Bryce Edwards asks whether it is “time to break up with America”. Don Brash asks whether it is any longer safe to be an American ally. Both are fair questions. Both, however, miss a more awkward truth.
New Zealand is being invited to agonise over the condition of a relationship that, in any serious strategic sense, ended long ago.
To borrow Bryce Edwards’s romantic vernacular, this is beginning to resemble the spectacle of someone solemnly debating whether to leave a partner who moved out years ago, changed the locks, and has since been seen around town with other people.
That may sound flippant. It is not. It is simply a more accurate description of New Zealand’s position than the self-important language now fashionable in parts of the foreign-policy commentariat.
The conceit behind the “break up with America” thesis is that New Zealand still enjoys something like the old alliance relationship with Washington, and must now decide whether to preserve or repudiate it on moral grounds. But America largely settled this matter decades ago. It did so not because Donald Trump arrived in 2026 and suddenly made the United States objectionable to refined New Zealand sensibilities. It did so because New Zealand ceased to be, in Washington’s eyes, a reliably aligned and strategically useful partner.
That process began in the 1980s and was reinforced thereafter. The anti-nuclear rupture was not some costless assertion of sovereign virtue, however fondly it is remembered in progressive mythology. It had consequences. One was New Zealand’s practical exclusion from ANZUS. Another was that a country once regarded as a dependable ally came increasingly to be seen as a sentimental, self-excusing, semi-detached actor: happy to enjoy the benefits of Western security, less keen to shoulder the burdens.
That point was not hard to see even in 2002. In articles I wrote then for the Otago Daily Times and the Australian Financial Review, I argued that New Zealand’s “independent” posture was not a free good. It was already carrying costs, in Washington and in Canberra. As I put it then, “the past has finally caught up with us.” I also quoted an Australian newspaper’s description of the trans-Tasman relationship as “rock-solid mates become distant acquaintances.” That was not journalistic overstatement. It was an early description of strategic downgrading.
The warning signs were plain enough. Australia moved ahead on strategic and trade matters without us. New Zealand was increasingly left outside conversations that once would have included it. Washington’s view had plainly cooled. Helen Clark’s government liked to treat this as either exaggerated or irrelevant, but it was neither. As I noted regarding Clark’s Washington visit at the time, she “was reminded in no uncertain terms that New Zealand is not now an ally of the US.” That was not some passing diplomatic mood. It was the essence of the matter.
That is why Bryce Edwards’s argument is back to front. He treats present tensions as though they represent a shocking new estrangement caused by Washington’s conduct. In reality, the estrangement is old. The truly striking thing is not that New Zealand may need to “break up” with America; it is that so many New Zealanders have gone on speaking as if the old relationship remained intact.
Consider trade. There was a time when it would have been almost unthinkable for New Zealand to be left out while Australia pursued major trade arrangements with the United States and others. Yet that is precisely what happened. As I wrote at the time, Australia was negotiating trade agreements with the US, Japan and Thailand on its own, whereas in the past it had been taken for granted that the two countries negotiated in concert. That was not a minor slight. It was evidence that New Zealand had become less relevant.
Consider defence. New Zealand scrapped air combat capability and for years behaved as though geography, good intentions and inherited Western order were adequate substitutes for hard power. It is difficult to be treated as a serious ally when one signals, in effect, that one expects others to provide the umbrella while one lectures them on the quality of their manners.
That point is underscored rather brutally by the scale of American hard power. In the recent rescue operation for the US Chief Warrant Officer, the aircraft employed by the United States reportedly amounted to more than three times the size of New Zealand’s entire air force. The refuelling tankers alone exceeded New Zealand’s whole fleet. One need not celebrate American military activism to recognise the obvious implication: countries that can project force on that scale do not think about alliance management in quite the same sentimental terms as countries that cannot. The gap is not merely one of degree. It is one of category.
This is why the current New Zealand handwringing over American conduct has an oddly unreal quality. Of course one may criticise the Trump administration. Indeed, one may criticise it sharply. But New Zealand should do so from a position of sobriety, not fantasy. The fantasy is that Wellington stands poised to sever some still-substantial alliance. The sobriety is to recognise that America long ago recalibrated the relationship in light of New Zealand’s own choices.
