzz cut’, Alex Oliver reported on budget cuts to the New Zealand foreign service, the cutting of 140–150 jobs (10 per cent of staff) and the scrapping of the rotational employment system that is used by all foreign services to maintain diplomatic professionalism.13

At the launch of a Pacific-related book in Wellington late last year, Neil Walter, a former head of New Zealand’s foreign service and the last one to have had significant Pacific experience, dis-cussed the many issues in the Pacific region and the challenges facing New Zealand. He said the book also reminds us that New Zealand has special responsibilities to

the countries of the Pacific. Some of these responsibilities are based on constitutional links; some reflect a shared history; and some are simply the inescapable obligations that come with geographical proximity and the desire to be a good neighbour.

On the role of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Wal-ter comments that the ministry’s move away from a professional career service — ‘with the conse-quential loss of so many experienced staff, is making it increasingly diffi-cult to bring to bear the expertise, continuity and understanding that our interests in the Pacific require’. He continued: ‘Whereas in my last year in the Ministry five out of six of our senior management team had postings in the Pacific, I understand that the comparable ratio now is just two out of thirteen.’14

Walter could have added that to-


China’s profile in the Pacific Islands region has grown significantly over the last decade, spurring a resurgence of American interest in the region, and inspiring speculation about whether a new great power competition is playing out in the Pacific Islands. This anal-ysis argues that viewing China’s growing role in the Pacific Islands from the perspective of geo-strategic competition is not only in-appropriate but also counter-productive. An evidence-based evaluation of China’s trade and investment, aid, and diplomatic and military ties with the region reveals, at best, a weak case for the argument that China has some grand geo-strategic design. With little strong evidence that China is doing much more than supporting its commercial interests and pursuing South–South co-operation in the region, placing China’s activities into a geo-strategic paradigm risks obscuring the bigger and potentially more transformative impacts — both positive and negative — of its commercial and aid activities in the region. The region’s estab-lished powers need to pursue a more sophisticated understanding of the real drivers of China’s recent activism in the Pacific Islands in order to avoid counter-productive policy and assist Pacific Is-lands countries in maximising the potential economic and devel-opment gains to be had from China’s interest.

China’s growing trade and investment profile in the Pacific Islands is routinely held up as evidence of its geo-strategic ambitions in the region. But in the last ten years, China’s trade with the Pacif-ic Islands only increased sevenfold, to US$2.1 billion in 2011. While impressive, this increase was much smaller than growth in China’s trade with other parts of the world over the same period. China’s trade with Africa, for instance, increased by a factor of fifteen over that decade, to US$160 billion in 2011.1

By 2011 China had become the Pacific Islands’ second largest bilateral two-way trading partner, but its trade with the region remained dwarfed by Australia’s. With exports to and imports from the region totalling US$897 million and US$1.17 billion respectively in 2011, China’s trade with the Pacific Islands was only roughly a third of Australia’s exports to and imports from the

checkJenny Hayward-Jones discusses China’s pres-

it.

A Chinese warship visits Tonga

Pacific in that year, which totalled US$2.6 billion and US$4.14 billion respectively.2

Growing Chinese investment in the Pacific is equally often seen as evidence of rising geo-strategic influence, but this line of argument is weaker when viewed in the context of the activities of other foreign investors. While it is difficult to collect reliable data on foreign direct investment in the Pacific Islands (in part due to weaknesses in Pacific Islands government collecting agencies and a lack of transparency from some investors), it is clear that there is growing diversity in an investment scene once dominated by Australia and New Zealand.

There are a number of new external players in the resource, aviation and communication fields. The Irish telecommunica-tions company, Digicel, has invested in the mobile phone markets of most Pacific Islands countries and has driven a revolution in


Tonga as well as Papua New Guinea. The participation of Chinese businesses in this competitive economic environment is not evi-dence of a threat to the established geo-strategic order.

The rise of China’s investment in the region has been most visible in Papua New Guinea, where it has been driven in large part by a desire to secure access to that country’s vast natural resources. Chinese companies and investors in Pacific Islands, mostly from provincial centres in China, have expanded beyond their traditional small retail business focus to the domain of public infrastructure and mining. Chinese construction compa-nies are growing in number and influence in the region, with aparticularly strong presence in Papua New Guinea and also Fiji. Contrary to common perception, these companies of-ten work in co-operation with other foreign investors and multinational partners to complete projects in the Pacific Is-lands.4 They also compete for and win World Bank and Asian Development Bank tenders in the Pacific Islands, which de-mand levels of transparency not commonly associated with Chinese activities in the region. This aspect of Chinese com-mercial activities complicates the perception that Chinese ac-tors in the region are inherently different from Western actors.

Aid spendingChina’s aid spending in the Pacific Islands tends to be highly visible, given its concentration in public works projects, an area that traditional donors have shifted focus away from over the last decade. Analysts and Pacific Islands politicians and officials thus frequently invoke China’s aid as evidence that China has strate-gic ambitions to replace the West by filling a gap left by the es-tablished donors. This interpretation would, however, appear to over-estimate the actual quantum and intent of China’s develop-ment assistance spending in the region.

According to published and forthcoming research conducted by the Lowy Institute’s Philippa Brant, China disbursed approxi-mately US$850 million in bilateral aid to the eight Pacific Islands countries that recognise the People’s Republic of China between 2006 and 2011.5 Brant’s research was based on a comprehensive, detailed survey of Pacific Islands budgets and government reports, information from China’s Ministry of Commerce, and interviews with Pacific Islands and Chinese government officials. She argues that the complex and various methods of disbursement of China’s

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (right) shakes hands with Dr Fred Sevele, prime minister of Tonga, at the opening of the the First Ministerial Conference of the

Nadi, Fiji, on 5 April 2006

(US$millions)

Source: OECD DAC Creditor Reporting System, Dr Philippa Brant

communications in the region.3 Energy companies from France have investments in Fiji and Papua New Guinea as well as the French Pacific. In Papua New Guinea, the United States oil and gas giant Exxon Mobil has a $19 billion investment in an integrat-ed liquefied natural gas development in the Southern Highlands and Western Provinces that dwarfs any other private sector invest-ment in the region.

Competitive environmentPapua New Guinea hosts a range of non-Chinese Asian invest-ments, including a South Korean cassava ethanol project and a Japanese cement company. Malaysian companies dominate the logging sector in Papua New Guinea, and also have substantial interests in the palm oil industry, property, retail and media. The tuna processing industry has attracted investment from companies in the Philippines, South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand and China. Japanese company Yazaki is the largest private sector employer in Samoa. The Malaysian company MBf Holdings has investments across a range of industries in Fiji, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and


aid in the Pacific Islands make it difficult to extract accurate an-nual expenditure figures per country and that a five-year regional total is more likely to be an accurate representation of Chinese expenditure on aid.

Using a five-year total to compare donors shows that even with its impressive rise in profile as an aid giver in the region, Chi-na is very far from challenging Australia’s overwhelmingly dom-inant position. As reflected in Graph 3, Australia is far and away the lead donor in the region, disbursing US$4.8 billion over five years, approximately four times that of the second largest donor, the United States.6

In fact nothing illustrates Australian predominance in the Pacific Islands better than its aid commitment to the region. In the 2012–13 financial year Australia committed A$1.19 billion to the Pacific Islands.7 In 2011, the last year for which compara-ble statistics for other OECD donors are available, Australia’s net disbursements totalled US$1.21 billion, which constituted 62 per cent of the bilateral aid received by the region.8 There is no other region in the world where a single donor dominates to the extent that Australia does in the Pacific.

Collaboration frameworkIt is often argued that OECD and Chinese aid are not compara-ble, given the Chinese government’s characterisation of its inter-national spending on development as ‘South–South co-operation’ rather than traditional official development assistance. ‘South–South co-operation’ is a framework for collaboration among de-veloping countries in various fields, and is meant to take the form of a partnership where knowledge and skills are shared to promote development. Such altruistic explanations should not always be accepted at face value. China’s aid often ends up supporting Chi-na’s own economic development through investment in projects that deliver contracts to Chinese companies and employment to Chinese nationals. Pacific Islanders, who tend to be excluded from opportunities to work on infrastructure projects funded by Chi-nese grant aid, may not see these projects as partnerships. More-over, as is the case for many other donors in the Pacific, Chinese aid is sometimes delivered with an expectation that the recipient country will be grateful enough to support a Chinese candidature in international organisations or the Chinese position on a vote in the United Nations.

Dr Graeme Smith makes a compelling argument that it is ‘Chinese infrastructure companies in the Pacific Islands, not aid agencies in Beijing’ that are responsible for driving aid.9 There is in fact very limited knowledge in the central government agen-cies of Beijing of the Pacific Islands region, and there is no single

centralised aid agency in Beijing co-ordinating China’s develop-ment assistance. Instead, commercial interests of the companies that deliver development assistance shape Chinese involvement in this field. Forty per cent of China’s global foreign aid expenditure is for construction projects in which China provides some or all of the financing, services, materials and labour.10 China’s aid in the Pacific Islands is, therefore, unsurprisingly and increasingly focused on Papua New Guinea, where the greatest number of op-portunities for Chinese construction, manufacturing and mining companies reside. It is these commercially-driven, albeit mostly state-owned, entities that are advocating for the attention of the Chinese Ministry of Commerce and the China Exim Bank in the Pacific Islands to ensure that they have the financial support to compete for tenders and expand their market share. Such drivers of aid are clearly commercial and bottom-up, contradicting the thesis that China’s development assistance is underpinned by a centrally co-ordinated geo-strategic design.

Diplomatic/military tiesChina maintains diplomatic missions in most of the countries that recognise it in the region. Chinese diplomats, like diplomats from many nations, leverage Chinese development assistance to shore up Pacific support for China’s positions on international matters. But in the competitive vote-buying environment that exists in the Pacific Islands, there is no evidence yet to suggest that Pacific Is-lands governments are being particularly swayed by China.

China has not yet sought to project hard power into the region. Two Chinese naval vessels visited some Pacific Islands countries in 2010, en route to Australia and New Zealand, which may signal longer-term military interests in the region. However, previous rumours about China setting up military bases in islands states have not come to fruition. Senior Chinese military officers have paid visits to regional counterparts, provided military uniforms, vehicles and other non-lethal equipment and refurbished barracks in Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Tonga. While China has been criticised for supporting the military-led regime in Fiji, the nature of the military support it has made available to Fiji has been no different from that offered to Papua New Guinea and Tonga.

Instead, once again, China’s diplomatic and military ties in the region lag well behind those of the existing powers. Australia re-mains the key security partner for many countries in the region and bears much of the security responsibility for the South Pacific, which it identifies as a key strategic interest. Australia’s influence is supported by co-operative working relationships with powers such as the United States, France and New Zealand, which all have ter-ritorial interests, defence responsibilities and military forces in the region.

The stance of Pacific Islands states in relation to these estab-lished powers often reflects the somewhat fractious attitudes that result from close and longstanding familiarity. Nevertheless, most of the islands states in the region (with the possible exception of Fiji) are not seeking to change the existing order, even if they could. However, they will continue to seek additional econom-ic growth opportunities from engagement with the rising Asian economies that neighbour the region.

Problematic paradigmIt could be argued that while viewing China’s growing presence in the Pacific Islands through a paradigm of geo-strategic com-petition may not be entirely accurate, it is prudent given the un-

A roadside sign in Tonga


certainty surrounding China’s future trajectory. But the problem with relying on a geo-strategic paradigm is that it obscures a better understanding of both the benefits and drawbacks of China’s cur-rent economic and commercially-led aid activities in the region, and perhaps even obstructs engagement with China on those ac-tivities. In that regard, in analysing the changing dynamics of the Pacific Islands region, it is important to be clear about the differ-ence between normal economic competition and competition for strategic influence derived from diplomatic, defence and aid links.

The real competition in the Pacific Islands region is economic, even if China, with its ‘South–South co-operation’ approach to development assistance and with the influence of Chinese com-mercial interests on its decisions about aid expenditure, often blurs the distinction between economic and development activi-ties. The last five to ten years have seen an increase in international interest in the resources of the Pacific Islands to meet global de-mand. Private sector competition for those resources has inten-sified. Papua New Guinea hosts a range of investment partners, who compete for the country’s abundant and valuable resources. Competition over Pacific Islands fisheries is fierce. There are also prospects, as yet unrealised, for deep-sea mining across the region, which is likely to provoke further competition.

The proximity of the Pacific Islands to resource-hungry East Asia will be very advantageous for the region over the long term. Already, rising demand for the resources of Melanesia has seen the region’s annual GDP growth rates surpass the global averages of the last decade. China’s own experience in lifting millions of people out of poverty inspires Pacific Islands countries in ways that the region’s established powers cannot. But it would be a mistake to think, as some Pacific Islands governments have done, that any and all for-eign interest should be welcomed simply because it contributes to the public purse.

Debt burdensChina’s loans to various Pacific Islands countries have created debt burdens. For example, according to IMF assessments Tonga is at high risk of debt distress due to loans from China’s EXIM Bank.11

Elsewhere, the commercial interests of foreign logging and min-ing companies have in some cases imposed lasting damage on the environments and, therefore, the livelihoods of communities in Melanesia. Moves by foreign firms, including Chinese-owned en-tities, into rural business sectors have caused some consternation in the islands. Vanuatu’s government has discussed imposing re-

strictions on foreign investment to stop Chinese businesses dom-inating its retail sector.12

Large and small companies from China or other nations that favour employment of their nationals over locals are failing to meet local communities’ expectations of investment. Resentment against Chinese-owned businesses was a factor behind riots in Nuku’alofa in Tonga and Honiara in Solomon Islands in 2006 and in Papua New Guinea in 2009. Resentment fuelled by frus-trations about exclusion from job opportunities could resurface and be expressed in violent outbursts in almost any of the Pacific Islands.

