Keep New Zealand Nuclear-Free – Stay Out of AUKUS!

Playing With The Big Boys' Toys: The US faces an array of enemies it is no longer certain it can beat – not without destroying itself at the same time. Equipping the Aussies with nuclear submarines (and other things) represents the moment in the Western movie when the grizzled old wagon-master reluctantly places a six-gun in the eager hands of a twelve-year-old. Ordinarily, he wouldn’t think of it, but there are “Injuns” out there, and the wagon train needs every gun it’s got.

THANK GOD New Zealand is not a member of the new “AUKUS” alliance. Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States have joined forces in a military pact that has only one purpose: the intimidation and restraint of China. The price of admission to this latest demonstration of Anglo-Saxon hegemony is a willingness to “go nuclear”. Not a problem for the US and the UK, both of which have possessed nuclear weapons and nuclear-powered vessels for decades. It is, however, a very big, and potentially disastrous, step for Australia, which once boasted a nuclear-free movement every bit as noisy (remember Midnight Oil?) as New Zealand’s.

Indeed, had the Australian Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, not been a highly valued CIA asset of long-standing, it is possible – even likely – that both Australia and New Zealand would have ended up declaring themselves “Nuclear Free”.

The consequences of such a double declaration would have been profound. Not to be outdone by these far-flung antipodeans, the Nordic countries may well have followed suit. In time, the whole of the Southern Hemisphere may have rejected the madness of “mutual and assured destruction”. Seeing Reds, the Americans would certainly have had several pink fits. Not enough, though, to prevent the world from taking a slightly different course.

An intriguing counterfactual history, to be sure. What actually happened, of course, is that the Americans, having failed to “secure” David Lange as they had secured Bob Hawke, were taken completely off guard when the New Zealand Labour Party followed the breadcrumbs of sanity out of the nuclear forest. Washington was mightily pissed-off, naturally, but hey – at least it wasn’t Australia!

Certainly, Australia has never wavered in its determination to be the United States “Deputy-Sheriff” in what is now called the “Indo-Pacific” region. Ever since Japanese bombers, in about the same time it took them to get their bomb-bays open, sank HMS Repulse and HMS Prince of Wales – and with them all the illusions of an overstretched British Empire – Canberra has tossed all its diplomatic and military chips into Washington’s pot. It does not intend to be caught out ever again as it was in December 1941. Henceforth, Australia would be right there in the room when the strategic decisions were being made – not 12,000 miles away. When your enemies are close, says Canberra, keep your friends closer.

The only alternative to taking up residence in Uncle Sam’s rectum, as far as the national security boffins and senior military brass were concerned, was for Australia to develop its own atomic bomb. Nuts? Maybe, but for a much longer period than one might have thought possible (1961-1973) the Australian right-wing governments of Robert Menzies and his successors were willing to give it a go. That they never quite managed to build an Aussie bomb was due largely to the refusal of the Brits and the Yanks to supply them with the wherewithal to do so. Anglo-Saxon imperialism may have been pretty crazy, but it wasn’t that crazy!

Fifty years on, and how things have changed. Washington is now willing to lease a dozen or more Los-Angeles-class nuclear-powered submarines to the Australian Navy. Why? Because, almost certainly, the secret protocols of the AUKUS Pact make it clear that, along with the nuclear-powered attack submarines, Australia will be given access to the “technology” it has always craved. Finally, Canberra will have what it takes to wipe the smirks off the faces of the Generals of the Peoples Liberation Army. Very soon America’s Deputy-Sheriff will be packing nuclear pistols.

If all this sounds like one of those paranoid Aussie television series, then it only goes to show that if you want to tell the truth – write fiction. AUKUS is proof positive that the Anglo-Saxon world has lost its nerve. It is the twenty-first century equivalent of circling the wagons against the Native Americans. The US faces an array of enemies it is no longer certain it can beat – not without destroying itself at the same time. Equipping the Aussies with nuclear submarines (and other things) represents the moment in the Western movie when the grizzled old wagon-master reluctantly places a six-gun in the eager hands of a twelve-year-old. Ordinarily, he wouldn’t think of it, but there are “Injuns” out there, and the wagon train needs every gun it’s got.

