Author    Charles Finny

​Last week I attended an excellent symposium at Victoria University of Wellington on the likely relationship between Donald Trump’s United States and Xi Jinping’s China and what evolving Sino-US ties might mean for the wider region, including Australia and New Zealand.
 
The keynote speaker was the former head of the Singaporean Foreign Service, Ambassador Bilahari Kausikan. His comments were most contentious on the US-China-DPRK issue.

In summary, Ambassador Kausikan said that China can’t put sufficient pressure on North Korea to stop its nuclear and missile programmes as this will cause the regime to collapse and this will in turn put the focus on China’s own regime.  The US can’t attack the DPRK militarily as the consequences for South Korea and Japan would be devastating (including potentially millions dead).  He also doubted that attempts to negotiate a peace treaty with the DPRK would be successful.

Author       Terence Wood

Murray McCully's time as New Zealand's foreign minister is at an end. On 1 May he'll be replaced by Gerry Brownlee. It's hard to know what Mr. Brownlee will mean for New Zealand's approach to foreign aid, but it's easy to assess Mr. McCully's legacy. He brought change, and he claims to have brought development when before there was only pseudo-expertise and waste. But the changes he made were either unneeded or harmful, and the development achievements he claims either haven't occurred or can't be attributed to him.
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McCully will be remembered for reintegrating New Zealand's semi-autonomous aid agency into the foreign ministry for no good reason. But the smaller injuries he inflicted on New Zealand aid were every bit as important. He took a well-functioning humanitarian emergency fund for NGOs and replaced it with one that was only able to get money out the door when stories of its dysfunction made it into the media. He killed off a similarly efficient fund for non-emergency NGO work. McCully's botched humanitarian emergency fund was eventually repaired. But, as the latest OECD review pointed out, New Zealand still wants for an effective general NGO funding tool.

Author     Robert Ayson

​We don’t have a lot to go on to evaluate New Zealand’s response so far to the heightened state of tension between North Korea and the United States. Pretty much the only direct evidence comes from the first two minutes of a radio interview given by Bill English earlier this week.
 
But the Prime Minister said enough for us to detect an approach that seems consistent with New Zealand’s existing line on North Korea’s troubling nuclear program. Perhaps the most obvious and important of these is that New Zealand would like to see this problem dealt with peacefully through diplomatic channels and in accordance with United Nations resolutions. A second is that North Korea is violating its international legal obligations, a point that echoes Foreign Minister McCully’s condemnation last month of North Korean missile testing. A third is that New Zealand welcomes signs of US-China collaboration, including indications that China is willing to increase economic pressure on North Korea. 

Author    Robert Ayson

Donald Trump’s Presidency began with a foreign policy decision forged in the furnace of America’s domestic politics. The abandonment of the Trans-Pacific Partnership certainly has had implications for New Zealand. But it would have been unwise at the time, and is even less wise now, to conclude from this single step that all the new Administration’s external policy preferences would be reversals of what we had come to expect from Washington.
 
Yet there were reasons to wonder if at least some of the established settings would change as Trump arrived at the White House. The President-elect seemed to be angling for a change to Washington’s longstanding one China policy. But that has proven to be little more than a transitory thought. Rex Tillerson’s recent China visit is instructive here. We don’t know how robust things got in private discussions, but the Secretary of State’s language (using formulations we have come to expect from Beijing rather than Washington) cannot have been more welcome to Xi Jinping.

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Author     Peter Greener

​Over the weekend of 25-26 February 2017, tens of thousands were thrilled by flying displays hosted at RNZAF Base Ohakea on the eightieth anniversary of the founding of the Royal New Zealand Air Force. The RNZAF opened the Air Tattoo with a 'Thunder formation' led by a Boeing B757, with two Lockheed Martin Hercules C-130 LEPs and a Lockheed Martin P-3K2 Orion. They looked impressive as they flew overhead and remain very capable aircraft. But with the oldest of these aircraft now 52 years old, all three types are due to be replaced by about 2026. The importance of making the right decision cannot be overstated. 
 
Last June’s Defence White Paper 2016 contained little information about specific future capability purchases, and there was hope that this would be rectified with the release of the subsequent Defence Capability Plan in November. But notwithstanding the DCP’s claim that it was 'significantly more detailed than previous versions', details remain elusive. Whilst defining capability requirements is central to decision making, the public remain interested in the actual platforms, the aircraft, that might help fulfil those requirements. So what replacements are we likely to see?