None of this requires one to endorse American policy towards Iran, still less every rhetorical eruption from the White House. Reasonable people can disagree about the justice, prudence and legality of the American and Israeli actions. It is easy enough to construct a case for them, and easy enough to construct a case against them. The trouble with much New Zealand commentary is not that it is critical. It is that it remains melodramatic and self-regarding.
The question is not whether New Zealand can strike an attitude. It plainly can. The question is what the attitude is worth.
If the lesson drawn from the Iran conflict is that New Zealand should further distance itself from the United States while continuing to underinvest in defence and overinvest in posturing, then the country will have learned precisely the wrong lesson.
The more serious lesson concerns capability and resilience. The fuel shock now affecting New Zealand and Australia is a case in point. Much of the commentary treats it simply as fallout from events in the Gulf. That is only half true. External shocks reveal internal foolishness. They do not create it.
New Zealand’s fuel vulnerability is, to a considerable extent, self-inflicted. So is Australia’s. For years both countries behaved as though the world had become so safe, so orderly and so frictionless that strategic reserves, domestic productive capacity and hard-headed energy security could be treated as relics of an earlier age. Refineries disappeared. Domestic production was constrained. Stockpiles remained inadequate. Governments of left and right acted as though “just in time” was a law of nature rather than a fair-weather management fashion.
It turns out that agriculture still runs on diesel, not on virtue. Freight still depends on fuel, not on slogans. The “end of history”, alas, has once again failed to arrive.
That matters for foreign policy because a country that will not provide for its own basic resilience is in no position to indulge grand notions of strategic independence. Independence without capability is not independence. It is dependence with better public relations.
Brash is right, at least, to force attention back to interest. States align because they believe it serves their interests. The United States certainly does. So should New Zealand. But that requires an adult discussion. It requires recognition that alliances are not charitable enterprises, and that stronger countries do not indefinitely extend special regard to weaker ones that contribute less, moralise more and assume that past sacrifices entitle them to perpetual consideration.
That is why the nostalgic invocation of the 1980s is so misleading. Yes, New Zealand survived the ANZUS rupture. Yes, the sky did not fall. But survival is not the same thing as costlessness. The price was paid over time: in diminished influence, in reduced strategic weight, in exclusion from opportunities, and in a gradual shift in how others assessed us. The Americans did not need to announce a dramatic divorce. They simply moved on.
One can see why this truth is uncomfortable. It is easier to imagine that Wellington still stands at the centre of a moral drama in which it must decide whether to cling to or renounce a superpower. It is less flattering to admit that successive New Zealand governments, especially from the Clark era onward, helped downgrade the relationship through a mixture of vanity, underinvestment and a childlike belief that principles count most when someone else pays for them.
Winston Peters, for all his theatricality, is not wrong to seek useful dealings with Washington. Nor are his critics entirely wrong to be alarmed by aspects of American conduct. But both camps tend to proceed from the same mistaken premise: that New Zealand still occupies a place in American strategic thinking remotely comparable to the one it once did.
It does not.
That does not mean New Zealand should abase itself before Washington. Nor does it mean hitching itself uncritically to every American venture. It means something more prosaic and more demanding: New Zealand must decide whether it intends to be a serious country.
A serious country would stop confusing rhetoric with policy. It would stop treating defence as a distasteful colonial leftover. It would stop congratulating itself on “independence” while relying on others for the hard stuff. It would rebuild resilience in energy, supply chains and military capability. It would seek good relations with the United States, Australia and others, but without illusion. And it would understand that trust, once squandered, is not restored by sentiment.
Bryce Edwards asks whether it is time to break up with America. The more pertinent question is whether New Zealand has finally noticed that America, in the old alliance sense, broke up with us years ago.
The task now is not to stage a melodramatic separation. It is to recover enough realism, capability and self-respect to make future relationships matter.
