In the last few days, plenty of people have mocked the Prime Minister for his apparent inability to answer simple questions about New Zealand’s attitude to the attacks on Iran by two countries with which we have a very friendly relationship, the United States and Israel. 

By chance, I heard him struggle with the simple question which Corin Dann put to him on RNZ on Monday morning this week.  I found myself feeling sorry for him because the current situation highlights the dilemma we face in foreign policy.

On the one hand, we strongly dislike the Iranian regime – it is a ruthless theocracy which supports groups dedicated to the destruction of Israel throughout the Middle East.  Most New Zealanders, even those who believe that the current Government of Israel is behaving in inexcusable ways with regard to the West Bank and Gaza, strongly support the right of Israel to exist.

In addition, the New Zealand Government is understandably reluctant to offend President Trump, who repeatedly demonstrates that he has no tolerance for any country which even hints that they don’t agree with his attack on Iran: witness his statement that he will embargo US trade with Spain after the Spanish Prime Minister expressed his disagreement with the attack on Iran by denying American military aircraft access to Spanish facilities.

On the other hand, the Government is presumably reluctant to give full-throated support for the American action, which is in clear breach of most concepts of international law.  While Iran has long pledged to destroy Israel, there was not the slightest evidence that Iran was about to attack the US, as Trump has contended.  Moreover, according to the Omani official who convened the negotiations designed to find an acceptable formula for controlling Iran’s access to nuclear weapons, agreement on such a formula was imminent.  Notwithstanding this, the US, no doubt goaded by Israel, launched an aggressive attack on Iran while negotiations were still in train.  (It’s hard not to recall the anger which the US itself felt when Japan attacked Pearl Harbour in 1941 while negotiations between the two countries were ongoing in Washington.)

More generally, the current situation forces a more general assessment of how closely we want to be associated with the United States, at least while Trump is president.

Since he came to office just over a year ago, Trump has shown a total disregard for international law – he’s snatched the President of Venezuela and his wife from their bed and announced that the US owns Venezuela’s oil; he has prevented any oil reaching Cuba, with disastrous humanitarian consequences; he has demanded that the government of Panama abrogate long-standing commercial arrangements with a Hong Kong-based company to run the Panama Canal; he has demanded that Denmark hand over Greenland to the US, despite the US already having a contractual right to put as many American bases in Greenland as it wants; he has bombed “anti-Christian terrorists” in Nigeria; he has put pressure on the president of Ukraine to accommodate the demands of Russia’s Putin; and in his National Security Strategy he has made it abundantly clear that, like President Monroe two centuries earlier, he will not tolerate any other Great Power securing any kind of foothold in the Western Hemisphere.   (And of course he, like his predecessors, is totally opposed to China taking a similar attitude to its immediate neighbourhood.)

And of course he has also imposed tariffs on imports to the United States from almost every country in the world, including a 15% tariff on New Zealand’s exports to the US.  With friends like this, who needs enemies?

So what is our alternative?  On previous occasions I have argued that New Zealand should emulate the Singaporean foreign policy, maintaining a cordial relationship with the United States but not in a formal alliance with the United States and maintaining a cordial relationship with China also.

China clearly wants to reunite Taiwan with the mainland and all of us must hope that that can be achieved peacefully.  But nothing we could do militarily would affect the outcome of whatever means of reunification are pursued.  And if the US and China were to come to blows over Taiwan, the Taiwanese themselves might end up wishing that a peaceful reunification could have been achieved.

This move to an explicitly non-aligned position may be difficult for the Prime Minister to contemplate, particularly given the strongly pro-America inclination of his Foreign Affairs Minister.   But it is the only logical position for us to adopt. 

Being allied to the US should in principle give us trade advantages with the US (though these are not at all obvious at the moment despite our sharing intelligence with the US through the Five Eyes arrangement and sending military personnel to exercise with US forces) but potentially much greater trade disadvantages by alienating our largest export market.  Our previously cordial relationship with China is, according to a New Zealander closely aware of political sentiment in China, already “hanging by a thread” given our apparent indifference to that relationship, and our overt attempts to curry favour with the US at the cost of offending China (like the idiocy of sailing our naval ships through the Taiwan Strait).

There are obviously risks in adopting a genuinely independent foreign policy where we would make it clear to countries which have come to assume we would always be willing to send forces to the battles they choose to engage in that we would sit out those wars.  Trump could well double the tariffs on our exports to the US.  On the other hand, we would avoid involvement in wars which are of no fundamental interest to New Zealand and in particular in a war with our largest trading partner.

Having a meaningfully independent foreign policy would also save us considerable spending on armed forces, not because we now live in a benign strategic environment – clearly we don’t – but rather because if we had an independent foreign policy it is hard to see why we would need large military forces.  No plausible spending on our armed forces would enable us to win a war with any major Power, and neither Fiji nor Australia are about to attack us – which is why Bob Jones’s New Zealand Party argued in 1984 that we should spend nothing on our armed forces.  

But might China attack us if were not allied to a great Power like the US?  I’ve heard some New Zealanders argue that that would happen so that “China can get its hands on our natural resources”.  But China can already “get its hand on our natural resources”.  Since 2008, we’ve had a very good free trade agreement with China under which both countries gain greatly – China gets access to our natural resources and we get access to the huge range of manufactured goods that China makes.  Unless we were to ally ourselves with the US militarily, China would have no reason to attack us. 

Yes, I sympathise with the Prime Minister but in my view he would win respect at home and abroad – if not in the White House – if he made a clear statement that the US attack on Iran is totally contrary to international law and the principles of the United Nations.