Co-operative futureAustralia, New Zealand and the United States should be seeking to engage and co-operate with China on its commercial and de-velopment activities. The region faces massive development chal-lenges, and with its sizeable resources and experience in lifting millions of people out of poverty, China can a make a significant contribution to addressing them. But as a relatively recent and still inexperienced donor and investor in the region, China would benefit from the experience of countries like Australia and New Zealand. The challenge, therefore, will be to build the appropriate framework through which this can occur.

This is easier said than done. China has been reluctant to co-operate with other donors in the past, and has repeatedly de-murred from joining the Cairns Compact on Strengthening De-velopment Co-operation, which was established in 2009 to facil-itate co-ordination and promote transparency among aid donors in the Pacific Islands. China may not have wanted its records on aid to the Pacific subjected to the rigours of transparency required by the compact. Nor did it necessarily want to abide by rules it had no hand in negotiating. It may have also believed that its mechanisms of delivering aid were simply too different to fit into a framework set up to suit the region’s established donors.

China does need to be more transparent about its aid activities in the Pacific. But ultimately it is in the interest of established do-nors to bring China into regional arrangements such as the Cairns Compact and this probably means showing more flexibility and understanding of China’s position as a relatively new aid giver. Otherwise, it will be difficult to move beyond the somewhat cir-cular discussion about the true intention of Chinese aid. This dis-cussion, often played out in the public arena, only fuels mistrust between China and other donors and prevents co-operation on aid projects that may actually help to break down suspicion. It is in this context in particular that viewing Chinese activities in the Pacific Islands from a starting point of geo-strategic competition is counter-productive.

Fruitful partnershipThe private sector has demonstrated in the Pacific Islands that co-operation between organisations with different nationalities, philosophies and modus operandi can work in partnership to achieve common objectives. Chinese companies already work in partnership with Australian, French and local companies to deliv-er projects in the Pacific.

The Cook Islands and New Zealand have proved that donor co-operation with China is also possible. In a world first, the Cook Islands instigated trilateral co-operation on a NZ$60 million pro-ject in 2012 to improve water quality in Rarotonga. Of course, this initiative came about for a number of reasons that are not

China


easily replicated by others. China had offered the Cook Islands a NZ$32 million concessional loan for the project years earlier. The Cook Islands proposed to involve New Zealand, with which it has a special relationship, as a means of improving project ef-fectiveness. New Zealand, which also has a very positive relation-ship with China (it is the first developed country to have signed a free trade agreement with China), contributed NZ$15 million towards the cost of the project and the Cook Islands government also contributed.13 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised the initiative as a model the United States could follow.14

The Australian government has made some positive strides in broadening and deepening its relationship with China. In April 2013, it agreed a Strategic Partnership with China that comprises an annual foreign and strategic dialogue and an annual strategic economic dialogue. Australia and China could use this dialogue to share views on development priorities in the Pacific Islands. Substantive discussions about the Pacific that focus on tackling se-rious development challenges in the region in collaboration with Pacific Islands states, rather than on persuading China to join existing Australian-led initiatives such as the Cairns Compact, would probably be more constructive for the islands countries. It should serve to build trust and could help to assuage any Chinese suspicions of containment.

New initiativeThe new Australia–China Development Cooperation Memoran-dum of Understanding, also signed in April 2013, is meant to en-able the two countries to co-operate on aid initiatives, including regional health issues and water resource management.15 Co-op-eration with China in the aid sector is difficult and this memoran-dum represents a very valuable start to building a new relationship in the region, based on a higher degree of trust between Australia and China.

Encouraging wider co-operation on disaster response pre-paredness exercises would be a constructive and non-politicised means of breaking down barriers between Pacific Islands coun-tries and their established and newer partners, and help Pacific Islanders to become more resilient. Natural disasters are crises that befall almost all Pacific Islands countries on a regular basis, so there are many opportunities to put co-ordinated planning into practice. These exercises can be organised bilaterally and regional-ly, and if initiated by Pacific Islands countries or regional bodies, China is more likely to be attracted to participating.

Useful mechanism Australia, New Zealand and France already have in FRANZ a useful mechanism that assists Pacific Islands countries in dis-aster response, but there is scope for more partners to assist. China has offered cash grants and in-kind donations to Pacific Islands governments following past natural disasters. As there are now a large number of Chinese engineering firms based in the Pacific, China’s role in disaster response could involve in-kind assistance provided by these firms to repair infrastructure. Building effective models of co-operation in this field would help all partners act as responsible stakeholders that are respon-sive to the priorities of Pacific Islands countries. They would also lessen the chances of misinterpreting the motivations of external actors in the region.

China is a very long way from approaching Australia’s domi-nance of the aid, trade and strategic domains in the Pacific Islands

region, or displacing the longstanding relationships between Pa-cific Islands states and the region’s established powers. If China’s aims in the region are to be described in terms of geo-strategic competition, then on the available evidence China is not a par-ticularly committed competitor. Australia, New Zealand and the United States should co-operate with China in areas that support Pacific Islands economic and development priorities rather than building any new security or diplomatic infrastructure designed to compete with China. This will help to maximise the benefits of China’s new role in the region, while helping to minimise the neg-ative consequences that do flow from some of China’s commercial and development activities in the Pacific Islands.

NOTES 1. David Smith, ‘China’a booming trade with Africa helps tone

its diplomatic muscle’, The Guardian, 22 Mar 2012.2. Paul Gruenwald and Daniel Wilson, ‘Pacific trade — who

should be targeted in Emerging Asia?’ ANZ research article, 16 Aug 2012.

3. Danielle Cave, ‘How the Pacific’s ICT revolution is trans-forming the region’, Lowt Institute Analysis, Nov 2012.

4. Losirene Chand, ‘China Railway, TOTAL partners’, Fiji Sun, 27 Feb 2013.

5. Philippa Brant, ‘No strings attached? Chinese foreign aid and its implications for the international aid regime’ (PhD the-sis, University of Melbourne, 2012); interviews with Philippa Brant conducted in April 2013. The figure of $US850 million does not include scholarships ot technical assistance which are delivered by separate line government agencies in China.

6. OECD.StatExtracts, Creditor Reporting System 2013 (stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?datasetcode=CRS1).

7. Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Portfolio Addition-al Estimates Statements 2012–2013: Foreign Affairs and Trade Portfolio (Canberra, 2013).

8. OECD Development Assistance Committee, ‘Development aid at a glance: statistics by region — Oceania. 2013’ (www.oecd.org/dac/stats/regioncharts.htm).

9. Graeme Smith, ‘Are Chinese soft loans always a bad thing?’ in The Interpreter, 29 Mar 2012 (www.lowtinterpreter.org/post/2012/03/29/Are-Chinese-soft-loans-always-a-bad-thing.aspx).

10. China’s Information Office of the State Council, China’s foreign aid 2011 (english.gov.cn/official/2011-04/21/con-tent_1849913.htm).

11. International Monetary Fund, Tonga: Staff Report for the 2012 Article IV Consultation — Debt Sustainability Analysis, 1 May 2012.

12. ‘Vanuatu to restrict foreign owners in the business sector’, Ra-dio New Zealand, 16 Apr 2013 (www.rnzi.com/pages/news.php?op=read/id=75342).

13. New Zealand Aid Programme, ‘New Zealand and China collaborate on world first in development,’ Sep 2012 (www.aid.govt.nz/media-and-publications/development-stories/sep-tember-2012/new-zealand-and-china-collaborate-world-fi).

14. Kate Chapman, ‘US to follow NZ lead in China aid’, 1 Sep 2012 (www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/7593279/US-to-fol-low-NZ-lead-in-China-aid).

15. Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs, ‘Australia and China enter new development cooperation partnership’, Canberra 10 Apr 2013.


Retired Australian Army Major General Jim Molan wrote recent-ly that the Australian Defence Force is ‘being pushed into a state where its capabilities are at, or will soon be at, a state from which they will not be able to be revived in any reasonable period of time — a situation of terminal decline’. That might be a little over-stated, but it is true that there are some force elements currently under-performing, and any credible estimate of the cost of future force structure plans is greater than the projected funding. For the amount the government spends, I do not think we get much of a return in terms of military options available.

It is not too hard to find examples that support Molan’s con-tention. The Royal Australian Navy has managed to keep a frigate on station in the Gulf for over a decade, but has conspicuously failed to maintain an acceptable level of capability in its amphib-ious and submarine fleets. The Army and Royal Australian Air Force have both managed to do the jobs they have been called upon to do, although the former has had to dip deeply into its Re-serves for specialised personnel like engineers and medical. Look-ing forward, recapitalisation of the air combat fleet (A$15 billion) and protected mobility for land forces (over A$10 billion) at the same time as a new submarine fleet (potentially A$30–40 billion) and replacement frigates (over A$10 billion) is going to be a very big ask in the fiscal environment we are likely to see.

It is not too hard to see how we got to this point. Defence spending has rarely increased at a rate that will allow the quantity and quality of capability to be maintained. As my colleague Mark Thomson’s budget analysis has shown, maintaining military ca-pabilities requires annual funding increases of about 2.5 per cent above inflation. The 2009 Defence white paper promised to do that (for a while) but never delivered on it.

Inevitable declineA decline in capability, capacity, or both is inevitable if the fund-ing is not there. And the rising unit cost of military platforms does not help. It has meant that the numbers able to be fielded have steadily fallen over the years. For example, the Army had 143 Centurion tanks, which were replaced by 103 Leopards, which in turn gave way to 59 Abrams. The RAAF and RAN operated over 400 combat aircraft between them in 1960. Today the RAN’s fast jets are a distant memory and the RAAF is down to 71 ‘classic’

Issues in Australian defenceAndrew Davies discusses the future of the Australian Defence Force.

Andrew Davies is program director at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in Canberra. This article is an amalgam of a series of blog posts published on the ASPI Strategist (www.aspistrategist.org.au).

After a decade of continuous operations, Australia’s armed forces are fraying around the edges. A major recapitalisation began after the 1999 East Timor operation, but is only partly complete. There is a real risk that the mismatch between aspiration and resources that became obvious after the 2009 Defence white paper funding model collapsed just two weeks after its release will come home to roost in the next few years. The ADF is now looking at a situation a bit like the NZDF has faced before them — more top-end capabilities to support than money to do it with.

Hornets and 24 Super Hornets.The overarching challenge in defence planning is always to

align strategy and resources and shape the force structure accord-ingly. One possible policy prescription is to maintain Australia’s stated military strategy options of long-range high-end platforms and increase spending to first arrest the decline and then expand the forces. (Molan suggests around 2 per cent of GDP would do the job — a long way from where we are today.) That is certainly a workable solution — if the government and its successors in perpetuity are willing to provide the required funds. But it is not the only way, which is just as well, as neither side of Australian politics is showing much inclination to shovel more money to-wards defence.

History and the current fiscal situation suggest strongly that pursuing that top-down strategy is unlikely to be an appealing option for future Australian governments, especially if it comes with a big price tag. So we need to find a different approach, by accepting the resource constraints as more or less fixed (in the absence of an external shock that changes the calculus) and de-veloping a strategy that suits the force structure that the funding envelope can afford.

Unappealing approachThat approach is not likely to appeal to the Department of De-fence or to those of us who make a living pontificating on stra-tegic matters because it is somehow less intellectually ‘pure’. But I believe we need to deal with the world we have rather than the world we would like to have. If Molan is right that the ADF is in terminal decline, then drastic treatment might be called for.

We have a very good example available to us of setting strat-egy to deal with a resource-limited environment. We need only to look across the Tasman. Our New Zealand neighbours have


taken a deep breath, weighed up their resources and strategic cir-cumstances and have taken some tough decisions, at the expense of some military sacred cows. The most visible such decision was deciding that it could do without fast jets. Imagine that — armed forces with no ‘top guns’.

Instead, New Zealand has decided that it will keep the ability to police its maritime jurisdiction (with only limited warfighting capabilities at sea), do long range airlift, participate in peacekeep-ing and stabilisation operations in the South Pacific (and lead small ones), make small contributions to US-led and UN-man-dated operations further afield — and not much else. The result is a force structure that is modest but well-suited to the equally modest strategy it supports.

One objection to this argument as a role model is that New Zealand can always rely on Australia for its defence. My response to that is twofold. First, why should not they plan on that basis? It has the merit of being true because of geography and the realities of the scale of resources the two counties can bring to bear. And, second, we have a similar luxury of a bigger friend with more capability in the form of the United States. We might not like to look so obviously calculating, but the New Zealanders have mostly learned to live with it.

White paperThe Defence white paper released at the start of May 2013 did not help. It maintains the fiction that all of the ‘core capabilities’ can be retained with a funding boost that is modest in the next few years and some ‘smoke and mirrors’ shifting around of mon-ey. The 2009 white paper had a more generous funding envelope and started at a higher baseline.