Nicholas Kerr, who grew up in New Zealand, is a marketing consultant in Texas, where he lives with his wife and two small children. This article was sourced HERE
That may sound flippant. It is not. It is simply a more accurate description of New Zealand’s position than the self-important language now fashionable in parts of the foreign-policy commentariat.
The conceit behind the “break up with America” thesis is that New Zealand still enjoys something like the old alliance relationship with Washington, and must now decide whether to preserve or repudiate it on moral grounds. But America largely settled this matter decades ago. It did so not because Donald Trump arrived in 2026 and suddenly made the United States objectionable to refined New Zealand sensibilities. It did so because New Zealand ceased to be, in Washington’s eyes, a reliably aligned and strategically useful partner.
That process began in the 1980s and was reinforced thereafter. The anti-nuclear rupture was not some costless assertion of sovereign virtue, however fondly it is remembered in progressive mythology. It had consequences. One was New Zealand’s practical exclusion from ANZUS. Another was that a country once regarded as a dependable ally came increasingly to be seen as a sentimental, self-excusing, semi-detached actor: happy to enjoy the benefits of Western security, less keen to shoulder the burdens.
That point was not hard to see even in 2002. In articles I wrote then for the Otago Daily Times and the Australian Financial Review, I argued that New Zealand’s “independent” posture was not a free good. It was already carrying costs, in Washington and in Canberra. As I put it then, “the past has finally caught up with us.” I also quoted an Australian newspaper’s description of the trans-Tasman relationship as “rock-solid mates become distant acquaintances.” That was not journalistic overstatement. It was an early description of strategic downgrading.
The warning signs were plain enough. Australia moved ahead on strategic and trade matters without us. New Zealand was increasingly left outside conversations that once would have included it. Washington’s view had plainly cooled. Helen Clark’s government liked to treat this as either exaggerated or irrelevant, but it was neither. As I noted regarding Clark’s Washington visit at the time, she “was reminded in no uncertain terms that New Zealand is not now an ally of the US.” That was not some passing diplomatic mood. It was the essence of the matter.
That is why Bryce Edwards’s argument is back to front. He treats present tensions as though they represent a shocking new estrangement caused by Washington’s conduct. In reality, the estrangement is old. The truly striking thing is not that New Zealand may need to “break up” with America; it is that so many New Zealanders have gone on speaking as if the old relationship remained intact.
Consider trade. There was a time when it would have been almost unthinkable for New Zealand to be left out while Australia pursued major trade arrangements with the United States and others. Yet that is precisely what happened. As I wrote at the time, Australia was negotiating trade agreements with the US, Japan and Thailand on its own, whereas in the past it had been taken for granted that the two countries negotiated in concert. That was not a minor slight. It was evidence that New Zealand had become less relevant.
Consider defence. New Zealand scrapped air combat capability and for years behaved as though geography, good intentions and inherited Western order were adequate substitutes for hard power. It is difficult to be treated as a serious ally when one signals, in effect, that one expects others to provide the umbrella while one lectures them on the quality of their manners.
That point is underscored rather brutally by the scale of American hard power. In the recent rescue operation for the US Chief Warrant Officer, the aircraft employed by the United States reportedly amounted to more than three times the size of New Zealand’s entire air force. The refuelling tankers alone exceeded New Zealand’s whole fleet. One need not celebrate American military activism to recognise the obvious implication: countries that can project force on that scale do not think about alliance management in quite the same sentimental terms as countries that cannot. The gap is not merely one of degree. It is one of category.
This is why the current New Zealand handwringing over American conduct has an oddly unreal quality. Of course one may criticise the Trump administration. Indeed, one may criticise it sharply. But New Zealand should do so from a position of sobriety, not fantasy. The fantasy is that Wellington stands poised to sever some still-substantial alliance. The sobriety is to recognise that America long ago recalibrated the relationship in light of New Zealand’s own choices.
None of this requires one to endorse American policy towards Iran, still less every rhetorical eruption from the White House. Reasonable people can disagree about the justice, prudence and legality of the American and Israeli actions. It is easy enough to construct a case for them, and easy enough to construct a case against them. The trouble with much New Zealand commentary is not that it is critical. It is that it remains melodramatic and self-regarding.
