}

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

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.

6 comments:

Evil European said...

The New Zealand government has better be careful. You only have to look at the situation of the UK, with Blair pimping the UK out to Bush, seeking to 'influence' the Bush regime and ended up having the whole country taken for a ride.
It is increasingly hard for the US governments to treat other countires as equals and as friends.
'Your either we us or against us' :(

Arthur Schenck said...

I completely agree, EE. Even "free trade" deals are stacked in America's favour. When the US Congress was considering the "free trade" deal with Australia, one congressperson described it as "the most pro-US trade deal ever presented to Congress". Personally, I don't think that there's any virtue in pursuing "friendship" at any cost.

Jessica said...

Hi Arthur - I'm not sure how far fetched the free trade agreement is after reading today's opinion piece on Scoop (http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0703/S00248.htm) where Buchanan points out that Uraguay suddenly recieved an unasked for agreement. Though perhaps that's because of Bush's recent tour of Latin America and immigration politics.

Of course, as you said, "free trade" is stacked in America's favor anyway, and I doubt NZ will bend over backwards for it.

Arthur Schenck said...

Thanks for the Scoop link, Jessica! I think Paul makes some good points about things from the US point of view, and I like the way he said that New Zealand shouldn't go to teh meeting as a supplicant. BTW, did you know that Paul is an expat American, too?

Jessica said...

I didn't know that! Lots of us, aren' there!

Arthur Schenck said...

There apparently are many Americans here (reading the statistics), but in nearly 12 years in New Zealand I've only briefly encountered other Americans, usually people working in stores. I've met several Canadians, though. I think we're just not like other ethnic groups, like South Africans, for example. They have a community here on the North Shore. It almost seems Americans in NZ want to stay away from each other, which frankly baffles me.