Picking Sides.

Time To Choose: Like it or not, the Kiwis are either going into AUKUS’s  “Pillar 2” – or they are going to China.

HAD ZHENG HE’S FLEET sailed east, not west, in the early Fifteenth Century, how different our world would be. There is little reason to suppose that the sea-going junks of the Ming Dynasty, among the largest and most sophisticated sailing vessels ever constructed, would have failed to make landfall on the Pacific coast of North America half-a-century before Columbus. The colonisation of the Americas, from West to East, would have consolidated China’s global hegemony irreversibly. The cramped and fratricidal states of the European peninsula would have remained minor players in a Chinese world.

In the worst geopolitical nightmares of the United States and its Pacific allies, a China grown as powerful as the empire which sent forth Zheng He’s mighty fleet, threatens to transform the Pacific into a Chinese lake.

Technologically and militarily superior to the internally-riven United States, this China of the future regularly stations elements of its fleet off the Californian coast – in much the same spirit as the United States Navy currently navigates the waters of the South China Sea.

In a diplomatic reversal of the USA’s “island-hopping” strategy of the Second World War, an expansionist China will already have brought the tiny nations of the Pacific under its sway. The naval and air bases located on the territory of Beijing’s new “friends” will have extended its strategic reach alarmingly.

Completing this American nightmare would be the transformation of New Zealand into China’s unsinkable aircraft carrier and nuclear submarine base. Handily located off Australia’s eastern seaboard, China’s military resources would have strategically neutralised Australia’s eye-wateringly expensive fleet of Virgina-class nuclear submarines.

Beijing’s heavy investment in New Zealand’s failing infrastructure, coupled with her role as the principal consumer of its exports, made Wellington’s detachment from the West a much easier project than would have been the case if Washington’s “Indo-Pacific Strategy” had run to offering the Kiwis a generous free trade deal to replace their economically-critical FTA with China.

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IT IS ONE OF THE KEY DISADVANTAGES of always being on the winning side of history’s great encounters: not being able to grasp the sheer contingency of such victories.

Had America’s carriers not been at sea on Sunday, 7 December 1941, and gone down in Pearl Harbour alongside her battleships; and had Japan’s bombers eliminated the USA’s Hawaiian-based fuel supplies; then an enemy fleet off the Californian coast would not have been the stuff of strategic nightmares; it could, very easily, have been the reality.

Certainly, with America’s fleet either destroyed or out of action, there could have been no Battle of the Coral Sea, no Battle of Midway, to save Australia and New Zealand from Japanese invasion and occupation.

Preventing the Pacific Ocean from becoming a Japanese lake in the 1940s required the expenditure of an awful lot of blood and treasure – and an awful lot of luck. Had things turned out differently, the Americans, desperate to secure their eastern flank, may have been forced to let the Pacific go. And, if J. Robert Oppenheimer had been run over by a Los Alamos bus in January 1942, then they may never have got it back.

What we New Zealanders need to grasp is that America can no more allow the Pacific to be dominated by China in the 2040s than it could allow it to be dominated by Japan in the 1940s. Global hegemony is a zero-sum game. For every step America takes back, its rival/s will take a step forward.

While China was content to remain the world’s factory, all was well. But, the moment Xi Jinping committed his country to building a blue-water navy to rival Zheng He’s great fleet; the moment his Belt & Road project threatened to link the Global South inextricably to Chinese capital and technology; all bets were off.

That brief geopolitical respite, when the Russians were on their knees, and the Chinese were still getting up off theirs, was squandered by Washington in a profoundly compromising series of adventures in the Middle East. Twenty years of “forever war” in Iraq and Afghanistan has left America’s armed forces physically and morally exhausted, and its ruling class dangerously lacking in fortitude. What better symbol of America’s decline could there be than two old men swinging ineffectually at each other for the custody of an angry and divided nation?

The USA’s weakness at the top notwithstanding, the dice of geopolitical hazard cannot remain uncast indefinitely.

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THE NEW CONCEPTUAL STRUCTURE for the rebuilding of the USA’s global strength is its Indo-Pacific Strategy. To understand the theatre-shift, from “Asia” to “Indo”, one has only to study the actual voyages that Admiral Zheng He undertook in the early decades of the Fifteenth Century.

He’s great fleet swept south and west from coastal China, through the Indonesian archipelago, past Sri Lanka, long the coast of India, rounding the Arabian Peninsula, to journey’s end in East Africa – distributing gifts and collecting tribute all along the way. The economic and political logic was as strong for the Chinese then as it is now. Recognising that logic, the Americans have no real choice but to prevent it from unfolding.

There was a time when the USA could have done it all alone, but now it seems that the retention of American hegemony in the Pacific requires the diplomatic mobilisation of the English-speakers who invaded Iraq in 2003 – the US, the UK and Australia. Hence AUKUS – also known as “bringing the old imperialist band back together for one last tour of an ungrateful and increasingly uncooperative world”.