The New Zealand Government, its Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs especially, will happily stay as far away from this lunacy as possible – and the country’s anti-nuclear legislation gives them the perfect excuse. Moreover, with its paltry team of five million and its disturbing unwillingness to beat the war drum as enthusiastically as its much larger and more co-operative neighbour, New Zealand is dispensable. For the moment, Washington is perfectly happy to have the Kiwis cooling their heels outside the room where the big strategic decisions are being made.

All of New Zealand’s recent history, however, suggests that not being in the room is a situation which the New Zealand Defence Force will deem intolerable. It is also highly likely that a significant number of senior bureaucrats at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade will be equally disturbed by our “no show” at the AUKUS party. They will be worried that Beijing, observing these developments from afar, will see a gap just large enough to accommodate a big, fat Chinese diplomatic lever. The “Deep State” (the military, key players in the state bureaucracy, and the national security apparatus) is unlikely to tolerate New Zealand being separated from its “traditional allies” for too long.

New Zealand’s prime minister, and her nuclear-free team of five million, should fasten their seat-belts: the next few months look set to give them all a very bumpy ride. As if fighting Covid-19 wasn’t enough, Jacinda should prepare for her very own anti-nuclear moment.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 17 September 2021.

Empire Games: How Nicky Hager's Revelations Are Re-Shaping The Nationhood Debate.

The Anglo-Saxon Empire: As World War II ended the imperial baton passed from the United Kingdom to the United States. Bounding to Uncle Sam's side were the old empire's eager puppies - Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The current debate about the "Five Eyes" espionage network is in the process of morphing into a much broader debate about who New Zealanders are - and whom they should serve.

 

“I’M SENTIMENTAL – if you know what I mean – I love the country but I can’t stand the scene.” So sings Leonard Cohen in the final verse of his grand 1992 anthem “Democracy”. The country he’s singing about is, of course, the United States of America, and his conflicting feelings about the place are shared by millions of people around the world. There is a great deal to love about America and Americans, but there is, equally, a great deal that rest of the world, like Cohen, cannot stand.

 

The tragic human cost of US “diplomacy”. The vast powers wielded by what President Dwight Eisenhower dubbed the “military-industrial complex”. The evident inability of the “special interests” which now control the US Congress to any longer even recognise, let alone serve, America’s national interests. All of these political afflictions, combined, have created a “scene” to which no sane person (or nation) would pledge allegiance.

 

And yet that is exactly what the tight little political and journalistic clique clustering around John Key (like the doomed 300 at Thermopylae?) is demanding of New Zealanders. We are being told that, in spite of its manifest failings, the United States remains the last, best, hope of humanity, and that any person, or group, who dares to question the NZ-US relationship is guilty of something very close to treason.

 

Nicky Hager: Patriot.

 

The prime target of this latest thrust against the Key Government’s critics is Nicky Hager. No other journalist has so consistently – and accurately – mapped the moral fault-lines running through the NZ-US relationship. Whether it be the exposure of our own Government Communications Security Bureau’s unacknowledged participation in the US National Security Agency’s Echelon spy system in Secret Power (1996) or the NZ Defence Force’s unmandated determination to range itself alongside America in Other People’s Wars (2011) Hager’s investigative journalism has for the best part of 20 years undermined successive New Zealand governments’ attempts to remain a member in good standing of the Anglo-Saxon “club”.

 

It is worth taking a moment to consider what New Zealand, as a member of this 70-year-old club (the USA, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) has signed-up to.

