Author     Robert Ayson

​A week ago New Zealand’s Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta and her Australian counterpart Marise Payne issued a joint statement citing “clear evidence of severe human rights abuses” in Xinjiang. The two Foreign Ministers also lent their support to the efforts of leading western partners: “New Zealand and Australia welcome the measures announced overnight by Canada, the European Union, the United Kingdom and the United States”, their statement continued.
 
But it did not take long for the penny to drop that there were limits to this solidarity. Wellington and Canberra were not joining in on travel bans and asset freezes on specified officials and on the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps Public Security Bureau. “Australia and New Zealand welcome sanctions over Uighur abuses,” one headline read, “but impose none of their own.”

Author    Nurreddin Abdurahman

On March 25 hundreds of Tigray people and their supporters marched through Wellington to demonstrate at Parliament. They called on New Zealand to condemn the atrocities being carried out in the name of the Ethiopian government in the northern province of Tigray.

Ethiopia, an East African country of over 100 million people, a federal state peopled by multiple religions and ethnicities, stands on the brink of catastrophe. Credible reports have reached human rights NGOs and the international media of a massacre of churchgoers at Dengelat in Tigray that took place last November, and further killings in the city of Axum, in the west of the province, at about the same time. These terrible events came in the midst of an undeclared war between the central government and regional Tigray forces. Despite international disquiet, the Ethiopian government and its leader Abiy Ahmed has until now sheltered behind the tired rubric of non-interference in a sovereign country’s affairs.
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What lies behind these events and how can further tragedies be averted?

Author    Marion Crawshaw

As the COVID numbers in PNG grow exponentially, Australia is scrambling to provide support. The support includes vaccines for frontline health workers, a large Medical Assistance Team (MAT), PPE, tents for isolation wards and a long list of other supplies.  From what we know so far, Australia will be working on the ground with the PNG response system, WHO and UNICEF.  New Zealand appears to be unaccountably absent from this picture of urgent support required for a Pacific neighbour in trouble.  
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The alarming growth of COVID in PNG is relatively new although it might have been predicted given the very low testing numbers.  The fact that recent cases are spread right across PNG’s provinces also raises suspicions that there has been unidentified spread in case numbers for a while.  The picture looks increasingly like that of Italy a year ago, when initially small numbers of cases grew exponentially and eventually overwhelmed the health system in much of northern Italy.

Author     Marion Crawshaw

The departure of the Micronesian states from the Pacific Forum will be a tragedy for the Pacific region. The Pacific’s visibility and effectiveness on the global stage will be reduced. While individual members will continue to have agency in their own right, the Forum draws members together and amplifies their common concerns. It has done this effectively with oceans issues, climate change and fisheries.  The Micronesian countries have been at the forefront of all these issues.  The Blue Pacific concept developed by the Forum explains the connections between Pacific Island nations and tells the story of the importance of the Pacific to the outside world.  The Biketawa Declaration provided the basis for cross regional mutual support in troubled times and the Boe Declaration has built on it, presenting broad concepts of security that have resonated well beyond the Pacific.  
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Like all multilateral organisations, the Forum is imperfect. If you go digging deep in the weeds of its work, you can lose the sense of the importance of the whole.  Yes, the meetings can be tedious but even in a zoom environment they provide opportunities to connect, maintain community and forge common understandings.  Expanding attendance, in both numbers and level, of Dialogue partners at the annual Pacific Forum meetings in the last ten years shows the increasing profile of the Pacific and the Forum, even if discussion is constant on how to make the meetings more meaningful.

Author   Robert Ayson

You won’t find it on her twitter feed alongside messages of welcome to Anthony Blinken, the newly confirmed US Secretary of State. You won’t find it on the Beehive site somewhere near the Foreign Minister’s statement on the Myanmar coup.  Nor will you locate it on the website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. But at the end of last week Nanaia Mahuta gave a television interview in Australia which could be the best guide yet to how she is approaching the central question for New Zealand’s foreign policy – dealing with the rise of China.
 
The brief but significant exchange on this thorny question may have been overlooked by media on the eastern side of Tasman: the interview began with yet another discussion of New Zealand’s approach to covid-19. But Mahuta’s main role that evening was to set out the Ardern government’s position on a very different problem: Trade Minister Damien O’Connor’s all-too newsworthy assertion that Australia could improve its relationship with China by following New Zealand’s example and showing some more respect to Beijing. Mahuta’s response (at around the 5 minute mark) was unequivocal: “in terms of the China-Australia relationship,” she told the ABC interviewer, “that is not really something we can or should comment on. That is a matter for Australia and China to work through.” Mr O’Connor, that’s your bus coming, isn’t it?