The question is not whether New Zealand can strike an attitude. It plainly can. The question is what the attitude is worth.
If the lesson drawn from the Iran conflict is that New Zealand should further distance itself from the United States while continuing to underinvest in defence and overinvest in posturing, then the country will have learned precisely the wrong lesson.
The more serious lesson concerns capability and resilience. The fuel shock now affecting New Zealand and Australia is a case in point. Much of the commentary treats it simply as fallout from events in the Gulf. That is only half true. External shocks reveal internal foolishness. They do not create it.
New Zealand’s fuel vulnerability is, to a considerable extent, self-inflicted. So is Australia’s. For years both countries behaved as though the world had become so safe, so orderly and so frictionless that strategic reserves, domestic productive capacity and hard-headed energy security could be treated as relics of an earlier age. Refineries disappeared. Domestic production was constrained. Stockpiles remained inadequate. Governments of left and right acted as though “just in time” was a law of nature rather than a fair-weather management fashion.
It turns out that agriculture still runs on diesel, not on virtue. Freight still depends on fuel, not on slogans. The “end of history”, alas, has once again failed to arrive.
That matters for foreign policy because a country that will not provide for its own basic resilience is in no position to indulge grand notions of strategic independence. Independence without capability is not independence. It is dependence with better public relations.
Brash is right, at least, to force attention back to interest. States align because they believe it serves their interests. The United States certainly does. So should New Zealand. But that requires an adult discussion. It requires recognition that alliances are not charitable enterprises, and that stronger countries do not indefinitely extend special regard to weaker ones that contribute less, moralise more and assume that past sacrifices entitle them to perpetual consideration.
That is why the nostalgic invocation of the 1980s is so misleading. Yes, New Zealand survived the ANZUS rupture. Yes, the sky did not fall. But survival is not the same thing as costlessness. The price was paid over time: in diminished influence, in reduced strategic weight, in exclusion from opportunities, and in a gradual shift in how others assessed us. The Americans did not need to announce a dramatic divorce. They simply moved on.
One can see why this truth is uncomfortable. It is easier to imagine that Wellington still stands at the centre of a moral drama in which it must decide whether to cling to or renounce a superpower. It is less flattering to admit that successive New Zealand governments, especially from the Clark era onward, helped downgrade the relationship through a mixture of vanity, underinvestment and a childlike belief that principles count most when someone else pays for them.
Winston Peters, for all his theatricality, is not wrong to seek useful dealings with Washington. Nor are his critics entirely wrong to be alarmed by aspects of American conduct. But both camps tend to proceed from the same mistaken premise: that New Zealand still occupies a place in American strategic thinking remotely comparable to the one it once did.
It does not.
That does not mean New Zealand should abase itself before Washington. Nor does it mean hitching itself uncritically to every American venture. It means something more prosaic and more demanding: New Zealand must decide whether it intends to be a serious country.
A serious country would stop confusing rhetoric with policy. It would stop treating defence as a distasteful colonial leftover. It would stop congratulating itself on “independence” while relying on others for the hard stuff. It would rebuild resilience in energy, supply chains and military capability. It would seek good relations with the United States, Australia and others, but without illusion. And it would understand that trust, once squandered, is not restored by sentiment.
Bryce Edwards asks whether it is time to break up with America. The more pertinent question is whether New Zealand has finally noticed that America, in the old alliance sense, broke up with us years ago.
The task now is not to stage a melodramatic separation. It is to recover enough realism, capability and self-respect to make future relationships matter.
Nicholas Kerr, who grew up in New Zealand, is a marketing consultant in Texas, where he lives with his wife and two small children. This article was sourced HERE
11 comments:
"The Americans did not need to announce a dramatic divorce. They simply moved on." 100% correct. And meanwhile NZ like idiots patted ourselves on the back for our grandstanding
All true, NZ has become irrelevant because it decided it didn’t need friends and allies. Unfortunately, those past mistakes get imbedded in 1980’s thinking and we never move on from those decisions.
