New Zealand foreign policy: From ‘independence’ to ‘realism’?
New Zealand Foreign Policy: From ‘Independence’ to ‘Realism’?
WRITTEN BY DR LUCAS KNOTTER
9 September 2024
Aotearoa New Zealand’s foreign policy has – for decades now – been characterised by its geographical and cultural position in the South Pacific, traditional security and political ties to the United States and other Western allies, and trade relations with China. In these circumstances, New Zealand foreign policy-makers and pundits, almost without exception, tend to refer to NZ’s supposedly ‘independent’ foreign policy’, which is often translated as a talent for balancing its interests with American and Chinese hegemony in the (Indo-)Pacific.
Recently, however, commentators (and former prime ministers) have begun to postulate that NZ might be going through a “radical change” or a “hard reset”, as its (relatively) new government is seen to be moving further from a more conciliatory stance towards China. This is somewhat surprising, as commentators wondered whether new Prime Minister Luxon would precisely be more accommodating to China. At the same time, it is questionable whether this amounts to a stark change altogether. At most, the actual character of NZ’s foreign policy ‘independence’ requires deeper (re)consideration.
Foreign policy changes
The first tentatively ‘new’ direction in Aotearoa’s foreign policy is that it “has grand plans to step up engagement with Southeast Asia”. Foreign Minister Winston Peters underlined this in a speech at the Pacific Islands Leaders Meeting, while Trade Minister Todd McClay affirmed that “New Zealanders intrinsically understand” the opportunities that Asia presents. Peters and Luxon have frequented nations and summits about the region over the last months, discussing economic affairs and security agreements with players like the Philippines, Singapore, India, and Japan. Again, these are not necessarily sharp changes from previous conduct — in terms of trade and defence relations, ASEAN nations and New Zealand go back far — but it is notable that a recent foreign ministry briefing document has called for the prioritising of relationships with such nations and labelled this a “reset”. This effort to diversify Aotearoa’s foreign relations has been applauded as a way to enhance its “resilience” in an increasingly complex world.
NZ’s supposedly ‘new’ foreign policy is thus neither truly independent, nor truly realist, nor prompted to safeguard Aotearoa’s public interest.
More importantly, Luxon met with US President Biden last July and attended a NATO Summit in Washington DC, where NATO and its Indo-Pacific partners (IP4) — Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand — agreed to four joint cooperative security projects. This agreement comes off the back of Trade Ministry figures showing that the US is now New Zealand’s fastest-growing and second-largest major trade market (below China but above Australia and Japan). Familiarly, NZ-NATO ties are not ‘new’ — previous NZ prime ministers attended NATO meetings too, and the US has provided primary security guarantees and liberal partnerships for Aotearoa for decades. Reconfirming these relationships is thus hardly revolutionary. Still, whereas previous governments prevaricated over formalising ‘Individually Tailored Partnership Programmes’ (ITPPS) with NATO, government leaders are now much more forthright in getting it done. Supposedly, “this marks new territory for New Zealand, and something of a turnaround”. With NATO’s strengthening attempts to build up defence capability in the Pacific Region, New Zealand now finds itself being asked to become a more active partner. For NZ, attending NATO meetings “is likely to become more frequent, not less”.
Wrapped up in this are New Zealand’s ongoing deliberations over whether to join AUKUS (Pillar II) — the defence agreement between Australia, the US, and the UK. Given New Zealand’s anti-nuclear foreign policy tradition, such a move may seem surprising, and establishment foreign policy figures voiced explicit disagreement with the prospect. Former Prime Minister Helen Clark claimed it formed “a move away from her country's long-held independent foreign policy”, while Robert Patman found that “New Zealand involvement in pillar two of AUKUS would represent a seismic shift in the country’s geopolitical stance”. Yet, despite Australian commentators now themselves questioning the merits of the AUKUS deal, and the Aotearoa government's denial of official commitment to Pillar II, there seems to be genuine enthusiasm for it. In April, Peters and US Secretary of State Blinken voiced a collaborative spirit towards realising NZ’s involvement, and the official Ministry of Defence documents clearly emphasise the positives for Aotearoa’s security.
China fatigue
These ‘new’ reorientations of Aotearoa foreign policy have been mostly intuited as a move away from China. Unsurprisingly, China has voiced concern over New Zealand’s potential AUKUS affiliation — Ambassador Wang Xiaolang warned the Wellington government that AUKUS “won’t make the region safer”, as it risks heightening nuclear proliferation in the region, undermining international non-proliferation agreements and sabotaging promises to Pacific Island nations, and generally reinvigorating an arms race in the Pacific Ocean. Prime Minister Li Qiang’s visit to Wellington in June served to remind the government of the benefits of sustaining good relations, but this reminder functioned as a caution.