Australia has done the experiment of trying to maintain top shelf capabilities on modest budgets before. The 1990s were tough times for the ADF. Funding was constrained as successive governments worked their way back from the ‘recession we had to have’, causing the ADF’s readiness and capability levels to fall away. Submarine capabilities declined alarmingly and the Anzac frigates were ‘fitted for but not with’ the systems needed to make them combat ready. Australia’s air combat platforms were not able to participate in even moderately challenging environments due to inadequate electronic warfare fits and long-delayed weapons upgrades. At the same time, the Army spent a demoralising dec-ade preparing to hunt for small groups of insurgents who had de-cided — for reasons nobody could ever adequately explain — to penetrate the vast expanse of Australia’s north to do who knows what.

Yet — and this is very important for what follows — the ADF still managed to pull off the INTERFET operation in late 1999. It is conventional wisdom to say that this was a ‘by the skin of our teeth’ success, which is usually followed up by an argument for boosting defence funding so that it will not happen again. I would argue that there is actually another lesson that can be drawn from that episode: the decline in front-line combat capability across the ADF did not preclude success in that sort of operation.

Foreseeable contingenciesIt is true that the ADF would have been in trouble if had it faced an adversary with high-level capabilities around that time, and things could have gotten difficult if the Indonesian forces had not co-operated in East Timor (that is why Indonesian agreement was an effective precondition for the deployment). But the rel-

atively benign stabilisation operations that did arise in East Ti-mor, Bougainville and Solomon Islands were far and away the most likely sorts of contingencies foreseeable at the time. In short, the armed services and those who see a strong military as a vital arm of national power lamented the decline in ADF capabilities in the 1990s, but it did not endanger Australia’s security in any meaningful way. In fact, the embarrassing failure to provide am-phibious vessels during the Queensland floods in 2011 showed that our preoccupation with platforms suitable for high-intensity operations can lead to capability downfalls in those areas that are more likely to be required.

That observation brings me to what I think is the crux of the defence decision-making process -— the level of risk we are willing to live with and how we assess it. Assuming that we are at least passably smart in the way we spend the defence budget, more funding buys more capability, which in turn retires more risk. That is why we tend to ramp spending up in times of height-ened risk perception, as the Menzies government did during the time of insurgencies in Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia, and as the Howard government did after 9/11. But it is also possible to over-estimate risk and spend more than is prudent to retire the risk of events that are either unlikely to the point of irrelevance or which would have consequences that do not outweigh the cost of hedging. The convulsive decade-long reaction to 9/11 is arguably a case in point.

As mentioned above, New Zealand is a good example of a country taking a hard look at its strategic situation and realising that it had capabilities on the books that were never likely to be used in anything but a war of choice, which would take place far from its sovereign territory (and in which New Zealand’s contri-bution would be far less then decisive). Arguably, New Zealand is less well defended today than it was in the past, but it is defended well enough against anything that is actually likely to happen.

Looking at Australia’s strategic circumstances, we are less well served by geography than our mates across the Tasman, so our risk assessment is different — but perhaps not as different as might be supposed. Power projection across oceans remains a formida-bly difficult task, and the list of countries that could bring much combat power to bear against Australia’s territories is (provided we exclude the United States) vanishingly small.

The futureA predictable rejoinder to that analysis is ‘but we can’t predict the future’, so we have to hedge against things we cannot foresee. To a point that is true, but any planning process has to have a stab at prediction within a reasonable set of parameters, and defence planning is no exception. So I will provide my short list of what I think are reasonable planning assumptions for the next twenty years. I do not think any of them are particularly contentious:

even with only modest investment, the ADF will continue to overmatch the power projection capability of those countries within range of Australian territoriesthe United States will remain the primary military power in all parts of the Asia–Pacific region from which a conventional threat to Australian territories could be launched

Australia’s budget situation will not return to as favourable a state as was the case in the period 2000–08.

Let us start with the third of those. Post-global financial crisis, Australian government revenues have fallen sharply and serious economists inside and outside government are talking about a


structural deficit that will take ‘a substantial level of financial dis-cipline’ on the behalf of future governments to deal with. So, in the absence of a substantial external shock, Defence should not hold its breath waiting for more money. Like it or not, we need to find ways to provide defence capability and capacity with spend-ing levels not too different from today’s. I think that is doable, but acknowledge in advance that the levels of risk we will have to accept will rise — the good news being that they are currently very low and are not likely to increase to an uncomfortable level.

My prescription for the ADF force structure is based on the following objectives:

having the ability to lead or contribute substantial military ca-pability to regional stabilisation, peacekeeping and non-com-batant evacuation operationshaving adequate surveillance and constabulary capabilities to protect our maritime interestshaving the capability to defeat the force projection capabilities of countries in our immediate regionhaving the capability to provide high value contributions to US-led operations in the wider Asia–Pacific theatre and be-yondmaintaining a critical mass of core warfighting capabilities which will allow for expansion in the future should the stra-tegic situation deteriorate significantly.

Core interestsThe first three points are options that support Australia’s core interests. First, we have a greater stake in regional stability than powers further afield do. That is why we have found ourselves as leaders of operations in Bougainville, East Timor (twice) and the Solomon Islands. That is not going to change, and we will have to be ready to do it again when circumstances demand. We will be able to handle similar operations with the land forces and airlift capability we have today plus the two large amphibious ships that will arrive in a few years. (Until then we might want to cross our fingers and hope our trans-Tasman mates can provide sealift if we need it.)

Second, while we actually do a pretty good job of policing our maritime interests, in part by making good use of intelligence sharing arrangements, the politics of border security will proba-bly cause Australian governments to try to do more. Throwing extra money at top-end platforms like the naval version of Global Hawk or the P-8 maritime patrol aircraft is likely to be at the top of Defence’s wish list. But there are almost certainly more cost-ef-fective ways to improve performance.

Third, while there is no indication that any country has de-signs on Australia’s territory (and there is no credible reason for it to do so), maintaining capabilities that overmatch nearby militar-ies is prudent because intentions can change relatively quickly. We can put a large tick in that box with the forces we already have. Indonesia has neither the intent nor ability to seriously threaten Australia’s current air or maritime forces and has little prospect of doing so in the next couple of decades. In fact, given the large size of Indonesia’s army (and thus the unappealing idea of a land conflict there for Australia’s small army), there is a natural détente between the countries even if there were to be a massive falling out. No other small to medium power has the ability to first de-feat Indonesia then use their territory to stage against Australia.

That leaves us with hostile major powers — and brings us to the fourth objective. There are not any of those at the moment.

But, again, intentions can change, and an insurance policy is worthwhile. That is where getting smart in our alliance contribu-tions makes good sense. Providing similar capabilities to the Unit-ed States but on a much smaller scale will not make any difference in the outcome of a major power conflict, but if we are clever and turn up with niche contributions of often over-subscribed force elements, we could — and I hesitate to say it — punch above our weight. High value assets we could bring to the fight include air-to-air refuellers (almost always over-subscribed in intense air operations), electronic warfare aircraft (ditto), special forces and (perhaps) conventional submarines — although we need to have a frank discussion with the US Navy about the concept of oper-ations for those.

Expansion capacityFinally, it makes sense to keep up the levels of expertise and a baseline level of sophisticated hardware to allow us to expand our defence forces if we need to. But we do not need gold-plated tech-nology to do that.

The force structure decisions that follow from this line of rea-soning include:

There is no need to develop substantial elements of the Army as a ‘Marine’ force, with the exception of a vanguard force to seize and hold points of entry for larger forces — but only against light opposition. The Army does not need weapon systems designed for high intensity warfare. In fact, it is head-ed this way, with only 2 Battalion Royal Australian Regiment being trained as an amphibious specialist battalion.There is no need for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter any time this decade — consolidate on the Super Hornet (especially the Growler electronic attack variant) and have another look some time after 2020. This is almost happening with the 2013 white paper announcement of twelve more Super Hor-nets and the JSF to reach initial operational capability around 2020.The future frigate need not be a large, top-end warfighting vessel. A larger number of less capable vessels would provide better value.Maritime surveillance and response needs a cost-effective force mix of manned and unmanned and military and civil-ian platforms.Twelve future submarines might not be necessary, depending on what we (and the US Navy) want them to do.

There are some sacred cows in this list, and the defence estab-lishment will not like it one bit. Nor will either side of politics be prepared to say publicly that they will settle for less capability than is in the increasingly fanciful Defence Capability Plan. But the alternative is to cut elsewhere in government spending to put more into defence. Do not hold your breath.

A US Navy battle group


During the Cold War US attachment to Israel, people in Wash-ington asserted, stemmed from ideological reasons: Israel was praised as the only democratic state in the Middle East. At the same time Americans could not forget Jewish suffering during the Second World War. Nonetheless, the major reason for US support of Israel was pragmatic geo-politics; in the process of Cold War geo-political realignment, the Soviet Union ultimately chose the Arab regimes in Egypt and Syria as its allies/proxies after the 1956 Suez War. Consequently, the United States, following the simple logic that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, embraced Israel, providing it with generous economic and military help. Wash-ington also helped to open doors for Russian Jews who started to emigrate to Israel in droves.

Following the end of the Cold War, the situation changed. There was no Soviet Union. Apart from Iran there was no hostile power present in the Middle East, at least of those that could be compared in strength with the Soviet Union. In these new cir-cumstances, Washington hastily reconsidered its vision of Israel. Israel’s conflict with the Arab world helped foster anti-American feelings in the region. It also created instability, encouraging the spread of Islamic terrorism and regimes that could well endanger general stability in the Middle East, which remains one of the major sources of American oil.

More importantly, the conflict in the Middle East, or even potential big power conflict in the area, has created or could cre-ate an unbearable strain on the US economy even without much rise in oil prices. Indeed, the US economy has been in the process of decline for a few generations now. This can easily be seen if one looks beyond the ‘service’ bubble to actual goods production, such as steel and cars. In this latter category US decline in the last few generations has been not just relative to overall global production but also in absolute terms. The lack of efficiency and the mercantile nature of the military machine creates additional problems.

At present, the US military is not the holy shrine of patriot-ism despite assertions of the Pentagon/White House propaganda machines to the contrary. It is, however, a ‘cash cow’ and/or the last option for employment. Consequently, despite the huge US

Israel and the United States: a new trendDmity Shlapentokh discusses the implications of a weakening in American backing of the Jewish state.

Dr Dmitry V. Shlapentokh is an associate professor of history at Indiana University, South Bend, Indiana. E-mail: [email protected]

During the Cold War, Israel was the staunchest ally of the United States in the Middle East. It goes without saying that the US relationship with Israel continues to be strong. Still, new reali-ties clearly affect this relationship. In comparison to the Cold War era, Israel has become much less important for the United States and, in some cases, it has actually become a liability. Israel’s support in the United States, including among the Jewish community, has dwindled at least in comparison to the early years of Israel history. Jerusalem has recognised the new mood in Wash-ington and the emerging complicated relationship between Middle Eastern countries and great powers, especially the United States.

military budget, the actual translation of dollars into military as-sets has become increasingly modest. In this regard, the cost of one soldier in Afghanistan/Iraq for just one year is illustrative: it is one million dollars. This is not because soldiers are extremely well paid and treated — the state has, in fact, done its best to minimise payment for their medical bills, education and other benefits — but because the delivery and upkeep of each soldier is in the hands of numerous middlemen/contractors, who try to milk Uncle Sam as much as possible.

Such a mercantilisation of the army had never existed in the past, and it is the reason why the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the United States’ enemies are poorly trained guerrillas, cost the treasury almost the same as the arms race with the Soviet Union in the midst of the Cold War. This explains why Wash-ington decided basically to abandon both Iraq and Afghanistan regardless of the long-term consequences. Washington plainly has no resources for new big conflicts in the Middle East, even for a war with Iran, a state that both Washington and Jerusalem regard as a mortal threat.

Additional problemsThe rise of China has created additional problems. Increasingly perceiving Beijing as its major rival of the 21st century, Wash-ington proclaimed that it would redeploy an increasing share of its military assets to South-east Asia. Consequently, Washington wished to see the Middle East kept free from major trouble. To this end, it began to press Israel to make substantial concessions to the Palestinians and clearly indicated that it might not back Israel if it launched a strike against Iran. The nature of this pressure, and

The decline of employment in the US manufacturing sector


evidence of a general worsening of the Israeli-American relation-ship, could be seen in statements by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to the effect that Israel could be a ‘failing state’ unless it solves its problems with Palestin-ians and its Arab neighbours in general.

Such a statement, which implies a sort of artificiality of Israel as a state, had never been

by bloodline/ethnicity, received Israeli citizenship on the spot, at least during the state’s early years. In fact, Jews could receive cit-izenship even outside of Israel. This very fact — that one could receive Israeli citizenship easily — underscored the sense of ethnic solidarity that transcended idiosyncratic features of various seg-ments of the Jewish diaspora. At the same time, not only could non-Jews not become Israeli citizens — for they were not covered by the ‘law of return’ unless, of course, they were married to a Jew — but also most Arabs in Israeli-controlled land were not citizens.

Israeli society placed emphasis on the military, especially in the state’s early days, and emphasised the glory of the soldier who fought and died for his people. At the same time, moneymaking was in a way despised as the preoccupation of Jews in ‘galut’ (dias-pora), carried out with both cynical disregard of the fate of Jewish people and/or inability to defend them against predators of all types. The role models of that time were protagonists of ancient Jewish history from Isus Navin to the fighters of Masada, who were often ruthless but courageous in dealing with their enemies.