Take the nuclear free stance, you can’t mention the word nuclear in this country without getting weird looks. Yet it would solve many problems the political class fret about in our media.
Lastly, how on earth does any government of any political persuasion think it’s going to defend its economic territory if it has no defence force?
Send out a Māori waka? Jump up and down, stick out your tongue?
Tell that to a Chinese aircraft carrier loaded with fighters.
It’s thinking so removed from reality it’s hard to fathom.
America is divorcing everyone except Israel and Russia.
Thanks for your insight Nicholas. Our isolation tends to distort our thinking. I experienced it as a young professional working in Sydney in the early 1980s. NZ was in a lather about "Closer Economic Relations" and my mother asked me about the Australian viewpoint. I had to inform her that no-one outside of the Diplomatic Corps had even heard of it. Same with the supposed NZ-Australian "rivalry". In reality, we don't even feature on their radar screen.
Looking back, it seems inevitable that our very short-sighted politicians, of all parties, would see our very distant location from most countries as a guaranteed shield. None remember how threatening, at the time, was the Japanese thrust into the South Pacific. It was easy to give the metaphorical fingers in the 1980s to the Americans over the ridiculous nuclear-power issue.
But now we need to see the Australians, and they need to see us, as important strategic partners. We will be the eastern bulwark, (as much as we can), and they will provide a measure of collective military capability based on their population size and resource base. We will, though, need to show a great deal more enterprise if this partnership is to work. Time to get serious about defence, Christopher.
Anon 10.24. America is not divorcing anyone. It is telling the children to stop bludging off the adults. Either contribute or move out, either choice is fine by them.
"God defend New Zealand" says the National Anthem I sing (don't know about the other one). Appealing to the deity may be our only option. We certainly can't do it ourselves. And nobody else is going to do it for us. Now all we gave to agree on is which god is available to do the job.
An interesting insight into how New Zealand, lost the way. I recall that when David Lange decided that US Navy Nuclear powered vessels were no longer welcome here, the US at the time "made it clear" that our former association was now 'dead in the water'.
Did it worry David L, no he "had his head in the sand over other matters".
His marriage being one problem for him.
Did it worry his Caucus colleagues, other than Mike Moore (Min Of overseas Trade), the others could not have cared less.
They were more interested in 'reversing' what Muldoon had set in place.
Sadly Helen Clark had no interest in ensuring any relationship, she loathed America.
There were many New Zealanders, who did have a relationship with America and strived to maintain it, more so for trade.
What was achieved was impressive - ask any one in the NZ Wine industry.
Without their hard work, NZ would not have gained access to the American Market, that access now 'decimated' by the Trump Tariff regime.
It will be interesting to see how any Govt, of today or going forward resolves our inability to create Trade Deals (sorry the FTA with India is a waste of time) and working with the EU, since its inception, has proved futile.
Interesting days & times ahead.
I am wondering if I am right or wrong:
But WHEN will NZ become a province ( state ) of Australia.
Would be great, because then we would be rid of a lot of co-governance BS.
The USA has always been a fair weather friend as has Australia to a lesser degree. Remember the Rainbow Warrior. We were kicked out of ANSUS because of our nuclear stance which had to include Nuclear Propulsion due to the US policy to neither confirm or deny. I wonder whether Australia will adopt that slogan when they get nuclear subs? But we are not always the injured party. Our Skyhawks were a huge help to the Australian Navy when they were based in Victoria and we changed our rifles to be non compatible with those of our best friends. I Kiwi and Digger in the same trench could no longer swap rifles!
The Jones Boy is right in reminding us of our vulnerability. The myth of the Yanks saving us from the Japs has persevered. NZ was a strategic base for their forces and a good R&R spot but it was for their purpose, not ours. As for our "Defence" forces, they simply fall under the heading of : Resistance is Futile.
Post a Comment
Thank you for joining the discussion. Breaking Views welcomes respectful contributions that enrich the debate. Please ensure your comments are not defamatory, derogatory or disruptive. We appreciate your cooperation.