 

Though these five states represent less than 7 percent of the world’s population, the USA and its four closest allies constitute the Earth’s most powerful military, economic and diplomatic combination. English-speaking, and still predominantly white, the Anglo-Saxon club holds the rest of humanity (overwhelmingly non-English-speaking and non-white) in its grip. The global reach of the so-called “Five Eyes” intelligence gathering apparatus is but one aspect of the Anglo-Saxons’ “full-spectrum dominance” of the planet and its peoples.

 

When we consider the extent to which these powers dominate the world’s key resources – especially oil, coal and iron-ore; when we add up the number of nations that, in one way or another, are beholden to them; when we recall that the US Dollar remains the world’s fiat currency; and when the five Anglo-Saxon nations’ ability to project decisive military resources to any point on the Earth’s surface is taken into account; are we not justified in discarding the word “club” and replacing it with the much more appropriate “empire”?

 

No one likes to hear it called that, of course. The world is supposed to have rid itself of empires in the years immediately following World War II. Ours is a democratic age, and as every good historian knows, imperialism and democracy don’t mix. And yet, the behaviour of the five Anglo-Saxon powers, in the 70 years since the end of World War II, is difficult to characterise as anything other than imperialistic. If the “club” looks like an empire, speaks like an empire, and acts like an empire, then, chances are, it’s an empire.

 

Anglo-Saxon Imperialism: If it looks like an empire, speaks like an empire, and acts like an empire, then, chances are, it’s an empire. (Magnum photo by Philip Jones Griffiths)

 

The Prime Minister’s media defenders condemn Hager as “anti-American” because he has been able to correlate directly the strength of New Zealand’s military and intelligence ties to the United States with New Zealand’s loss of diplomatic independence. This would be dangerous enough in itself, but Hager’s revelations also help to remind New Zealanders of those occasions when their leaders had the courage to stand apart from the American-led Anglo-Saxon Empire. That Hager was an active player in the events that led to New Zealand declaring itself nuclear-free in the mid-1980s only sharpens the Right’s determination to blacken his reputation.

 

Indeed, it is becoming increasingly clear that New Zealand’s most senior and effective right-wing journalists are engaged in an attempt to fundamentally re-shape New Zealanders’ perceptions of the anti-nuclear movement. Rather than an expression of our growing sense of nationhood, they intend to re-cast it as the unfortunate result of a left-wing conspiracy to extricate New Zealand from the “Western Alliance” (also known as the Anglo-Saxon Empire). According to this revised history of the past 30 years, Kiwis have been duped by leftist radicals like Hager (and Helen Clark?) whose ultimate objective is to thrust New Zealand naked and alone into an increasingly dangerous world.

 

And to whom should this duped and defenceless New Zealand turn for protection? Why, Uncle Sam, of course! Hager’s revelations have upped the ante of the national independence debate and, in Poker parlance, the Right has opted to “see him” and “raise him”. The debate about New Zealand’s involvement in the Five Eyes alliance is, accordingly, being broadened out to embrace the much more vital questions of who we are and whom we should serve. Will New Zealand continue striving to become an independent South Pacific nation, or will it opt to remain a far-flung, but intensely loyal, province of the Anglo-Saxon Empire?

 

For those who love this country, but can’t stand the political scene, the stakes have never been higher.

 

This essay was posted on The Daily Blog and Bowalley Road blogsites on Tuesday, 17 March 2015.

Surprise Moves

Insanity We Trust: Trace Hodgson's cartoon from the 1980s captures brilliantly our ANZUS "allies" gangster-like certainty that on matters of nuclear policy the USA and Australia were in a position to make New Zealand an offer it couldn't refuse. They were in for a big surprise.

WHAT A SURPRISE New Zealand’s anti-nuclear legislation must have been to the Americans. For decades the folks in Washington had (rightly) assumed that the “peace and disarmament” policies of the world’s Labour parties were merely the sort of promises left-wing politicians always made in opposition – and then abandoned in government.

