When it comes to national security, small countries can either obey or think

By Chris Trotter*

A small country has limited options when it comes to defending itself. Either it places its security in the hands of a larger power and reconciles itself to a foreign affairs and defence policy circumscribed by obedience, or it learns to think.

New Zealand, a very small country for most of its history opted to obey.

Israel chose to think.

Many would reject that claim, arguing that Israel has always been able to count on the support and protection of the United States, the largest of all the large powers.

The counterargument would describe the ways in which the Israelis turned their best minds, along with those of the Jewish diaspora, to persuading the American political class that even at the cost of alienating virtually every other Middle-Eastern power, the survival of the State of Israel constitutes a moral and strategic responsibility from which the United States cannot turn away.

Onto the scales of American judgement the Israelis and their co-religionists around the world piled the enormous moral weight of the Holocaust, along with the eschatological obsessions of America’s evangelical Christian churches. (Only when the Jews have been returned safely to Zion can the End Times begin!)

To these emotive appeals they added the plain fact that Israel’s enemies were the friends of America’s enemies. By making Israel its special friend, the USA would be placing the enemies of both nations at a strategic disadvantage.

The Israelis were also confident that where the USA led, the rest of the West would follow. By forging a till-death-us-do-part relationship with the United States, Israel could secure the diplomatic and military support of many others.

Israel’s foreign and defence policy did not come without cost. Over and over again the Jewish state was forced to fight but, with the exception of the Suez Crisis of 1956, it was never forced to obey.

Even in the case of Suez, Israel’s deference to the wishes of the Americans did not bring the crushing humiliations which US President Dwight Eisenhower imposed upon the British and the French. For the latter, Suez marked the end of independent imperial adventures. Israel’s were just beginning.

On balance, its obedience to the United States, and before that to the United Kingdom, has not served New Zealand well.

By folding itself into the strategic and tactical plans of its protectors New Zealand lost any capacity to act independently in defence of its own interests. Seen from this perspective, Michael Joseph Savage’s 1939 avowal of New Zealand’s automatic support for Britain and her empire: “where she stands, we stand; where she goes, we go”; may be read as a frank admission of its strategic impotence.

In the end, and in spite of the blood sacrifice offered up to Britain in the First World War, Australia and New Zealand were more or less abandoned by their imperial protector. Winston Churchill dispatched a couple of battleships, which the Japanese promptly sank. After that, if the Americans failed to save them, then the Aussies and the Kiwis would be on their own.

The American naval victory over Japan at Midway, left Australia and New Zealand deeply indebted to the United States. Loyalty to the British Empire and Commonwealth lingered, but the political leadership of Australasia knew that, militarily-speaking, British power was fast ebbing away. The defence pact signed by Australia and New Zealand in 1951 was with the US not the UK.

Historically, it is the New Zealand Labour Party that has calculated most accurately the diplomatic, military and moral costs of trading New Zealand’s independence of action for superpower protection.

Beginning with Peter Fraser, who spoke up forcefully for the rights of small nations at the 1945 conference that established the United Nations, and continuing under Norman Kirk (Vietnam) David Lange (nuclear weapons) and Helen Clark (Iraq) Labour prime ministers have chafed under American suzerainty.

The intractable problem encountered by all of them was the strength of the structures linking New Zealand to the Americans, the British, and the Australians.

Historically, the country’s national security, foreign affairs and defence personnel have proved to be bound much more tightly to their allied counterparts than they are to errant Labour governments with dangerous dreams of fashioning an “independent foreign policy”.

The other tie that binds is New Zealand’s commitment to “interoperability” with the weapons and systems of its “very, very, very good friends”.

The arms purchased by New Zealand from its “defence partners” render it acutely vulnerable. Any significant disagreement with the nation/s supplying New Zealand with the weapons it requires will raise serious questions about resupply, repair and reequipment. Ammunition, spare parts, systems upgrades: all are dependent on keeping the goodwill of the nations that manufacture them.

A country that cannot rely upon the loyalty of it diplomats, military officers, and intelligence personnel, and whose military purchases are sourced from a strictly limited number of suppliers, cannot hope to run an independent foreign policy.

Obedience may be secured by love, or by threats. Most commonly, however, it is secured by a mixture of the two.

A New Zealand that decided to defend itself by the acuity of its thinking would begin the process by identifying the principal sources of its people’s economic security.

Accordingly, New Zealand’s first priority would be maintaining the best possible relations with Australia and China.

In the alarming context of a United States thrashing about recklessly in an increasingly costly attempt to reassert the global hegemony it enjoyed for the brief period that separated the fall of the Soviet Union from the full emergence, economically and militarily, of the Peoples Republic of China, is that achievable?

It is, if a clear-thinking New Zealand repositions itself diplomatically and militarily to take full advantage of an Indo-Pacific region which, following President Donald Trump’s criminal derangement of global energy markets, is fast becoming less – not more – beholden to the United States.

That repositioning would require a radical reconfiguration of New Zealand’s armed forces to take full advantage of the country’s growing domestic capacity in marine design and manufacture, rocketry, and drones?

It would entail a decisive strategic shift towards bolstering the security of the small island states of the South Pacific, especially in relation to the protection of their exclusive economic zones and the elimination of illegal drug trafficking in their waters.

It would make the peaceful reintegration of Taiwan into the PRC a key objective of New Zealand diplomacy? One which New Zealand’s genuinely independent foreign policy and its lack of alienating military entanglements might persuade larger powers to look upon it as an honest broker?

If Israel could think its way into regional hegemony by mastering the arts of diplomatic manipulation and war, why shouldn’t New Zealand promote its own and the South Pacific’s regional security by mastering the arts of peace?

*Chris Trotter has been writing and commenting professionally about New Zealand politics for more than 30 years. He writes a weekly column for interest.co.nz. His work may also be found at http://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com.