DON BRASH: INDEPENDENT FOREIGN POLICY? GONE BY LUNCH-TIME

Christopher Luxon has sold us down the river.  In a speech to the Lowy Institute in Sydney last week, he mocked the whole idea of an independent foreign policy, and made it abundantly clear that we have no alternative than to tie our fortunes to the United States.  And in so doing, make an enemy of our largest trading partner.  He displays his ignorance of history.

Perhaps this was inevitable given that most of those in our Ministry of Foreign Affairs are besotted with the Washington relationship.  Perhaps too it was inevitable because Australia has tied itself to Washington, and Australia has long been our closest ally.  And because of his lack of any historical perspective, he is easily manipulated by those whose careers have been built around our relationship with Washington.

But it’s a disastrous mistake.  In the short-term, it carries a serious risk of jeopardizing our relationship with China, by a country mile our largest trading partner.  And in the longer term, it carries a serious risk of involving us in a war which nobody would win in any meaningful sense.

He talked several times about the need to uphold the rules-based system and lamented its gradual breakdown, and referred in particular to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as if that invasion was a totally unprovoked attack which came out of the blue – and was not Russia’s predictable reaction to the prospect of having NATO on its border (following broad hints that Ukraine would eventually be invited to join NATO as early as 2008).   Those who are a decade or two older than Mr Luxon will recall that the US itself was prepared to risk World War III rather than tolerate Soviet missiles in Cuba.

The “rules-based system” suited New Zealand pretty well but it was of course a system where the US made the rules and complied with them when it suited the US.   The World Trade Organisation was very much an American creation but when it suited US domestic politics, the US effectively destroyed it by refusing to nominate the “arbitrators” who are essential to its functioning.  And the rules-based system didn’t stop American involvement in Vietnam, or invasion of either Iraq or Afghanistan.  Anybody who doubts that the US itself obeys the “rules” very selectively should read The Arrogance of Power, by Senator William Fulbright, still the longest-serving chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Anybody who wants a good understanding of the current situation should read Destined for War: Can America and China escape Thucydides’ Trap? by Harvard University History professor Graham Allison.  Though published in 2017, it seems astonishingly prophetic.  “Thucydides’ trap” refers to the frequency with which war breaks out when a dominant Power is challenged by a rising Power.  Allison looked back over the last 500 years and found 16 cases where a dominant Power was challenged by a rising Power – and war was the result in 12 of those cases.

The US has been the dominant Power in the Western Hemisphere since the time President Monroe propounded what has become known as the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, when the US asserted its authority over the entirety of North and South America, warning European Powers to stay out.  And in the 20th century, the US gradually became the dominant Power throughout the world, effectively unchallenged after the collapse of the Soviet Union – until the rise of China.

It is pretty clear that the rise of China is seen as an existential threat by many in Washington, and the US has in recent years been adopting a range of measures to try to slow that rise – in particular by denying it access to the latest technology and imposing high tariffs on many Chinese imports.

Using what economists call a purchasing power parity exchange rate, the Chinese economy is already larger than the US economy and, since China’s population is some four times that of the US, it seems almost inevitable that China’s economy will be very much larger than the American within a few years.  China is already the largest trading partner of most countries in the world, including New Zealand of course.  As Hugh White, Professor of Strategic Studies at the Australian National University, said in Wellington earlier this month, we are witnessing the largest shift in relative power in the world since European settlement began in Australia and New Zealand.

By linking us to AUKUS, Christopher Luxon has placed a target on our chest.  Absent an alliance with the US, China has absolutely no reason to attack New Zealand: it can get everything it needs from New Zealand as it does now, by trade, to our mutual advantage.

Perhaps we should form an alliance with the US out of a sense of responsibility to the US – after all, the US-led world has suited us pretty well (though we’ve never managed to get a free trade treaty with the US). 

There might perhaps be some logic in that if it were obvious that China poses a military threat to the US, but there is absolutely no reason to believe that China poses such a threat.  For reasons which are not hard to understand, China resents having US military ships and aircraft cruising up and down the Chinese coast, with US bases in Korea, Japan, Guam, the Philippines, Papua-New Guinea and Australia.  If that is difficult to understand, imagine how the US would react were Chinese bases in Canada and Mexico.

Historically, China has sought to protect is own territory (not very effectively in the 19th and 20th centuries) but has never tried to build the kind of international empire which the European Powers and the US (in a different way) did.

Alas, signing up to any kind of alliance which is directly and explicitly aimed at our largest trading partner is a mistake of existential proportions.

Don Brash

18 August 2024