Essential differencesThe praise of ruthless fighters — the genocidal slaughter of ene-mies during the Jewish conquest of Palestine in ancient times was seen as essential for victory — went hand in hand with a certain contempt for Holocaust victims. The latter were seen as ‘soap’ — an allusion to Nazi use of the bodies of their victims to make soap. The implication here was that these victims had willingly accepted their death instead of fighting and dying in battle. All of the characteristics of Israel and, of course, occupation of the West Bank and expulsion — either direct or indirect — of hundreds of thousands of Arab Palestinians made the early Israel quite differ-ent from the United States.

All these aspects of Israeli politics and socio-economic arrange-ments provide scope for enemies of Israel and often Jews — the term ‘anti-Semite’ is not accurate, for many haters of Israel and Jews are Arab Semites themselves — to dub Israel as a ‘Nazi state’. This definition is not true and most Israelis would passionately discard this notion. They, among other things, would point to the endless Arab terror and to the very fact that many Muslim states, such as Iran, want the destruction of Israel. Thus, military corpor-ativism, especially in the beginning of Israeli history, was due not to a drive for endless expansion, as it was with Nazi Germany, but

heard before from the mouths of American politicians of such high rank. John Kerry, Clinton’s successor as secretary of state, is known for statements about the ‘Israeli lobby’ being too influ-ential and, implicitly, detrimental to US interests. Chuck Hagel, now secretary of defense, had made similar statements — but this did not prevent President Obama favouring him for one of the top Cabinet posts. A generation or so ago such statements would have spelt immediate ruin for a political career.

The increasing discord between Israel and the United States could also be seen in the emergence of a new type of publica-tion. One of the notable examples could be the work of John Mearsheimer, the noted political scientist from the University of Chicago, who maintains that the Israeli lobby in the United States harms American national interests.1 Top university press-es have never published such material before. Anti-Israeli articles also started to appear in leading American newspapers and were frequently authored by the American Jews. This cast light on the changes in the American Jewish community that have been tak-ing place during the last few decades.

Critical articlesIt is usually assumed that American Jews have played a consid-erable, if not crucial, role in US support of Israel, that they have constituted the most powerful lobby. This continues to be true. Still, one could find articles critical of Israel published in influen-tial American newspapers like the New York Times, authored by Jews. Not as many American Jews are emigrating to Israel as did when Israel was newly formed as a state. In any case, the interest/attachment of American Jews to Israel has become visibly less in-tense than it was several decades ago. There are several reasons for this. First, the sense of Jewish solidarity with Israel was originally due to the persistence of anti-Semitism, which had been a part of American life for a long time as, of course, of the life in the other parts of the West. Today, it is basically gone. There were other as-pects of support of Israel and the reason for emigration, especially in the country’s early days.

American supporters of Israel often stated that the United States supported Israel because it has been a democratic, mar-ket-oriented, capitalist state from the very beginning of its exist-ence. It was the similarity between Israel and the United States that made them true friends. But this was not the case. The state played a huge role in Israel’s early economy. Institutions such as the kibbutzim were extremely important not just in economic but also in political life. And this was, of course, in sharp contrast with the United States, where state involvement in the economy traditionally has been low.

Unlike Israel, the American government provides citizenship to newcomers regardless of their ethnicity. In Israel Jews, defined

Chuck Hagel

An American anti-Semitic cartoon


rather to the need for basic survival. They would also note that any comparison between Israel and

Nazi Germany is truly blasphemous, given that six million Euro-pean Jews perished in the Holocaust following centuries of perse-cution and pogrom-type violence. Indeed any analysis of Israel is enmeshed in emotions and still open wounds. Nevertheless, tak-ing all of this into account, one should look at the problem from a detached position or at least try to do so. Of course, it would be preposterous to see Israel as similar to Nazi Germany; indeed, in sharp contrast with Nazi Germany, present day Israel has no plans for global conquest and quite a few, if not a majority of Is-raelis, would agree on secession of the West Bank if the guarantee of Israel’s security were upheld. There is no mass terror against Palestinian Arabs because of their ethnicity and some Arabs are Israeli citizens.

Even so, taking all of this into consideration, it is still possi-ble to see clear signs of ‘national-socialist’ features in Israeli soci-ety, and they were especially obvious in the first decade after the state’s formation. It might be assumed that this similarity would discourage anyone, especially American Jews, from moving to Is-rael or supporting it. But over-simplification should be avoided. Ethnic Germans from democratic Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland were, after all, ready to accept Hitler as their leader, and the same could be said about Austrian Germans. There were, of course, dif-ferent reasons. Discrimination suffered by Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia is one, while Austrians had shared with Germans in Germany the humiliation of First World War defeat and the ensuing geo-political transformation, which left Austria a small state without its centuries-old empire.

Broader attraction There were also the cases of American Germans returning to Nazi Germany. During the war, some of them were actually sent back to the United States to engage in sabotage, only to be arrested before they were able to do anything and executed. Their return to Nazi Germany no doubt stemmed in part from high unemploy-ment in the United States caused by the Great Depression. In the case of both Austrian Germans and Sudeten Germans, however, the attraction of the Nazi state was much broader and motiva-tion in joining it could not be reduced just to unemployment and wounded national pride. A close look at Nazi Germany is need-ed to understand the complexity of Nazi and similar corporate/neo-socialist regimes.

While studying such regimes, researchers invariably highlight the horrors that these regimes brought to humanity and ulti-mately to their own people. This approach can be found in the Nuremberg Museum dealing with the Nazi legacy. At the end of the exposition, visitors see pictures of not just corpses in concen-tration camps but also the ruins of Nuremberg. There was another aspect of such regimes that is, in most cases, ignored and for un-derstandable reasons. The regime not only provided a wide social security net and job security but also a sense of community ties, a sense that state and society in large would never abandon you and you could rely on them. There was a sense of belonging to one big family where physical proximity, smiles and comradeship indeed meant something. Finally, the Nazi state also provided the sense of striving for one goal.

And in the context of this aspect of the Nazi state, it is un-derstandable that some American Germans would want to go to Nazi Germany or look at it with sympathy. This was not just

caused by problems of unemploy-ment or racism or the like. It was a desire to replace the cold, cal-culating and basically indifferent atomised world of modern Amer-ican capitalism with Gemeinshaft family arrangements. The same could be said of American Jews’ appreciations/interests in Israel in its early years of existence. The ‘na-tional-socialist’ aspect of the state was not a liability for many Amer-ican Jews; for them it was actually an advantage, albeit an unar-ticulated one. For them, a return to Israel was a return to ‘home’. The ‘home’ could be poor, but here they lived in a society where the state would never abandon you, friendship/relationships in-deed mattered and the endless striving for success was replaced by the sense of living a meaningful life. This feeling not only was an important reason for many American Jews to move to Israel but also explained the support of Israel by those American Jews who still lived in the United States; this was especially true for those who were on the left of the political spectrum. Such feelings came under challenge as time passed.

There are, of course, many reasons for such a shift. Undoubt-edly, changes in Israel played an important role here. Over time, these early ‘national-socialist’ familistic arrangements started to become eroded by the development of capitalism. Consequently, Israel came increasingly to be seen as a ‘Hebrew speaking USA’. The increasing similarities of Israeli society to that of America par-adoxically enough alienated an increasing number of American Jews, especially on the left, for whom Israel became not ‘home’, politically or emotionally, as an alternative to what they saw around them but a place similar to where they already lived — the United States. The decline of American Jews’ interest in Israel was evident in recent elections. Barack Obama is one of the most anti-Israeli presidents in American history. While he visited the Middle East during his first term, he never went to Israel. He could hardly be re-elected without Jewish American votes. The fact that he was re-elected indicates, therefore, that his anti-Israe-li position did not alienate him from the majority of American Jews. And his re-election is increasing the alienation of Israel from the United States.

Different approachesWashington’s increasing move away from Jerusalem could be dis-cerned in their different approaches to a variety of foreign policy challenges. Consequently, the Israeli elite increasingly sees its US counterpart as willing to make deals at Israel’s expense and possi-bly to betray Israel in the future. Several problems are apparent. To start with, Jerusalem sees that, despite anti-Iranian rhetoric, Washington is clearly unwilling to strike Iran and could well rec-oncile itself with Iran as a nuclear power. Moreover, a quite dras-tic US-Iranian rapprochement is not absolutely impossible, with America’s old ally left to the side. Indeed in the past, Washington moved close to Beijing without regard for Taipei, whose position was seriously endangered thereby. Jerusalem also has a more re-cent example before its eyes. The situation in Egypt was carefully noted in Israel. Washington did nothing to save the Mubarak re-gime, let alone Mubarak personally, and moved closer to the new (but now defunct) regime of the Muslim Brotherhood, who had

Barack Obama


previously been seen as extremists. Israel and Washington have different views on authoritarian

regimes and their enemies in the Middle East. Israel assumed, for example, that the Gaddafi regime in Libya was the best among all possible choices and its collapse would benefit Islamists much more dangerous to both the United States and Israel. There was a rumour that Israel actually provided help to Gaddafi in his con-frontation with the rebels. In fact, Israel’s warning was right. Isla-mists did indeed become a strong force in Libya and they have no sense of gratitude to the West. Indeed, they killed the US ambas-sador last September, and weapons from Libya found their way to Hezbollah. Following the same line of thought, Israel is not on the side of the United States in Syria, where Israel is hardly excited by the prospect of collapse of the al-Assad regime. At least some peo-ple in Jerusalem, it is clear, perceive Washington as either naïve or reckless, and fear that is ready to strike a deal or at least flirt with Islamists at the expense of Israel.

Needed back-up Finally, Israelis definitely view with apprehension the present eco-nomic/financial crisis in the United States. They fear that both foreign aid and the military budget could well be targeted for se-vere cuts. This would undermine the United States’ ability to en-gage in long and expensive military operations, as well as its abili-ty/willingness to help Israel. Moreover, some people in Jerusalem took into account the possibility not just of the slow ‘aging’ of the United States — American observers believed that the Unit-ed States would be the leading global power until approximately 2030 — but also of a sudden and dramatic economic, military and geo-political collapse. In this latter case, Jerusalem could be left alone. All of this induced Israel to search for a back-up. Rap-prochement with Russia is one of the steps in this direction.

The Israel–United States relationship during Cold War was cemented not so much by common values as by common inter-ests. Washington saw in Israel a major ally in the conflict with the Arabs, acting as Soviet proxies. Israel was also broadly supported by a considerable segment of American Jews, many of whom, es-pecially on the left, saw in Israel’s ‘national-socialist’ corporativism a social-emotional, so to speak, alternative to the coldly capital-ist United States. With the end of the Cold War and dwindling American resources, Israel’s attitude toward Washington became more suspicious and Jerusalem engaged in a search for a back-up. Jerusalem and Washington are certainly not on a collision course. Still, it is clear that their relationship has become tenser than be-fore and most likely will remain so in the future. And this will make developments in the Middle East even more convoluted and unpredictable than they have been in the past.

NOTE1. John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby

and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York), 2007).

NZIR

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Foreign policy is about how one country relates to another, and to the outside world generally. It is influenced by a need to protect and promote a country’s prosperity and security. It is conditioned by external developments, over which smaller countries have very marginal influence. Such developments readily transform the balance of external interests for any country, large or small, even while, as in New Zealand’s case, traditional instincts endure to preserve old familiar relationships and alignments. Foreign policy is shaped by what a country is and seeks to become, so interna-tional reputation is important. I shall come back to that below.

New Zealand foreign policy is influenced by our situation as a small, remote, modern democracy that lacks critical economic mass but by dint of much ingenuity is a leader in bio-technology and a successful producer and exporter of high quality food and related commodities, in a world where food needs are multiplying prodigiously. Predictable flows of trade, investment and technolo-gy are crucial to New Zealand. We do not possess the hard power required to assert New Zealand interests by force of arms. New Zealand foreign policy is deeply attached, therefore, to support for a system of rules-based international behaviour as the basis for a predictable and prosperous world. Values as well as interests drive New Zealand foreign policy.

New Zealand’s colonial inheritance and the international realities of a war-torn 20th century shaped our foreign policy. They nour-ished a particular New Zealand psychology of dependence on a small number of powerful but distant friends (first, Britain and then the United States). Those countries provided both military protection and economic opportunity for us. That convenient marriage of New Zealand interests was, however, subverted by trade distorting agricultural protectionism habitually favoured by those powerful but distant friends. It was overtaken also by so-called globalisation of the world economy which, over the last part of the old century, broadened New Zealand commercial ho-rizons as successful newly emergent economies, especially in East Asia, provided exhilarating new opportunity for trade and invest-

New Zealand foreign policy: the importance of reputationTerence O’Brien reviews aspects of New Zealand’s approach to international affairs.

Terence O’Brien is a senior fellow at VUW’s Centre for Strategic Studies. This article is the edited text of the address he gave to the Paremata Probus Club on 19 March 2013.

ment if New Zealand foreign policy was able to create and sustain the indispensable political platform.

We are still in the process of adjusting New Zealand foreign policy to the full implications that flow from the emerging di-chotomy in our modern external dependencies. The revolution in communications technology that drove globalisation has served to tame New Zealand’s remote geography by collapsing time and distance. Our geography at the same time continues to lend New Zealand valuable protection from various aberrations of globalisa-tion — multinational crime, people smuggling, drugs, terrorism and the like.