 

The British Labour Party had once voted for unilateral nuclear disarmament. The Australian Labor Party used to favour a uranium export ban. In 1984 the New Zealand Labour Party was committed to a nuclear-free New Zealand. No worries. The diplomats at the State Department and the Joint Chiefs at the Pentagon remained calm and carried on. They knew that when push came to shove, such policies had a habit of changing.

 

The US Secretary of State, George Shultz, was introduced to New Zealand’s Prime Minister-elect, David Lange, as the rain poured down on the roof of a leaking hangar at Wellington Airport in July 1984. It was a brief (and soggy) encounter, but he came away convinced that this new Labour leader would work the same political magic as Bob Hawke across the Tasman. He would go before his party conference and make its embarrassing peace and disarmament remits disappear.

 

This time, however, the policy didn’t change. And the United States, lacking a “Plan B”, did what the United States always does when people and/or countries refuse to live down to its expectations and/or give in to its demands. It raged, it fumed, it retaliated and then it sulked – for more than twenty years.

 

And New Zealand’s anti-nuclear policy endured. Initially, the National Party promised to fulfil its historical role as Uncle Sam’s little helper and restore the status quo ante. It took the wise old head of National Party leader Jim Bolger to understand that putting things back the way they were wasn’t a winning political option. That the only correct answer to Labour’s nuclear-free New Zealand was: “Me too!”

 

The Nuclear-free New Zealand policy is, therefore, not only a lesson in moral leadership – but in leadership per se. It demonstrates that the need to constantly reposition one’s party’s policies in conformity with the prejudices of “centrist voters” is very far from being axiomatic. Centrist opinion in the New Zealand of the mid-1980s was very firmly in favour of remaining in the ANZUS alliance. Labour’s adoption of the nuclear-free New Zealand policy forced centrists to choose between what were, in effect, mutually exclusive options.

 

On this issue (but, alas, on very few others) centrist voters were forced to the Left. And, when they discovered that the sun still rose every morning in the east, and water still ran downhill, they stayed there.

 

The future of politics in New Zealand belongs to the political party which first draws the lessons from Labour’s adoption of – and persistence with – the Nuclear-free option.

 

Just as, by the mid-1980s, the Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD!) strategy of the Cold War had led humanity to the very brink of annihilation, so, too, are the macro and micro strategies of neoliberal economics leading the peoples of the western nations to the very edge of a  social abyss.

 

The first political party to devise a way back from the edge: to unmask neoliberalism as the most dangerous ideology to grip the Western mind since the equally totalitarian creeds of fascism and communism; will be able to write its own political cheques for the next quarter-century.

 

It could be Labour or National. (Both, to a greater or lesser extent, are neoliberal parties.)

 

Whichever it turns out to be, the first sign that things are moving in the right direction will be when one of them finally abandons the shibboleths of free trade and takes a stand for New Zealand’s economic sovereignty.

 

The second sign will be a bold diplomatic out-reach to the growing number of countries looking for a global trading system undistorted by the selfish, socially and environmentally destructive economic demands of the giant American corporations.

 

MFAT officials were in Singapore this week for the latest Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations. The Prime Minister has been visiting Mexico, Brazil, Colombia and Chile.

 

The TPP, as currently drafted, unfairly advantages American corporations. The countries the PM is visiting are anxious to confound the United States’ imperial expectations and demands.

 

We could help with that. After all, we’ve done it before.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 8 March 2013.

The Kiss Of Fealty

The Kiss Of Fealty: In return for their protection, we place ourselves in the thrall of those powerful enough to provide it. Their enemies become our enemies, and when they ask for "a service", or "make us an offer", we dare not refuse. No matter whether the powerful be kings, gangsters or nation states, the relationship is always the same.

 

NEW ZEALAND is a vassal state: always has been; probably always will be. We are a small and vulnerable country whose security remains the obligation of much stronger powers. For a quarter-century, while the rest of the world re-arranged itself after the Cold War, we have enjoyed the illusion of independence. Now, thanks to Kim Dotcom, the age of illusion is over.