Can New Zealand stay out of AUKUS? Should New Zealand stay out of AUKUS? The answer to the first question, sadly, is: Only if its people are happy to turn their country into a battleground, upon which Beijing and Washington will wage a protracted ideological war for the hearts and minds of the inhabitants of what both superpowers recognise as a critically important piece of strategic real-estate. Which, even more sadly, answers the second question.

Helen Clark may have got away with keeping New Zealand out of the invasion of Iraq, but that was because, in Iraq, only American pride was at stake. In the looming struggle for the Pacific, the option of “sitting this one out” will not be on offer. Washington will insist that blood is thicker than milk, and Beijing will remind us that milk is New Zealand’s life-blood.

Like it or not, the Kiwis are either going into AUKUS’s “Pillar 2” – or they are going to China.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 6 May 2024.

Who Shall We Turn To When God, And Uncle Sam, Cease To Defend New Zealand?

Bewhiskered Cassandra? Professor Hugh White’s chilling suggestion, advanced to select collections of academic, military and diplomatic Kiwi experts over the course of the past week, is that the assumptions upon which Australia and New Zealand have built their foreign affairs and defence policies for practically their entire histories – are no longer valid.

WHO IS HUGH WHITE and why is he so determined to alarm us? Formally, Hugh White is the Emeritus Professor of Strategic Studies at the Australian National University in Canberra. Informally, he’s a disrupter of cherished fictions. Unwilling to further embellish the orthodox accounts of Australia’s and New Zealand’s strategic obligations, White dares to ask the sort of questions that make his audiences either bristle with indignation or recoil in horror. In short, White possesses the Devil’s imagination: that terrifying ability to interrogate a worst case scenario without flinching.

White’s chilling suggestion, advanced with bewhiskered geniality to select collections of academic, military and diplomatic Kiwi experts over the course of the past week, is that the assumptions upon which Australia and New Zealand have built their foreign affairs and defence policies for practically their entire histories – are no longer valid.

Both nations are the offspring of empire: peripheral adjuncts to a core imperium powerful enough to guarantee the security of both. Accordingly, the unwavering principle of Australian and New Zealand statecraft has been to keep strong the ties that bind them to their distant protectors. Up until the Second World War that meant listening intently to the voice of London. After HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse were sent to the bottom of the South China Sea by Japanese bombers in 1942, however, Canberra and Wellington found it more expedient to tune-in to Washington.

The key image to keep in mind is that of the “young lions”. A poster depicting Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand answering the summoning roar of the leader of the imperial pride, Great Britain. Alone, not one of the so-called “White Dominions” was strong enough to see off either Hitler or Hirohito. That is why they answered the call. The British Empire would face the “audit of war” as a unit: Albion’s “pride” would stand, or fall, together.

In the words of the New Zealand Prime Minister, Michael Joseph Savage, broadcast to the nation almost exactly 80 years ago: “Both with gratitude for the past and confidence in the future, we range ourselves without fear beside Britain. Where she goes, we go; where she stands, we stand.”

It was the same (minus the eloquence) with Uncle Sam. When he hollered, the Aussies and the Kiwis came a-runnin’. Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, Iraq: one way or another both countries made it their business to show up. The Australians were always more demonstrative of their love for Uncle Sam than the Kiwis. Even before the break with Washington in 1985, occasioned by New Zealand’s anti-nuclear policy, Wellington generally contrived to contribute only the very least it could get away with. Where Robert Menzies sent thousands of young Australian conscripts to South Vietnam, Keith Holyoake sent a few hundred volunteers – albeit with Howitzers.

White’s unnerving propositions posit a strategic situation in which not only does Uncle Sam cease to holler, but also – and much more alarmingly – ceases to come when called. He sees a new, multi-polar, world in which the principal nation-states have withdrawn behind their nuclear-fortified walls in watchful suspicion. A world frighteningly similar to that of the 1930s, in which a feeble and increasingly despised League of Nations simply ceased to matter. When leaders closed their mailed fists around the hilts of their swords and no longer bothered to pay even lip-service to the principles of international law.

This grim strategic position, so far from the “amazingly benign strategic environment” inherited by Helen Clark in the dying days of American hegemony, is made much worse by the USA’s ability to cast-off the ties that bind without significant cost. Great Britain depended on the food and raw materials of its far-flung dominions in a way that the USA, a vast continental power, does not. Abandoning the Western Pacific will not break the American economy, nor will it cause its people to starve. Indeed, the reverse may be true!

Which leaves us facing the one power which does evince an interest in what Australia and New Zealand have to offer – the Peoples Republic of China. White taxes his audience with questions about how far we Anzacs are prepared to go to preserve a modicum of freedom of action within the new imperium radiating from Beijing.