Globalisation has stimulated the spread of multiculturalism as people and ideas transcend borders with increasing freedom. Migrants from Asia, the Pacific and elsewhere have measurably deepened the mix of New Zealand’s population. Some 40 per cent of our population will be of non-European extraction in the next twenty years. This prospect sharpens our older challenge of Maori–Pakeha reconciliation as a foundation for New Zealand society. Globalisation compels a greater need now to compose differences that emanate from the Treaty of Waitangi so that New Zealand can successfully absorb and accommodate multicultur-alism.

It compels as well deepening authentic New Zealand capacity for independent judgment about how best to position this coun-try in this globalising and inter-dependent world. Modern inter-dependence does not just mean how inter-connected we have become to other sovereign countries. It includes, too, vital rela-tionships between actual key inter-dependent issues of our time — between energy utilisation and climate change, food security and resource scarcity, nuclear energy and nuclear weapons, great power policies and international terrorism, as well as numerous other connections.

In the modern inter-dependent world, it is not necessarily more dangerous to be small. The scourge of international terrorism, for example, is directed rather more at larger powerful countries than small ones. Internal disintegration provoked through insur-gency or indeed by simple democratic process (as in the case of the United Kingdom and Scotland) is just as likely to test larger nations as smaller ones. The dangers posed to the cyber security of a nation and its people are as critical to large states as to small ones, indeed more so. Smaller countries and their interests do not, however, normally bulk large when major powers weigh their pol-


icy options. Small country foreign policy needs to be ready to form coalitions of interest with similar like-minded governments if collective persuasion is to influence great power decisions. This means New Zealand keeping different company on different is-sues at different times. Under successive New Zealand govern-ments, over the last years of the old century and the early years of this new one, our experience demonstrates that operating beneath the radar screens of the powerful in international affairs is no dis-advantage providing it is backed by resourceful diplomacy and clear independent thinking.

This need to mingle in different company contends with New Zealand’s traditional 20th century instincts that lie with international allegiance, in particular, to the select but powerful Anglosphere group (United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia). Shared values, traditions and other links like special intelligence sharing connect this exclusive clan even as the world around is in a state of profound change, where to be modern and successful does not first require that a country be Western or English speaking; and indeed where the international standing of future Western leadership is degraded by excessive debt, mis-managed banks and widening inequality.1 New Zealand foreign policy has now to recognise the reality that the balance of New Zealand interests has been substantively altered by the emergence of successful East Asia, as well as prospects in Latin America and elsewhere, upon which New Zealand will rely effectually for its well being.

Right foundationsFor New Zealand to capitalise upon such transformation, the right foreign policy foundations are indispensable. Asian foreign policy objectives must, for example, henceforward be weighed more closely by New Zealand when it fashions its own overall foreign policy-making. That process still has some good way to travel. While a more purposeful New Zealand Asian alignment is perceptible, it does not yet include much by way of New Zealand making common cause on the great issues of our time (political, economic and security) with Asian governments inside established multilateral institutions like the United Nations and WTO; nor, more important, is it displayed by way of greater defence co-op-eration with the Asian region — notably with China. The New Zealand Defence Force leadership retains enduring preference for actual operational engagement with Anglosphere countries. This has decreed, therefore, New Zealand involvement with NATO, an Atlantic alliance of which we are not, of course, a member, and

which has no relevance in East Asia; and in places like Afghani-stan where New Zealand interests are in fact pretty marginal. Al-though successive New Zealand administrations profess a ‘whole of government’ approach to building key Asian relationships, this evidently does not yet extend, as it should, to operational defence policy. The great majority of Asian states have, for their part, inci-dentally, avoided combat or other commitments in Afghanistan.

Notable ingredientThe redacting of New Zealand–United States relations over the past two or so years is a second most notable ingredient of recent New Zealand foreign policy. The 2010 Wellington Declaration and 2012 Washington Agreement signify enhancement of a rela-tionship that, because of New Zealand’s non-nuclear policy and America’s firm disavowal of that policy, had been diminished for a quarter of a century especially in dealings affecting security and defence. Even while those 25 years were a time of notable accom-plishment by New Zealand in a variety of respects, it remains a counsel of wisdom in international relations that small countries should strive always to remain on good terms with the power-ful. New Zealand and the United States possess, moreover, a solid measure of shared interests and values as well as a history of joint resistance to unlawful aggression in the world. The betterment of relations therefore is timely. It effectively casts New Zealand now as a military ally of the United States, given our joint associations in Afghanistan and New Zealand support more generally for the US post-9/11 international security agenda. American expecta-tions of New Zealand have as a result been heightened; but this paradoxically increases the need for New Zealand to cultivate and retain a judicious independent sense of balance in its foreign pol-icy.

Two examples illustrate this last point. First, given improve-ment in New Zealand–US relations, a delicate question immedi-ately arises. Does New Zealand now see itself henceforward as a permanent combatant alongside the United States fighting in the so-called global war on terror, which Washington assesses to be enduring, open-ended, and world encompassing? If we do, then we owe it to ourselves to be clear-sighted and independent in our judgments about international terrorism and its causes. The de-piction of radicalised Islam as driven by irrational rage and bent upon destruction of the West and all it stands for, which is the explanation proffered by Tony Blair, George W. Bush and many others, ignores entirely the part that cumulative Western policies in the Arab world and the Middle East, dating back for a century and longer, have actually played in stoking the turmoil that now incites eruption of internationalised terrorism with its gruesome inhumanity. There is absolutely no justification for the hideous crimes that are the result. But it is dangerous self-deception to deny that a long tradition of Western interference, manipulation, invasion, and extensive foreign military presence has any bearing at all upon what we are witnessing today.

Secondly, given New Zealand’s history of past involvements in the Middle East, it is not necessarily surprising that our gov-ernment anticipates that we will be expected to contribute yet more in the future.2 Such commitment is portrayed as evidence of the country’s good global citizenship, a reaffirmation of what the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade calls the New Zealand ‘her-itage of integrity’. Yet the very nature of the conflict fomented by the global war on terror is sufficient cause to ponder. The dilem-ma of conflicts that blur essential distinctions between insurgen-

John Key meets with Barack Obama


cy, armed opportunism, warlordism and genuine terrorist threat globally, that involve pre-emptive and/or clandestine strikes, that include torture, rendition and entail use of drones and targeted assassinations with or without casualties amongst the innocent — cannot be simply dismissed as inconsequential, especially where a state of war between governments does not actually exist. As suggested earlier, reputation in small country foreign policy is important. The prevailing level of insecurity in several parts of our inter-dependent world points to increasing need for genuine independent New Zealand judgment about the nature of conflict, and when, where and how New Zealand should involve itself in peace support.

American pivotCloser to home, the shift by the United States under President Obama to greater concentration on the Asia–Pacific region (the so-called ‘pivot’) provides a particular new ingredient for New Zealand foreign policy. Most regional governments have wel-comed the ‘pivot’. At the same time it sharpens the need for discerning judgment in New Zealand foreign policy in two par-ticular respects. In both cases the complexities confronting New Zealand foreign policy formulation are extensive.

First, in the trade/economic domain, on-going negotiations involving Washington and ten other regional governments (in-cluding New Zealand but only four Asian governments) for a Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) involve something more than just a classical free trade arrangement. Led by the United States the negotiations extend to removing policies that are perceived as barriers to free exchange in areas like services, health, safety and role of state-owned enterprises. This effectively breaks into new and uncharted trade agreement ground.3 Attempts by the United States to pursue a similar agenda inside the WTO have foundered, so that the WTO is now becalmed. What is on the TPP table is an economic integration agreement which, if final-ised, will be a conspicuous first for New Zealand with any major power. Alongside the de facto military alliance with Washington,

that combination would entail a significantly expanded allegiance for this country — more than a simple resurrection of past dependen-cy. New Zealand never attained the same dual intimacy with supreme power in the 20th century even during the height of hot and cold wars that shaped the old century.

The TPP confronts clear complications. Major Asian economies (China, India, South Korea, Indonesia) are not yet committed to the TPP — although Japan has decided to join in the negotiations, which may in fact prolong and complicate the process. China has been suspicious that the American-led ne-gotiations are directed at Beijing to diminish China’s role as the fulcrum of Asian economic success — President Obama has indeed de-scribed the TPP as a means to pressure China ‘to meet international standards’ of trade and economic behaviour. China’s relations with Japan are currently somewhat hostile and Japan’s presence at the TPP negotiating table could fuel Beijing’s suspicion as to ultimate purpose. As the sole developed economy that

enjoys a free trade agreement with China, New Zealand cannot simply rationalise away Chinese misgivings. Prime Minister John Key will have gained valuable firsthand impressions when he visited China in April. America’s direction of the TPP process is first and foremost to help restore her economic fortunes through extracting advantageous concessions. US economic leadership credentials are harmed, however, by the consequences of deep in-solvency; and US decision-making is conspicuously paralysed by enduring partisan and special interest politics. Those factors point to judicious caution about the wisdom of deeper economic policy integration with America in the circumstances as they exist.

Up until this point East Asian regional economic institution building has been in the hands of regional governments them-selves and New Zealand has fashioned its regional foreign policy accordingly, especially by careful diplomacy in South-east Asia (ASEAN). There is now a distinct risk of a split between US-led and Asian-led regionalism in the greater Pacific Basin. The ASEAN governments are promoting an alternative framework for economic policy integration, which involves China (and New Zealand), but not the United States. In all these circumstances and given the fact that even after sixteen rounds of intensive ne-gotiation, New Zealand has no clear idea of the actual benefits it would derive from the TPP, nor what it must concede, we are best advised to hasten slowly on the TPP, notwithstanding that Presi-dent Obama has asserted a deadline of the end of 2013.

Taking sides?It is a perennial reality in international affairs that small coun-tries invariably confront the awkward choice of taking sides when major powers disagree or misinterpret one another’s intentions. That is a looming potential dilemma for New Zealand foreign policy depending upon just how Sino-American relations play out over what may indeed be a prolonged period. Currently there is headline focus on maritime security with longstanding sover-eignty disputes between China and a group of South-east Asian nations, and between China and Japan, over ownership of various

A troopship full of New Zealand soldiers leaves for the Middle East in November 1941


small mainly uninhabited islands in the seas around China. These have boiled to the surface just as the US ‘pivot’ begins — which may or may not be a contrived coincidence. It seems inconceiv-able that China for its part would risk conflict with all its wider ramifications over the particular claims, but the need for peaceful accommodation by Beijing and the others is paramount. China’s concerns extend in fact beyond the islands as such, and include deep-seated objection to continuing US Navy patrols and recon-naissance right up to China’s 12-mile coastal limit. This is a legacy of the old Cold War. It is, indeed, not clear that such continued US practice actually contributes to regional stability.

It is a statement of the obvious that New Zealand foreign poli-cy must absolutely avoid side-taking over the sovereignty disputes. Likewise New Zealand must be prudent with respect to the navy patrol quarrel. One benefit from improved defence relations with the United States is greater opportunity for maritime exercising with the US Navy. But involvement with US and/or Australian operations that appear to reinforce America’s assertion of an abso-lute right to patrol where it chooses, or infers side-taking over sov-ereignty claims, should be very carefully avoided by New Zealand. While recognising that US expectations of New Zealand will have increased following the restoration of a broader defence relation-ship, New Zealand defence policy and New Zealand foreign pol-icy must now march in very close step in respect to forging and sustaining relations in Asia.

Reputation importanceAt the outset of this article I suggested that reputation is impor-tant in foreign policy. The distinction between what is foreign and what is domestic becomes increasingly blurred. A country cannot pretend to others to be something that it is not in reality. In the 20th century, the Soviet Union hypocritically portrayed itself as the friend and supporter of under-privileged nations while at home it imposed an iron fist on its own population. In the end Soviet credibility simply collapsed. Likewise today any country that, for example, claims good environmental credentials at the international level while it negligently contaminates at home runs a grave risk of being exposed as disreputable. For New Zealand preserving reputation in this connection, and others, is a vital part of credible foreign policy.

Policy changes introduced for domestic reasons may resonate quite differently abroad. Let us take three quick examples. The recent New Zealand decision not to sign up to the second Kyoto Protocol on climate change severely dismayed our Pacific Islands neighbours as well as others. It probably disqualifies New Zealand

from any future meaningful mediator role in those relevant inter-national institutions where over the twenty years since the Rio en-vironment summit New Zealand has cultivated a solid reputation as a conciliator. Second, the decision to link New Zealand with the Australian scheme for (off shore) processing of boat people refugees was explained in domestic and Australian relations terms. But the Australian scheme has been firmly condemned already by the most competent international body — the UN High Com-mission for Refugees. There must be some repercussions for the New Zealand reputation.

Third, and more generally, the decision to omit mention of non-nuclear policy from New Zealand’s current foreign poli-cy narrative is notable. The 2012 MFAT Annual Report makes no mention of it, nor does the MFAT Statement of Intent in its present and earlier versions as the annual contract between the ministry and its minister. Both documents are supposed to record for consumption here and overseas the integrity of New Zealand foreign policy. The narrative does extol New Zealand support for efforts to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, led by the Unit-ed States. But reference to the equally pressing need for nuclear disarmament by all present owners is effectively omitted. New Zealand’s non-nuclear policy established a wide reputation in the international community that was instrumental, for example, in winning a seat for this country, in the face of stiff competition, on the 1993–94 UN Security Council. We now have our hat in the ring again for 2015–16. Once again the competition will be tough. At the bottom line the campaign for a seat amounts in effect to a global referendum about how reputable others rate this country and its foreign policy. That judgment call will be made over the next eighteen months.