Author     Robert Ayson

There are good reasons why we are hearing a lot about American democracy as the Biden Administration takes office. If anyone needed reminding of the strain that four years of Donald Trump’s presidency had placed on the institutions underpinning America’s democracy, the 6 January siege of the US Capitol building illuminated the problem with terrifying starkness.
 
Two weeks later, in the poem that stole the inauguration show, Amanda Gorman insisted that “while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated.” In his inaugural address Biden sought to rededicate the United States to its constitutional principles: “Today”, he intoned, “we celebrate the triumph not of a candidate, but of a cause, the cause of democracy.”
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Author      Ford Hart

Joe Biden’s election will not change the fundamentals of U.S.-China relations, which, for all the drama of the last four years, pre-date the Trump Administration.  President Biden is likely to return to earlier presidents’ practice of more carefully regulating this vital strategic relationship and the complex trade-offs it features. The restoration of a more effective, conventional policy process in Washington should improve the tone of the relationship, but major differences will remain. With fewer distractions from The White House, the increasing challenges of a more assertive, authoritarian China should become more apparent. 
 
President Trump has represented himself as the first American president to confront challenges presented by China. This is simply not true. Indeed, the reality is that the U.S.-China relationship was always contentious.  Given sharply differing PRC values and goals, powerful American constituencies had reservations about China from Nixon’s visit on, and it fell to successive presidents to balance these voices against strategic interests.  Far from overlooking difficulties in the China relationship in the vain hope of Chinese democratization, as Mr. Trump has alleged, previous U.S. administrations grappled with knotty concerns ranging from intellectual property theft to the threat of war. Even a cursory review of the low points in U.S.-China relations — e.g., Tiananmen Square, the Taiwan Missile Crisis, the bombing of China’s Belgrade Embassy, the EP-3 incident — illuminates recurring tensions.  

Author    Robert Ayson

​As the election night excitement quickly wears off, Jacinda Ardern has work to do.  There is a refreshed cabinet to select from a much larger range of MPs.  There are talks to be had with James Shaw about the role that the Greens might play. And the big challenges have not disappeared. Each new case of the virus, however well managed, is a fresh reminder that the international pandemic is still with us. And before long, there will be renewed attention to the government’s plan to get New Zealand’s economy humming without adding to an already strenuous covid-era debt burden.
 
But the Prime Minister’s thoughts must occasionally turn to the US federal election on 3 November. Ardern and her colleagues, like so many New Zealanders, will be waiting and hoping for Joe Biden to defeat Donald Trump. But New Zealand hasn’t been waiting for Joe since the Democratic Party made Biden its nominee. We’ve been doing that for the best part of four years.

Author    Robert Ayson

​The truism that there aren't many votes in foreign or defence policy seems spot on for New Zealand’s 2020 general election. Less than a month from the October 17 polling day, there are few external policy musings on offer from the three largest parties in the current parliament. On New Zealand’s foreign and defence relations with the rest of the world, Spinoff’s Policy tracker is nearly empty.
 
The party websites bear out these gaps. If Labour is expecting to romp home under Ardern, there is little sign that foreign policy is part of the winning recipe.  A few general points about climate change and free trade agreements can’t compete with the emphasis on the international dimensions of the government’s covid response. National’s online pickings are even slimmer. The main policy page almost suggests the world isn’t out there, and even by a process of elimination your writer could not discover anything on defence and foreign policy.

Author    David Capie

​This week sees the end of Shinzo Abe’s remarkable second term as Prime Minister of Japan. When he resigned in 2007 after a scandal-plagued year as PM, few would have imagined that he would return to power five years later and go on to be Japan’s longest serving prime minister and one of the region’s leading statesmen.
 
Abe’s international legacy will be to have steered Japan through turbulent times in the region, navigating between what Michael Fullilove has called ‘a feckless America and a reckless China’. From the outset, Abe was clear in his ambitions. He told a Washington audience in 2013 “I am back and so shall Japan be.” Abe wanted to fashion a Japan that could lead and be a ‘rule maker’ as well as a ‘rule taker’. He wanted to prove that reports of Japan’s demise were exaggerated and that it ‘is not and never will be a tier-two country’. While he didn’t achieve all his goals, Abe’s leadership marked the return of a more confident Japan, a respected leader in regional diplomacy.