More importantly, how much are we willing to pay?

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 6 September 2019.

Climate Change Survivalism Is Not The Answer

The End Of Civilisation: Despairing of the major powers ever agreeing to take the steps necessary to slow global warming, The Daily Blog Editor, Martyn Bradbury, has drawn up what amounts to a survivalist agenda for New Zealand. Quite rightly, I believe, he regards these islands as being better positioned than just about anywhere else on the planet to weather the worst aspects of Climate Change. Our government, says Martyn, should act now to prepare us for the dark times to come.

FOR 700 YEARS the little fishing town of Lamu has lived sustainably. Empires have risen and fallen, and still the lateen-sailed dhows have ventured out upon the Indian Ocean and returned laden with fish. The town boasts a unique and distinctive architecture: so distinctive that UNESCO declared it a World Heritage Site. Surely, that would be enough to keep the people of this little town, situated on the northern coast of Kenya, safe from the depredations of the wider world?

Sadly, no. Not far from Lamu town, the Chinese are engaged in one of the biggest construction projects in Africa. They are dredging and polluting the pristine channels between the islands of the Lamu archipelago in preparation for building a massive sea-port. Why a seaport? So their huge coal-carriers have somewhere to unload their cargo. What will Kenya do with all that coal? Why, it will burn it in the huge coal-fired power-station the Chinese are building.

But, didn’t Kenya sign-up to the Paris Climate Accord? Isn’t it pledged to reduce its carbon emissions? Yes it is. Even worse, when the coal-fired plant is in operation, it will increase Kenya’s carbon emissions by a factor of 7. So, the town of Lamu, and its fishing fleet, will not be the only ones to suffer from the malign effects of China’s “Belt-and-Road” construction binge. We all will.

This is the madness that Martyn Bradbury, the editor of The Daily Blog, drew to our attention in his blog entitled “We Are 31 YearsAway From Civilisation Collapse Yet The Things We Argue And Debate Right Now Are So Petty.”

Despairing of the major powers ever agreeing to take the steps necessary to slow global warming, Martyn drew up what amounts to a survivalist agenda for New Zealand. Quite rightly, I believe, he regards these islands as being better positioned than just about anywhere else on the planet to weather the worst aspects of Climate Change. Our government, says Martyn, should act now to prepare us for the dark times to come.

Buried amid the many very sensible suggestions for making this country as self-sufficient as possible, I noticed one proposal that sent a chill down my spine. There must be, according to Martyn, a “large scale increase in Navy, Army & Airforce”. Clearly, like so many survivalists, Martyn anticipates the arrival of unwelcome visitors, and he is determined to be ready for them.

When the pitiful boatloads of climate refugees begin to appear off our coast, New Zealanders must possess the necessary military hardware to drive them from our shores. Even if they have nowhere else to go? Absolutely. New Zealand will be in the same position as a lifeboat which has reached its maximum occupancy. If any more survivors of the shipwreck attempt to climb aboard, then the lifeboat will capsize and sink, drowning everyone. To save those lucky enough to have found their place of safety, everyone else must be beaten back.

But what sort of people would we become if we were willing to countenance, day after day, the destruction of refugee vessels, and the inevitable drowning of hundreds, and, ultimately, tens-of-thousands, of desperate men, women and children? You might say that the worthy end (the survival of civilisation in these isolated islands) justifies the terrible means required to achieve it. I would say that the means we adopt to achieve our ends will inevitably determine those ends. A civilisation predicated on the murder of tens-of-thousands of desperate human-beings cannot be anything other than a horror story.

Besides, New Zealand does not possess the sort of military-industrial complex capable of supplying its government with the array of munitions required to send the fleets of climate refugees to the bottom of the sea. To acquire the warships, reconnaissance aircraft, fighter-bombers, long-range missiles and satellite guidance systems such a policy necessitates, we would have to enlist the aid of either the United States or China. Which would make New Zealand their ultimate bolt-hole – not ours.

They might consent to let us live on as their hewers of wood and drawers of water. We do, after all, have a global reputation as efficient producers of food. But, make no mistake, that is what we would be: the servants (or slaves?) of whoever ended up taking over New Zealand. The most trusted of us might be permitted to serve alongside the soldiers, sailors and airmen of the occupying power. And every now and then, the most prolific of these local butchers would be awarded a medal. The land of Shepherd, Rutherford and Hillary would have become the land of remorseless killers.

Personally, I’d rather New Zealand, generous and welcoming to the end, sank below the weight of those to whom we never failed to offer a helping hand.

To those who told him that, in the end, it was better to be Red than dead, the celebrated Russian novelist, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, always retorted: “No, better to be dead, than live as a scoundrel!”

I couldn’t agree more.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 7 June 2019.