NOTES1. Niall Ferguson, The Great Degeneration: BBC Reith Lectures

2012 (London, 2012), p.36.2. NZ Government, Defence White Paper 2010, p.31, para 3.57.3. Claude Barfield, ‘Not So Fast: Conflicting Deadlines for

TPP, and US–EU FTA’, The American, 8 Mar 2013 (Ameri-can.com/archive/2013/march).

John Key speaks with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang during a meeting at the Great Hall of the People

New Zealand troops preparing to leave Afghanistan


On 10 July, as part of proceedings for the 2013 Asia Pacific Model UN Conference, discussion occurred on the topic ‘Syria: is there an end in sight?’ I was asked to answer the question: Is it likely that the solution to Syria will come from the UN Security Coun-cil and/or NATO?

Let me start with the second part of the question: will a solu-tion come from NATO?

NATO’s essential purpose is to safeguard the freedom and se-curity of its members through political and military means. The key words are ‘its members’, which as NATO’s name suggests bor-der primarily the North Atlantic, in other words European states, the United States and Canada. Of course, it is open to NATO to determine that its security is infringed by or within countries that do not border it, as happened after 9/11 when NATO forces responded to a UN request to stabilise Afghanistan. But ‘out of area’ deployments are rare.

There is one country, however, that is not part of the European Union or North America, that does not have the North Atlantic as a sea border, but which, nevertheless, is an important member of NATO. That country is Turkey. In the context of Syria, an incident occurred in October last year when several Syrian mortar shells fell on the Turkish border town of Akçakale, killing five res-idents. The Turkish government responded to what it termed ‘this abominable attack’1 with artillery strikes in Syria. The Turkish Parliament authorised cross-border military operations. The two nations’ militaries exchanged mortar fire for the next two days.

Nervous jittersAll this caused a few nervous jitters within NATO because a key provision of the Washington Treaty that binds all NATO mem-bers is Article 5, which states that ‘an armed attack against one or more [NATO members] in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all’. Some senior Turkish politicians advocated that NATO invoke Article 5 and treat the incident as an attack on all members. But this incident was never going to lead to invocation of Article 5. In fact Article 5 has been invoked only once in the history of NATO and that was after the 9/11 attacks in — or on — the United States. While the alliance criticised Syria, members made clear they did not want a military conflict. Let us face it, neither would the Syrian regime. They may be ruthless but they are not stupid. Rebels with small arms are one thing, NATO — and in particular NATO air power — is quite another.

Even within Turkey there was opposition to military interven-tion with some Turks blaming the opposition Free Syrian Army

CONFERENCE REPORTSyria: is there an end in sight?Peter Kennedy reports on discussion about the

UN Conference.

-

for the original shelling, suggesting they were trying to provoke Ankara into joining the conflict.

Why did NATO get involved with Libya but refuse to get involved with Syria? It is worth remembering that it was the Brit-ish and French who were the most gung-ho over Libya. Yet —

Turkish troops at the border crossing in Akçakale, opposite the Syrian rebel-controlled town Tel Abyad, in October 2012

and senior US officials make no bones about this — no substan-tive military action can happen without US support. Knocking out air defences or providing air-to-air refuelling — only the United States has the ability to do this in a sustained way. Wash-ington was not that keen on get-ting involved in Libya — it was not considered central to US interests. Syria is even less attrac-tive. Further, as NATO Secre-tary-General Rasmussen said on 31 May: There is a clear difference between Libya and Syria. We took

responsibility for the operation in Libya based on a very clear United Nations mandate to protect the civilian population and we got active support from countries in the region. None of these conditions are fulfilled in Syria.2

UN roleAnd that leads on to the second part of the question: will a solu-tion to the Syrian conflict come from the Security Council?

Anders Fogh Rasmussen


Sadly, the chances do not look high. The NATO Secretary-Gen-eral may say that they had a very clear UN mandate in Libya, but the Russians argue that NATO exceeded its mandate there and they do not plan to give them an-other chance. This is not the only reason Russia has been so diffi-cult over Syria — its economic interests in Syria and the survival of the al-Assad regime are inter-twined — but it is a significant reason. Further this is no acci-dental position of Russia. It may be President Putin who leads on such matters, but Foreign Minis-ter Sergey Lavrov knows the Se-curity Council well. He is a tough and experienced negotiator who chaired the Security Council on at least seven occasions when he was Russian ambassador in New York. My guess is neither he nor Putin will bend on this.

So is there some way round this? There have been a num-ber of recent announcements by some NATO members — led by

tification for its Kosovo intervention, it just did it to stop Serb destruction. It was this sort of action, a sort of ‘common sense and decency’ test, that led eventually to world leaders endorsing the Responsibility to Protect principles at the UN World Sum-mit in 2005. Yet if nearly 100,000 dead have not triggered these principles, I doubt that further killing of Syrians by Syrians will change the situation.

It is possible that the use of chemical weapons so close to the Turkish border could be seen as a reason for legitimate self-de-fence intervention. But nations really would have to be clear that the international criminals were state governments — in this case the Syrian regime — and not non-government groups pursuing their own agenda. That is what makes the Syrian case so complex.

Proposed conferenceIs there any process from which a solution might come? In early May of this year the US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov proposed the convening of an in-ternational conference on Syria. Towards the end of that month when they met again Lavrov, who is a tough pragmatist, said ‘It’s a very tall order. But I hope that when the United States and the

Vladimir Putin

Sergey Lavrov

the French and British — proposing to arm Syrian rebels. The dif-ficulty here is in knowing who are ‘good rebels’ and who are ‘bad rebels’. There are real concerns about weapons going to Sunni ex-tremists and others who might accentuate problems in the region.

What about the use of chemical weapons assuming, and it is an assumption, that they have been used by the al-Assad regime (only)? This was the red line over which President Obama warned the regime they could not cross. Putting aside the difficulty of credible evidence as to degree of use and exactly who might be responsible, there is a certain whiff of Iraq to some of this. Those who favour intervention are almost pleased to suggest chemical weapons have been used. If the responsibility to protect doctrine is not triggered by close to 100,000 civilians being killed, then could the use — or the alleged use — of chemical weapons be the key to intervention?

Probable blockIf it were, chances are intervention under UN Security Council auspices would still be blocked by Russia and China. In Syria, people have not been killed by the attack of one country upon another, they have been killed by opposing political and religious forces within one country. And countries that exert control in un-stable regions within their own borders do not like the idea of others getting involved in what they classify as internal conflicts.

So could the United States and allies go it alone without Security Council endorsement? And would intervention accord with international law? The short answer is yes and no. The NATO military intervention in Kosovo was undertaken with-out the consent of the Security Council after it became clear that Russia would veto any proposal to intervene in the former Yugo-slavia.3 NATO itself did not try to offer an international law jus-

Lakhdar Brahimi

Russian Federation take this kind of initiative, the chances for suc-cess are there.’

Further talks were held in June between the United States and Russia under the chair of Joint Special UN Representative for Syria Lakhdar Brahimi, who said ‘We all firmly agreed that a political solution to the crisis in Syria is the only solution possi-ble, and is extremely urgent.’4 The idea is to negotiate a comprehen-sive agreement between the gov-ernment of Syria and the Syrian opposition creating a transitional governing body, which would ex-ercise full executive powers.

Unfortunately Lavrov’s ‘tall order’ prediction is proving true with delays from June to July and now into the northern sum-mer. The problem is, as Brahimi also pointed out, ‘this conference cannot be held without Syrian John Kerry

delegations. The Syrian delegations have not been formed yet.’ He means in this context the Syrian opposition, who have been unable to agree a united position. So the bloodshed continues.

NOTES1. Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, ABC News, 4 Oct

2012.2. NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, 31 May

2013.3. Albrecht Schnabel and Ramesh Thakur (eds), Kosovo and

the Challenge of Humanitarian Intervention: Selective Action, Collective Intervention, and International Citizenship (Tokyo, 2000).


For Christian Caryl, a senior fellow of the Legatum Institute and contributing editor to Foreign Policy magazine, 1979 represents a key turning point in the history of the modern era. He sees four major events. In Britain Margaret Thatcher came to pow-er determined to dismantle the nationalised industries, curb the trade unions and promote the idea of entrepreneurship and self reliance. In China, Deng Xiaoping embarked on a massive pover-ty reduction programme, ending Mao Zedong’s experiment with collective farming, opening special economic zones for both for-eign and domestic entrepreneurship, and allowing information to come into China from the outside world.

In 1979 the Shah (who was considered unshakeable) hastily left Iran, one of the Middle East’s most secular countries, to be replaced by the Ayatollah Khomeini, who returned from years of exile to implement his vision of Iran as an Islamic state.

In the West some also decided that it was time for religion to reassert itself against the forces of secularisation. In October 1978 the College of Cardinals had elected a new pope (John Paul II). Karol Wojtyla, a priest from behind the Iron Curtain, had spent his entire career confronting the political and spiritual challenges of communism and was deeply read in the key Soviet texts. His June 1979 trip to his Polish homeland represented a challenge to the reigning power structure, especially the ideas underlying Sovi-et orthodoxy. He received a tumultuous welcome with an estimat-ed 11 million Poles attending his sermons. It was the church, not the state, that organised his well-attended meetings and, as Caryl sees it, the experience of the pope’s visit would be put to use in the Solidarity rallies that led to martial law in 1981 and ultimately to collapse of Soviet authority in Poland in 1989. The pope’s message focused on a policy of strict non-violence. Caryl suggests that the non-violence theme marking the fall of communism a decade lat-er owed much to the lasting influence of John Paul II’s teaching. The message was, of course, a religious one but it also represented a challenge to Marxist doctrines.

The reassertion of religion had a broader effect. Khomeini’s revolution became a rallying cry for the wider Islamic world. For the first time since the Ottoman Empire era an overtly Islamic movement had gained political power. The reverberations of this achievement were felt well beyond Iran, inspiring the reluctant admiration of even the country’s natural enemies in the Arab Sun-ni world. Caryl says that after Khomeini the Islamists did not just talk, they acted. The most potent legacy of the Islamic revolution in Iran was simply to show it could be done.

Fruitless warLike the four major events outlined in Strange Rebels, the Sovi-et invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 was historically significant in

Strange rebelsGerald McGhie comments on a book that posits 1979 as a key year in shaping our modern world.

Gerald McGhie is a former diplomat and NZIIA director.

ways perhaps not fully apparent until later. The long, costly and ultimately fruitless war created yet further stress on an already weak Soviet economy, ultimately contributing to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Losses in battle have traditionally shaken Russian regimes. The sinking of the Russian fleet by the Japanese in 1905 undermined the then Tsarist state, making way for the communist revolution in 1917, which itself followed the débâcle of Russian participation in the First World War. But Afghanistan had a deeper context. It helped set the stage for the next major conflict by providing a rallying point and training ground for mil-itant Islam. After all, it was to fight the Soviets that Osama bin Laden first went to Afghanistan.

Writing about significant events that still affect our current political, social and economic landscape is always a challenge. Christian Caryl moves with great skill from one scene to another filling his narrative with important details, particularly on how Deng’s reforms relentlessly turned China from the trauma of the Cultural Revolution to the economic force that it is today. At times he is also funny. During a state dinner in Washington in 1979 Deng was placed at the same table as the actress Shirley Ma-cLaine. Caryl calls this a ‘surreal moment’ as the film star ‘gushed’ to Deng about her last trip to China, describing in particular her contact with a professor who was ploughing a field. The profes-sor explained how wise the party had been to send him and his fellow academics to the countryside to ‘learn the true ways of the people’. MacLaine thought this was marvellous. As Caryl reports, Deng looked at her scornfully and said, ‘he was lying’. Professors, he told her, should be teaching university classes, not planting crops.1

Caryl also exposes some fascinating questions. It is curious, for instance, that enthusiasm for the market rose pretty much at the same time in countries as disparate (and as geographically distant) as the United Kingdom and China. Why, also, had secularism worn so thin at this time? Why was it that the Shah’s Iran could not restrain a religious movement that seemed, to Tehran and

STRANGE REBELS: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century

REVIEW ARTICLE

Author: Christian CarylPublished by: Basic Books,New York, 2013, 407pp.


Washington, to have come from nowhere? And why does Caryl accord John Paul II such prominence in the undoing of the Soviet empire?

Narrative exampleSome of the answers lie in the broad emphasis he places on the power of reactionary forces, but his story contains a great deal of narrative example rather than analysis. Deng Xiaoping and Mar-garet Thatcher certainly focused on economic shifts and both may have seen their actions in terms of a moral quest. Deng reacted against Mao’s excesses; Thatcher’s quarrel was with social democ-racy. But Thatcher wanted less, or even minimal, government; for Deng ‘the Chinese model went hand-in-hand with tight politi-cal control and an activist state investment role’.2 The result has been an apparently successful melding of public and private. Both Deng and Thatcher may, as Caryl says, have consulted Milton Friedman but China’s economic reforms drew much more signifi-cantly on the experience of its East Asian neighbours, particularly Japan. As we know, the East Asians rose to economic prosperity through the solid involvement — indeed partnership — of their governments, and not by relying on Friedmanesque policies.

