NZ and US friends again?

An article in today’s Dominion Post says that relations between New Zealand and the US are warming. Apparently, this is a good thing.

Relations between the countries have been cool since the mid-1980s when New Zealand passed legislation making New Zealand nuclear-free. After that, the US unilaterally ended its defence commitments to New Zealand, effectively ending the Cold War-era ANZUS alliance between Australia, New Zealand and the US.

Right before the 1984 NZ elections, the NZ Labour Party wanted a nuclear ban and many in the party also wanted an end to the ANZUS alliance. Although Labour Party Leader David Lange had long opposed nuclear weapons, he supported the ANZUS alliance. He believed that the issue of nuclear propelled ships was different from nuclear-armed ships.

This mattered because the US considered visits by its ships to be among the most important demonstrations of alliance. Their policy then as now was to neither confirm nor deny the presence of nuclear weapons on any ship. Therein lay the problem.

For more than twenty years, neo-cons in Wellington and Washington have promoted the notion that Lange indicated he would allow a visit by the USS Buchanan, despite America’s “neither confirm nor deny” policy. They go on to suggest that Lange buckled to pressure from within the Labour Party and refused to allow the ship to visit.

However, Lange stated repeatedly in his autobiography, My Life, that this wasn’t true.

In a startling act of myopic petulance, the US retaliated by barring New Zealand from participating in any military training exercises with the US. Australia trained with both countries, but separately.

September 11, 2001 changed everything.

New Zealand joined the international coalition invading Afghanistan, and became part of the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), in which nations agree to intercept ships believed to be carrying weapons of mass destruction or materials for making them. New Zealand’s participation in the PSI has led the US three different times to allow New Zealand to participate in military exercises with the US, despite the ordinary ban.

America has also seen the threat posed by instability in the Pacific, a region where New Zealand has influence and is an important power, often in cooperation with Australia.

New Zealand’s participation in Afghanistan and in the PSI and its work in the Pacific has led America to view New Zealand with new eyes, ones not so clouded by more than two decades worth of paranoia by administrations of both parties.

The New Zealand government recently announced that it will keep troops in Afghanistan through September 2008. It will cost NZ$30 million. The government will also be sending a frigate to the Gulf as part of the international task force intercepting ships there. This announcement came just as Prime Minister Helen Clark is due to leave for a trip to Washington where she’ll have a meeting with George Bush.

It’s good to have friendly relations with the world’s most powerful country. However, what does New Zealand get out of a closer relationship with the US? The traditional answer has been a “free trade” deal, but that seems unlikely for the rest of Bush’s term (whether it’s even desirable is another matter altogether). At the moment, the NZ government is apparently asking for regular bi-lateral briefings.

Still, it’s probably better to be seen as a friend than not. It would be nice, though, if the US was better able to see the countries that are its friends, even when it doesn’t act like they are.