Author     B K Greener

​In the last few weeks two major incidents have highlighted an ongoing dilemma. On November 4 the government announced the NZDF would, as had been forecast a few months earlier, start training the Iraqi Federal Police. An extension of the Building Partner Capacity Programme, this declaration was met with little public comment. More recently, a range of national and international military assets have been used to respond to the November 14 earthquakes that rocked New Zealand and caused devastation in and around Kaikoura. This time the public response has been overwhelmingly positive. However, these two incidents underscore an over reliance on utilising the military to respond to a range of issues. We need to have a conversation about this.
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Let’s start with police training. In Iraq, Bob Perito pointed out in 2006, that “the U.S. military’s takeover of indigenous police training was unprecedented”. In previous operations this responsibility had fallen to the Departments of State and Justice. In Iraq (and Afghanistan), however, it was decided that only the  U.S. military had the resources required to pursue the intended police training programme. In both countries heavily militarised police forces emerged; forces whose main focus was counter-insurgency. What happened as a result of this almost exclusive focus on counter-insurgency was not only a very high level of risk to those police officers, who were seen as softer targets than military personnel, but also a lack of emphasis on the skills and ethos actually needed to carry out civilian policing tasks. Significant abuses of power resulted and contributed to the conflict that continues on in both countries today.

Author    Robert Ayson

​Donald Trump’s astonishing election victory has provided a surreal context for John Kerry’s current visit to New Zealand. The Key government can promote the need for real Security Council action on Syria all it wants. And Mr Kerry can concur all he likes. But everyone is aware of the bigger picture. The 45th President is not going to be Hillary Clinton, who in 2010 became the first Obama Administration Secretary of State to visit New Zealand. And so Mr Kerry, who has just become the second, cannot offer a golden thread of American foreign policy consistency running from the present to the future. Instead his visit may be one of the last chances for normal conversations before the Trump team charge through the White House gates.
 
Just how many of Trump’s alarming foreign policy sentiments are converted into action will only be clear after January’s inauguration. But it would be foolish to think that his administration’s approach will be so toned down from campaign trail rhetoric that no one will really notice the difference from the Obama era. 

Authors    Nureddin Abdurahman and Malcolm McKinnon

Through the early part of the 2010s the New Zealand government carried out a sustained campaign for one of the elected (non-permanent) places on the United Nations Security Council, representing the ‘Western Europe and others’ group of member states. Despite having more limited resources and influence than the two other candidates, Spain and Turkey, New Zealand’s campaign was successful and it was elected in October 2014, along with Spain; Turkey missed out.
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In the course of that campaign, New Zealand diplomats and government representatives criss-crossed Africa – 54 votes in the United Nations General Assembly out of 193 – to seek support for the candidacy. New Zealand opened a mission in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, accredited to both the African Union and to Ethiopia itself. New Zealand did not blitz African with an open cheque book but it promised a variety of types of social and economic assistance – agricultural expertise, language training for officials, and educational scholarships amongst them. 

Author  Stuart McMillan

A shift in Japan’s defence posture has been noted with approval in New Zealand. The Key Government’s 2016 Defence White Paper observed:
 
Japan is an important defence partner for New Zealand, with common democratic values and a shared commitment to maintaining regional peace and security. New Zealand welcomes Japan’s recent moves to make a more proactive contribution to international security (para 3.68, p34).
 
Indications of what this partnership may involve could emerge from upcoming high levels visits to Japan. In turn, Japan is planning to send an aircraft and a ship for the Royal NZ Navy fleet review this November. It will also surely want to market its Kawasaki aircraft as possible replacements for New Zealand’s long-serving Hercules and Orion planes. 
 
Any resulting intensification in New Zealand’s defence relationship with Japan will be occurring at a time of significant change in Tokyo’s outlook. 

Author:   Robert Ayson

Few observers would take issue with New Zealand’s latest criticisms of the international community’s failure to stem Syria’s civil conflict. Chairing a special meeting of the Security Council in New York, John Key has just been laying into that august assembly:

‘After more than five years of violence, Syria has become a byword for failure. Failure of the parties and their supporters to put peace, and the lives of innocent people ahead of self-interest and zero-sum politics. Failure to respond to the crisis early to prevent this tragedy. And a collective political failure, including by this Council, to do what must be done to end the conflict.’

This argument should come as no surprise. In the first instance, the Council’s membership has hardly been united in an urgent determination to quell the humanitarian suffering in Syria or to help resolve the conflict that is causing it. Secondly, Mr Key’s words are reminiscent of one of the arguments that New Zealand used in its quest to get onto the Council in the first place. Speaking at the UN in September 2014, Foreign Minister McCully argued that:

'In Syria and Iraq we see the truly frightening consequences when leadership, both internally and in the Security Council, has failed.'
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From Wellington’s view, not much has changed in the lasy two years, a period that has coincided with New Zealand’s membership. It has been there, of course, with the limited time frame and limited leverage that all temporary members have to work with. And it is fair to say that Wellington attributes much of the blame to the permanent five whose veto power Mr McCully referred to last year as ‘the single largest cause of the UN Security Council being rendered impotent in the face of too many serious international conflicts’.