In his Epilogue, Caryl pointedly notes that economics and technology are limited in their explanatory capacity. Hence, ‘pol-itics is ultimately a category unto itself. We cannot understand political dynamics without recourse to ideas that motivate people to action’. He sees religion as the deepest motivation, ‘especially when it activates sources of identity that give meaning to people’s lives’.3

A review of a book on such complex international subjects as Caryl deals with is not the place to debate philosophical issues sur-rounding human motivation. What we can say here is that many would take issue with the suggestion that religion is the deepest human motivation. There is a substantial group that maintains that a humanist sense of justice holds that position.

The forces unleashed in Caryl’s remarkable year continue to shape our world. China looks set to become the world’s biggest economy. The election of a pope from South America has met with some enthusiasm among the faithful. Iran remains an Islam-ic republic and the mujahedin are still active in Afghanistan — to the embarrassment of an over-extended American defence force.

Uncertain valueThe value of the ‘Thatcher reforms’ (the term here is used in a generic sense) is as yet uncertain. The 2008 global financial crisis exposed the weakness of market fundamentalism. As the noted economist John Kay says, you should impose as few restrictions and limitations as possible in the op-

eration of markets. But this doesn’t recognise that markets actually operate — and can only operate — through an elab-orate social, political and cultural context.

Kay adds that government regulation has an important role but there is also a need for self-regulation; that is, the way people ex-pect to behave. To suggest that ‘unregulated markets are more ef-ficient’, Kay says, ‘is wrong. Markets rely on rules and signals’.4

Perhaps a more balanced approach to economic development will come to acknowledge that all major players have responsibilities to the wider community. As yet, it is too soon to say what the short to medium term will produce.

Professor Michael Kimmage considers a further issue involv-ing Caryl’s assumption that the momentous events that he de-

scribes constituted a single movement that pushed history in a ‘radically new direction’.5 As Kimmage sees it, the truth lies closer to the view that the actions of his protagonists pushed history in several new and unexpected directions and that the processes in-volved are on-going and will be with us well into the 21st century.

We might also add to the mix that the forces of reaction will continue to evolve and that the orthodoxies which the protago-nists in this book fought against will reconstitute themselves as the new focus of reaction. As Caryl says, the amount of money allo-cated by the Chinese government to internal security has now sur-passed the budget for national defence.6 For all its success Beijing remains remarkably insecure, reacting with speed and sensitivity to what appears, to the West, to be the mildest signs of dissent.

That being said, Strange Rebels is an absorbing book whose challenging presentation of four unexpected events in 1979 re-minds us that we live in a world characterised by uncertainty and significant change.

NOTES1. Christian Caryl, Strange Rebels. p.170.2. Ibid., p.352.3. Ibid., p.341.4. John Kay, in Strategy + Business, Fall 2003, Issue 32.5. The New Republic, 11 May 2013.6. Strange Rebels, p.254.

NOTE FOR CONTRIBUTORSWe welcome unsolicited articles, with or without illustrative material photographs, cartoons, etc. Text should be typed double spaced on one side of the sheet only. Text or

-come. Facsimiles are not acceptable. Copy length should not be more than 3000 words though longer pieces will be considered. Footnotes should be kept to a minimum, and only in exceptional circumstances will we print more than 15 with an article.


In less two years we will commemorate the 100th anniversary of the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign. That this costly struggle remains a focus of attention in Australia and New Zealand owes much to

BOOKS

Dr Malcolm McKinnon is a Wellington historian, whose most recent book is Asian cities: globalization, urbanization and nation-building (2011).

War historian and NZIR managing editor Dr Ian McGibbon has since 2009 been New Zealand’s representative in the Joint Historical and Archae-

Notes on reviewers

A POLITICAL LEGACY OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE:Power and the Parliamentary System in Post-Colonial India and Sri Lanka

Author: Harshan KumarasinghamPublished by: IB Tauris, London, 2012, 297pp, £59.50.

GALLIPOLIA ridge too far

Editor: Ashley EkinsPublished by: Exisle Publishing Ltd, Wollombi, 2013, 336pp, $49.99.

THE NEKA Gallipoli Tragedy

Author: Peter BurnessPublished by: Exisle Publishing Ltd, Wollombi, 2013, 167pp, $34.99.

the dignified but distance from the efficient — the Union Jack continued to be flown, the role of the sovereign highlighted, but its rulers were a kind of whig oligarchy, not in any sense a parlia-mentary government.

In the matter of horizontal accountability, the divergence is not so marked but still revealing. In India Prime Minister Nehru became much more than a first among equals, even with the per-sistence of Cabinet government. He set robust limits to the pow-ers of fellow ministers — notably Deputy Prime Minister S. V. Pa-tel, despite his being of near equal standing and reputation — and to the powers of the first president, Rajendra Prasad. In Ceylon, it was the governor-general himself (the impeccably British Lord Soulsbury) who scuppered the parliamentary system by selecting a deceased prime minister’s son as his successor (that the British were playing a complicated game — wanting to keep communists at bay, and a hold on the Trincomalee naval base, probably merits another whole study).

The divide is much greater and more portentous in the case of language states and communalism — Nehru and the Indian system reached an accommodation over the language state issue and thereby lanced a wound; Sri Lankan politicians had talked of a federal solution in earlier decades but retreated in the face of an upsurge of assertive Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism (directed mostly at the Hindu Tamil minority).

This is the closest Kumarasingham comes to commenting on the much later sorry history of Sri Lanka but it implies a potent counterfactual. Unbelievably, while heterogeneous India could find solutions to the relationship of communities and the state (to be fair, in the aftermath of a sobering and a very bloody partition), more manageable Sri Lanka could not.

Kumarasingham’s study demonstrates the return to be gained from looking patiently at seemingly arcane subject matter; and from identifying ‘critical junctures of exceptional circumstances’. It is relevant not just for our understanding of the political evolu-tion of India and Sri Lanka, although it will long be indispensable for that. It also reminds us, despite the catchy ‘Eastminster’, that categories such as ‘East’ and ‘West’, settler versus colonised, only go so far in illuminating historical change.

MALCOLM McKINNON

Harshan Kumarasingham ac-quired a deserved reputation among political scientists and students of political history in his Onward with Executive Power: Lessons from New Zealand 1947–57 (2010), which showed how radical in constitutional matters conservative New Zealand politi-cians could be — and seemingly the more loyal to the British con-stitution in rhetoric, as Sid Hol-land, the more radical in practice.

In this volume Kumarasing-ham turns his attention from one of the ‘new Westminsters’, as he styles the settler dominions, to two others; the parliamentary democracies established at inde-pendence in India (1947) and Sri Lanka (Ceylon, 1948: Kumar-asingham defensibly uses Sri Lanka, the name formally adopted only in 1972, throughout the text). He thus sets out to explore the evolution of ‘Westminster into ‘Eastminster’. Pakistan and Burma, in neither of which the system had much of a post-inde-pendence life, are not treated.

Kumarasingham tackles the topic from three angles: the extent of cultural transmission of the Westminster system; the extent of what he calls ‘horizontal accountability’; and the significance of events — of path dependency — in shaping the adaptation of the system in the two countries. The ‘event’ in India is the advent of language-based states and in Sri Lanka the eruption of com-munalism. Both occurrences happened about a decade after in-dependence, with that decade being the main focus of the study.

Each theme produces different findings. In respect of cultural inheritance, Kumarasingham demonstrates how marked was the contrast between, on the one hand, India’s rejection of the ‘dig-nified’ (as per Bagehot) but adherence to the ‘efficient’ parts of the Westminster system and, on the other, Ceylon’s proclivity for


the central place it occupies in the development of a sense of nation-al identity in both countries. The same applies to their adversary — Turkey. But there is enduring interest too in the campaign it-self, not only because of the exotic nature of the battlefield but also because of the inevitable ‘what if ’ questions that raise the possibil-ity of a different outcome to the eventual admission of defeat and evacuation of the invading forces.

offensive, which is then discussed from a variety of national view-points. Apart from Kenan Çelik’s examination of Turkish reactions to the offensive, there are interest-ing accounts of the French, Indian and German experiences, aspects that are overlooked in many ac-counts of the campaign. This mul-tinational approach is not the least of the merits of this book. New Zealand readers will, of course, be interested in the chapter on the attack by their countrymen on Chunuk Bair. This competently

What mistakes were made that led to the Allies being hemmed into two beachheads, at Cape Helles and Anzac, in the first place? Could anything have been done to overcome this predicament?

Of all the events during the eight months fight at Anzac, the August offensive provides the most fertile grounds for debate. De-signed to seize the Sari Bair range that dominated the battlefield at Anzac — Hills 971 and Q and Chunuk Bair — the offensive was supposed to break the logjam that prevented movement forward by the Allied forces to the south at Cape Helles and at Anzac. This would open the way to Allied domination of the forts that closed the narrows of the Dardanelles Strait to the Allied fleets waiting to head through to Constantinople (Istanbul). In accordance with a complex plan troops would advance up valleys to the north of the Anzac beachhead to seize the heights, while diversionary attacks would be mounted elsewhere, including at key points like Lone Pine, The Nek and Quinn’s Post. Meanwhile British forces would make another landing, at Suvla Bay, to the north of Anzac.

This supreme effort to break the stalemate that existed on the two Gallipoli battlefronts never came close to success, despite the epic achievement by the New Zealanders in seizing and holding for two days the heights at Chunuk Bair. Fanciful claims that New Zealanders briefly held the fate of the First World War in their hands as they perceived the distant strait ignore the fact that Chu-nuk Bair was not the key point — it was dominated by the higher Hill 971 to the north. In reality, the offensive failed on the first night when none of the attacking columns succeeded in capturing their objectives. Only by presenting the Turks with a fait accompli of the loss of this high ground could the offensive have made pro-gress — and there can only be speculation as to what control of

describes the main outlines of the story, but suffers from the fact that it relies too heavily on several secondary accounts.

A chapter by Peter Burness looks at the bloody diversionary attacks at Lone Pine and The Nek. The former led to the award of seven Victoria Crosses to Australian soldiers (including Napi-er-born Captain Shout), while the latter is notorious for the slaughter of the Australian light horsemen in a futile attack on 7 August that was supposed to assist the New Zealanders in their attack on Chunuk Bair (but did not because they were delayed). Those wanting a more detailed account of this catastrophe will find it in the second book under review, The Nek, also written by Burness, an updated version of a book that first appeared in 1996. This very readable account traces the experience of the 3rd Light Horse Brigade from its formation till its fateful part in the August offensive, an event portrayed in Peter Weir’s classic movie Gal-lipoli. Burness brings out well the personality clashes among the brigade’s senior officers that played such a key role in the tragedy. His account also highlights the extreme bravery of the Australi-ans, especially in the second and third waves of the attack, who knew the fate that awaited them the moment they rose from their trenches but who nevertheless did not hesitate to advance. About 250 were killed in this futile assault, which was easily repulsed by the Turkish defenders.

IAN McGIBBON

Members of B Squadron of the Australian 8th Light Horse Regiment before their ill-fated attack at The Nek

the Sari Bair range might have meant in terms of winning the overall campaign.

These issues were the subject of a confer-ence held at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra in August 2010. This gathering brought together an array of historians, who dissected elements of the campaign. Of par-ticular note was the presence of Kenan Çelik, a Turkish historian and expert on the Çanakkale Battle (the Turkish name for the campaign), who was able to provide a perspective that has lacked in much of past Australian and New Zealand writing on Gallipoli — that of the de-fenders. The papers, carefully edited by Ashley Ekins, form the basis of Gallipoli, A ridge too far, published to Exisle’s usual high standard.

Chapters by Robin Prior, Stephen Badsey and Ekins provide the wider context to the


It is probably no secret that being a foreign minister is one of the most challenging and exciting roles in politics. The position was also an enjoyable and rewarding one. There were many reasons why that was so. But a part of it was the experience of work-ing with a highly talented, experienced and committed group of New Zealand diplomats — people like Mike Green. He was a man of great integrity, the epitome of the quiet, highly intelligent, vastly experienced and dedicated public servant that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade has produced for most of its distin-guished history, and which has served New Zealand so well.

One can only hope that the disastrous restructuring of the ministry we have seen unfold in the last couple of years does not permanently cripple what until now has been one of our finest in-stitutions of state — on behalf of which it was a privilege to lead a successful campaign for much greater resources and a significantly extended reach.

Let us be clear, too, that there was never any justification for Mike Green’s expulsion from Fiji — a point on which then Prime Minister Helen Clark agreed, and made very clear, at that time. He always enjoyed the fullest confidence of the New Zealand gov-ernment.

Personally, Bainimarama and others in Fiji misread us. They probably expected that over time we would revert to business as usual — as indeed had happened in respect of the earlier coups beginning in 1987. But we did not and rightly so.

Persona non grataWinston Peters launches a book by the late Michael Green, the former high commissioner in Suva.

Rt Hon Winston Peters, the leader and spokesperson for foreign affairs of New Zealand First, was New Zealand’s foreign minister from 2005 to 2008. This article is the edited text of his remarks at a reception at Victoria University on 27 June to launch Persona Non Grata, Breaking the Bond — Fiji and New Zealand 2004–2007 (Dunmore Publishing Ltd).

In particular the smart sanctions — the travel re-strictions — that we put in place in early 2007 had a real impact. They were directed at the proponents of the coup and they have hurt.

It is clear that Mike Green’s expulsion had a lot to do with the coup lead-er’s frustration that we were not about to just sit back and timidly accept what had been done, particular-ly after we had gone to so much effort for the coup not to happen.