 

“Nuclear-Free New Zealand” may have ruffled the feathers of the American eagle and turned the ANZUS Treaty into a dead letter, but it did not amputate the New Zealand pinky finger from the Anglo-Saxon fist. Our membership of the UKUSA Agreement linking the intelligence agencies of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand remained intact throughout.

 

The United States may have excluded the New Zealand Defence Force from its military and naval exercises and blanked our diplomats at Washington cocktail parties, but its National Security Agency (NSA) never shut down the continuous feed of signals intelligence (SIGINT) from our Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB).

 

Labour and National Governments may come and go, but “Echelon”, the NSA’s global SIGINT collection and analysis network, is forever – as are the GCSB’s electronic eavesdroppers at the Tangimoana and Waihopai “listening posts”.

 

It’s what vassals do: they pay their dues.

 

Medieval lords held their lands from the king and within the boundaries of those lands their word was law. In return, the king’s vassals were obliged to take the king’s part in all quarrels, pay his taxes and send men and supplies to fight in his wars. Those who served a medieval vassal needed two good eyes. One to watch over their lord’s needs and the other to look out for the interests of their king.

 

It did not suit the United States to make too much of their vassal state’s breach of fealty in the late-1980s. It’s anti-nuclear policy may have posed “the threat of a good example” (to use Noam Chomsky’s trenchant phrase) but for the makers of the Washington Consensus that threat was more than off-set by the Lange Government’s radical example of free-market economics. So long as New Zealand remained a part of the Echelon network, a few relatively gentle diplomatic slaps would suffice as punishment.

 

Had David Lange and his ministers got serious about severing New Zealand’s military and intelligence connections to the US, and attempted to pull the plug at Tangimoana and Waihopai, then the reaction of the Reagan Administration would have been very different – and much more painful.

 

The full force of American retribution was, however, avoided because the servants of the New Zealand state all had two good eyes. While Treasury kept Washington’s good-will by persuading the Lange government to implement the most radical structural adjustment programme ever attempted in the OECD, the New Zealand foreign affairs, defence and intelligence communities quietly reassured their American counterparts that a bi-partisan policy of incremental reconnection to the United States was the New Zealand (if not the Labour) government’s Number One priority.

                                                                                         

The king was thus reassured by his errant vassal’s own servants and men-at-arms that their lord’s lapse of loyalty was purely temporary and that his successors would doubtless prove considerably more obliging.

 

And so it has proved. The smiling face of Mr Leon Panetta, the US Secretary of Defence, and his good news about New Zealand’s warships’ re-admittance to America’s naval facilities, was startling vindication of our foreign affairs and defence establishment’s patient diplomacy. The king’s favour has been restored: the kiss of fealty given and received.

 

Fitting, too, that just days after receiving our liege lord’s blessing, New Zealand’s Prime Minister and his deputy were forced to reveal its price. Remembering always that a king’s enemies are his vassal’s enemies also. And Mr Dotcom is, without doubt, the United States’ enemy.

 

Those New Zealanders who were surprised and alarmed by the extreme light-handedness of the political oversight of our security and intelligence services are still trapped in the illusion of independence. Our political leaders learned long ago what lapses in loyalty can mean for a vassal state. Much better to leave these matters to the permanent guardians of our own – and our masters’ – interests.

 

How else to explain Bill English’s casual admission that, were he given it all to do again, he wouldn’t hesitate to re-order the suppression of all evidence relating to the activities of the GCSB. Why else would John Key refuse a comprehensive and transparent inquiry into the illegal surveillance of Mr Dotcom? And be backed in his refusal by a former Labour Prime Minister, Sir Geoffrey Palmer?

 

 “You can’t have an open inquiry like a commission of inquiry with evidence in public about that,” Sir Geoffrey told TV3’s The Nation, “because these agencies will cease to be any use if their secrecy is not preserved”.

 

Of use to whom?

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 2 October 2012.