That frustration festered away over many months and was a major contributing factor to the illogical and unreasonable deci-sion to throw our high commissioner to Fiji, Mike Green, out of the country. As sombre as it is, it nevertheless remains important that the major elements of those smart sanctions remain in place. And they should stay in place until we get irreversible action to restore democracy, decency, the rule of law and fundamental hu-man rights, all of which have been serious victims of the regime. That means action not words: action not promises.

On-going disasterLet us make no mistake: what has happened in Fiji is an on-going disaster — a disaster not only for the people of Fiji but also for the wider region. Who now looks to Fiji as one of the centres of Pacific excellence, in education for example, or health training for the region or development generally? Who now looks to Suva as a key regional capital?

Regrettably, we had to forecast all that to Bainimarama — we warned that would happen. As someone in frequent contact with Fiji’s leaders, I joined a delegation there in early 2006. You may recall, too, that in the month before the coup we went to great lengths to bring both then Prime Minister Qarase and Bainmar-ama to a meeting in Wellington to work through the issues that had come between them.

A personal disquiet at the end of that meeting, which has not been shared until now, is that clearly Prime Minister Qarase was a reluctant politician, an honourable man, and someone who was moving a long way towards compromise and co-operation in or-der to forestall the threat of a coup.

The two hours of that Wellington meeting and saying farewell to him is a hauntingly sad memory. Regrettably, that was not a perception that was personally gained from Bainimarama, who evinced an attitude and opinion of his role, backed up by nu-merous threats to take action, which clearly had no basis in the constitution of Fiji or the law of that country. The great example of George Washington confirming authority back to the elected representatives in the early days after the American Revolution seemed lost on Bainimarama.

BOOK LAUNCH

A cartoon on a weblog site advocating democracy for Fiji and criticising UN lack of action


What has played out in the intervening years has been at times sickening (those videos of police beatings for example), deeply disquieting and terribly sad, first and foremost for the people of Fiji but also for all of us who have a great fondness for Fiji and its people as a close friend and neighbour.

Government-to-government relations are important, as are minister-to-minister relations. But of most significance are the re-lations between two peoples, which is probably the greatest cause for hope that one day we will get on top of Fijians’ recent propen-sity to illegally challenge duly elected governments.

Important lessonsLooking back on it all from my time as a former foreign minister, there are a number of lessons to take away:

We need to put more effort into preventative diplomacy. We cannot always stop bad things happening. But we need to be able to say we tried everything, and make a much more sus-tained effort and focus going into thinking about preventa-tive diplomacy drawing on the skills of our Foreign Ministry, and also other agencies such as the police, who have skills which are highly relevant to try to stop tense situations be-coming more serious.

We cannot do anything alone. We need to work closely with Australia and our Pacific neighbours. In the case of Fiji it was vitally important that the region spoke collectively in response to the coup. It still is. And that means our regional diploma-cy must be a top priority as we look ahead, and it means we must have talented, experienced people on the ground in the region. And we must maintain a robust dialogue on Pacific issues with others who have influence in the region including the United States, the European Union and increasingly Chi-na.

We must never give up on the people of Fiji even when we continue to disagree with their leaders. So smart sanctions are important whilst nevertheless maintaining humanitarian and other sorts of assistance. The people of Fiji are victims here and they deserve our support, understanding and solidarity.

To train and recruit talented people like Mike Green, New Zealand must spend much more than it is spending of late. Foreign Affairs is our international footprint, and expendi-ture cuts demonstrate a shabby misunderstanding of our po-tential role in economic and international affairs.

Inexcusable betrayalWhich brings us to one final point: Why on earth is the United

Nations continuing to use the Fijian military ostensibly to restore law and order and democracy in other parts of the globe whilst it is the principle cause for the loss of it in Fiji. There is no excuse for this state of affairs. It is in its own way a betrayal of the people of Fiji by giving succour to their oppressors. Nor does it stop just with the United Nations. The British government should also ex-plain why their military continue to recruit Fijian soldiers.

The Fijian military need to know that there will be increased consequences for their encouraging some in their midst who have a contempt for duly democratically elected governments. The ability of young Fiji men to access military career paths outside of Fiji is important to the Fijian military. That is why UN and UK recruitment should stop immediately and New Zealand must keep saying so publicly.

Persona Non Grata provides one with a deeper understanding of the importance of a diplomat’s life and work. It is a seriously interesting account and should be read by anyone interested in international affairs. My personal thanks go to Dr Gillian Green for sharing not only the launch with us but also the book, which provides a diplomatic family’s insights into what clearly was one rocky road because of the country of location where this unfor-tunate event took place. But most of all, we thank her for main-taining, through all the undeserved provocation, our country’s dignity.

Fijian resorts have lost some appeal since the coup

Former Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase before his incarceration in August 2012 and his subsequent release in June 2013

Frank Bainimarama


On 18 April Dr Kirdan Lees (senior economist and head of the Public Good Programme at the New Zealand Institute of Eco-nomic Research) gave a presentation at Victoria University on ‘New Zealand’s Challenges and Opportunities in the Post-GFC World’.

A panel discussion on ‘The EU and Asia Pacific: a Polish Per-spective’ was held at Victoria University on 3 May with Prof Rob Rabel (VUW) in the chair. The panelists were Radoslaw Sikorski (Polish foreign minister), Prof Robert Ayson (director of the Cen-tre for Strategic Studies), John McKinnon (executive director of the Asia New Zealand Foundation) and Prof Martin Holland (di-rector of the National Centre for Research on Europe, University of Canterbury).

On 22 May Victoria University’s Centre for Strategic Studies and the NZIIA co-hosted a public symposium on ‘After the Mis-sions: Understanding New Zealand’s Security Future’ at the James Cook Hotel Grand Chancellor. The symposium considered what we have learnt from the various missions that are now winding up,

Institute Notes

roundtable discussion with Dr Han Duck-soo (former prime minister of South Korea and chair of the Korea International Trade Association).

On 27 June the late Michael Green’s book Persona Non Gra-ta — Breaking the Bond: New Zealand and Fiji 2004–2007 was launched by Winston Peters at a reception at Victoria University. (Peters’s speech is to be found elsewhere in this issue.)

Dr Negar Partow

Shalom Cohen

how New Zealand’s friends and partners see things, what our future security environment looks like, and what our forces will be doing. It examined New Zealand’s op-tions if it wants to remain active in international and regional security.

At a meeting at Victoria Uni-versity on 29 May Ambassador Shalom Cohen (chargé d’affaires at the Embassy of Israel) gave a presentation on ‘Behind the Arab Spring — the Origin and Causes and the Current Situation in the Middle East’.

On 6 June Iranian-born Dr Negar Partow, Massey Univer-sity expert on Middle East poli-tics, religion, human rights and international security, addressed a meeting on ‘Iran’s Presidential Election and the Future of its For-eign Policy’.

On 20 June, at a joint meet-ing with the New Zealand Centre for Public Law and the Faculty of Law, Victoria University of Wellington, Ambassador David Scheffer (Mayer Brown/Robert A. Helman professor of law and director of the Center for Inter-national Human Rights) gave a presentation on ‘Challenges of In-ternational Justice’.

On 21 June vice president Professor Rob Rabel chaired a Dr Han Duck-soo

At a joint meeting with the Australian High Commission on 1 July, Jenny Hayward-Jones (di-rector of the Myer Foundation Melanesia Program, Lowy Insti-tute for International Policy) de-livered an address on ‘Big Enough for All of Us: Geo-strategic Com-petition in the Pacific Islands’.

On 16 July, at a joint meeting with VUW’s Institute of Gov-ernance and Policy Studies, HE Francis Etienne

Francis Etienne (French ambassador to New Zealand) gave a pres-entation on ‘Governance Gallic Style: Continuity and Change in French Politics’.

AucklandThe following meetings were held:25 Mar HE Beata Stoczynska (ambassador of the Republic of Po-

land in Wellington), ‘Poland and the Eastern Initiative’. 27 May HE Ambassador Shalom Cohen (chargé d’affaires at the

Embassy of Israel), ‘Behind the Arab Spring — the Ori-gin and Causes and the Current Situation in the Middle East’.

4 Jul Sidney Jones (senior adviser for the Asia Porogramme at International Crisis Group), ‘Democracy and Security in Indonesia’.

ChristchurchThe following meetings were held:21 Mar W. David McIntyre (former branch chairman and life

member of the NZIIA), ‘Whither the Institute after 80 Years?’

10 Apr HE Dr Marion Weichelt Krupski (ambassador of Swit-zerland), ‘Swiss Direct Democracy’.

9 May Dr Malakai Koloamatangi (Pasifika director, Massey Uni-versity at Albany), ‘The New Reign in Tonga’.

29 May Anthony Dodwell (former manager, company director, and consultant in the Kingdom of Bahrain), ‘Conduct-ing Business in the Middle East’.

14 Jun HE Francis Etienne (French ambassador), ‘French Policy for Peace and Stability in Sub-Saharan Africa’.

27 Jun Dr Sally Laura Carleton (a former participant in the Australian youth ambassador for development pro-gramme, who spent a year working as a research fellow at the Nepal Institute for Policy Studies), ‘Nepal’s Peace Progress’.


NelsonOn 20 February Ian Kennedy, former New Zealand ambassador to Tokyo, spoke about the importance and poten-tial of New Zealand’s relationship with Japan. This was followed by an address by Dr Scott Gal-lacher, deputy secretary of primary industries

based on common political values (the US–New Zealand rela-tionship) versus strategic economic interests (the New Zealand–China relationship). He gave many examples and anecdotes from his own personal experiences as a government minister, and as a young man growing up in an agricultural setting. (Supplied by James To)

TaurangaOn 17 July the branch heard a presentation by David Pine (New Zealand’s high commissioner in Kuala Lumpur).

WairarapaThe following meetings were held:25 Mar Ian Kennedy (former New Zealand ambassador to Ja-

pan), ‘New Zealand and Japan — Long-term Partners’.22 Apr HE Leonora Rueda (ambassador of Mexico to New Zea-

land), ‘Mexico and New Zealand: Closed Pacific Neigh-bours’.

27 May Paul Sinclair (regional security fellow, Centre for Strate-gic Studies, Victoria University), ‘Tensions on the Korean Peninsula, Implications for New Zealand and Thoughts on a Way Ahead’.

WellingtonThe branch AGM was held on 22 April. The following officers were elected: Chair — Peter NicholsVice Chair — Craig GreavesEvents Organiser — Lisa MarrinerTreasurer — Colin ReedMembership Secretary — Peter CosgroveMinutes Secretary — Elisabeth PerhamMedia Secretary — Tim WangStudent Representative — Andrew GoddardCommittee — Paul Bellamy, Vern Bennett, Sheryl Boxall, Kerry Boyle, Hon Sir Douglas Kidd KNZM, Dr Marc Lanteigne, Brian Lynch ONZM, Kelvin Ratnam, Mike Thompson. Ex officio: Pe-ter Kennedy (NZIIA director), Susan Budd (MFAT).

Following the AGM, the French ambassador in New Zea-land, HE Francis Etienne, delivered an address on ‘France-Mali’.

The following meetings were held:21 May Christopher Hill (former US diplomat and ambassa-

dor to Iraq 2009–10 and now dean of the Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver), ‘Challenges in East Asia and the Pacific’.

23 May Brigadier Zahoor Ahmed (Pakistan’s defence attaché), ‘Pakistan’s Fight Against Terrorism’.

10 Jun Dr May-Britt Stumbaum (head of the NFG Research Group ‘Asian Perceptions of the European Union’ at the Free University of Berlin), ‘Responding to Change in Asia — European Contributions to Secure Peace and Stability in the Asia–Pacific’.

13 Jun Group Captain Athol Forrest (New Zealand Defence Force) and Dr Lance Beath (senior lecturer in strategic studies, VUW), ‘Strategic Requirements for the Papua New Guinea Defence Force — and its Positive Role in Papua New Guinea’s Security’.

18 Jul Hon Sir Douglas Kidd (NZIIA president), ‘Monitoring the Pakistan National and Provincial Elections — May 2013’.

Sir Douglas Kidd

and a member of the NZIIA’s Standing Committee, on new ap-proaches to marketing our primary produce. On 1 May former Prime Minister Sir Geoffrey Palmer spoke to an audience of over 90 people about his role as the chairman of the committee set up by the UN secretary-general to investigate the so-called Gaza Flotilla Incident, in which the Israeli navy attacked Turkish vessels attempting to deliver aid to the Gaza Strip.

Palmerston NorthOn 13 March, NZIIA President Sir Doug Kidd addressed the branch on the topic ‘China’s Relationship with New Zealand’. He began by referring to recent speeches by Liu Jieyi (vice-min-ister, International Department of the CPC Central Committee) and Tom Donilon (national security adviser to President Obama) which framed the dominant context of the seminar — New Zea-land’s need for flexibility and foresight in managing its relation-ship between two great world powers. Kidd compared life in New Zealand 40 years ago with the present day, and noted how much we had changed from a simpler Cold War environment to a more complex globalised world. He looked back to when New Zealand was completely integrated with Britain for its economic survival, and noted how more goods are now sent to China. In short, he illustrated the dramatic shift northwards in our country’s global connections. In the rest of his presentation, he touched on China’s presence in the Pacific, and how New Zealand should better man-age its relations with Fiji; the re-prioritisation of our state interests to reflect the importance of a growing China; the pressure from the United States in ‘containing’ China, and how New Zealand might have to deal with it; and finally balancing strategic interests

Sir Geoffrey Palmer

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