For Aotearoa, maintaining cordial — if not positive — relations with China has always been somewhat like walking on a tightrope. China’s dismal human rights record, its cosying up with other anti-democratic states, and its neo-imperialistic tendencies in the Pacific Ocean make Peters’s known hawkishness towards China understandable. At the same time, China is certainly not the sole instigator of potential military conflict in the Indo-Pacific. More importantly, New Zealand was the first OECD nation to sign a free trade agreement with China (2008), and Qiang’s visit was accompanied by announcing non-reciprocal visa-free travel to China and FTA upgrade negotiations about services and agriculture. Previous governments’ trepidation towards antagonising Aotearoa’s most significant trading partner can thus similarly be seen as legitimate.
Yet, New Zealand’s current ostensible China fatigue cannot be separated from recent reports about Chinese interference in Aotearoa’s civil society and governmental institutions. Luxon admitted as much when he vowed in a Financial Times interview to “name and shame” China over spying. Over the past year, journalistic and Security Service publications have attempted to highlight the problems of (possible) Chinese coercion and manipulation efforts, which have spurred debates and questions over the veracity and seriousness of these efforts, what this means for Aotearoa’s Chinese heritage communities, and its relationships with China. Although the previous government certainly appeared to take this issue seriously — in 2019, it banned foreign donations to political party members over 50 NZD — this government may be looked at to take an even stronger stance.
Against this, however, former political leaders like Helen Clark and Don Brash recently expressly criticised the government for jeopardising NZ-China relations. More importantly, for them, the New Zealand government is now more firmly embroiling itself in US-China rivalries, as it talks about NZ defence assets as a “force multiplier” for the US and Australia, agreeing to deploy visiting forces to the Philippines, and being more open to AUKUS. This, Clark says, is “a radical change” and “a hard reset” that puts NZ’s independent foreign policy and economic security “on the bonfire”.
A fickle kind of independence
Still, it remains something of an exaggeration to say that NZ’s recent moves pose a foreign policy wheelspin. Such exaggerations have been a consistent accompaniment to NZ’s self-proclaimed foreign policy independence and should not be blown out of proportion. Insofar underlying geopolitical dynamics in the Pacific Ocean remain fundamentally unchanged, any rhetoric about a ‘new’ foreign policy coming out of Aotearoa should not be overblown. We may indeed be witnessing Aotearoa aligning itself with the US more closely, but we should not think that it was ever genuinely ‘neutral’ between US-China spheres of influence in the first place. Altogether, New Zealand has always been more intimately embraced with the UK and US than with China — in that sense, the idea that NZ’s recent stances imply a relinquishing of foreign policy ‘independence’ overstates the degree of independence it ever had.
The question of foreign policy ‘independence’ indeed remains a fickle one for Aotearoa. For instance, Chinese Ambassador Wang Xiaolang himself appealed to New Zealand’s “principled independence voice” as an argument against AUKUS, which suggests that NZ foreign policy independence could be externally weaponised to serve outside hegemons’ interests. Moreover, notwithstanding the legitimate concerns of Chinese nefarious interference in NZ society, it is unclear whether the Aotearoa public wants stronger US alignment instead. Surveys show that only twelve per cent of New Zealanders trust China to act responsibly in the world, but the US scores 38 per cent — New Zealanders simply seem generally cagey about their country’s ties to major (nuclear) powers.
Such views of New Zealand’s foreign policy ‘independence’ may imply representations of plucky New Zealand punching above its weight in navigating the ambiguous waters of the Pacific arena, but may also be a manifestation of a lack of widespread societal care about Aotearoa’s place in the world. Many NZ-based scholars have complained about the lack of robust public debate about New Zealand’s foreign policy, which could indicate that there is a lack of democratic input, but also that there is simply no public interest in foreign policy.
Realism
The Aotearoa government itself views their ‘renewed’ foreign policy simply as a return to pragmatism after the supposedly more ‘values-driven’ tack of the Ardern government. Foreign Minister Peters has framed his (re)direction in terms of a clear-sighted “realism” that replaces his predecessors’ “vaguer notions of an indigenous foreign policy that no one else understood, let alone shared”. New Zealand has based its new foreign policy on its professed observations of international order’s developments from rules to power, from economics to security, and from openness to preparedness, and therefore has deemed Ardern’s dialogical and de-escalatory global disposition as frustratingly naive in a region increasingly viewed in terms of coercive competition. In short, for this government, New Zealand’s foreign policy ‘independence’ denotes prudent level-headedness rather than ethnic uniqueness or exceptional virtue.
But it’s important to keep in mind that this is a self-proclaimed realism, which certainly does not necessarily amount to a “clear-eyed assessment of New Zealand’s strategic interests that is not clouded by partial truths or wishful thinking”. NZ’s self-labelled ‘foreign policy reset’ towards the US can be characterised by ideology and overexcitement to differentiate from previous governments at least as much as by supposed hard-nosed rationality. Aside from the fact that global crises like climate change and unequal development form as much of a threat to regional stability and well-being in the region, it is also eminently doubtful that aligning oneself closer to the US will resolve New Zealand’s ‘predicament’ in between them and China, which seems unlikely to meaningfully change in the foreseeable future.
It is tempting to accuse those calling for “balancing” NZ’s relations with the US and China of committing a both-sidesism. Truthfully, domestic dynamics in the US itself hardly render it a guaranteeably reliable partner within new security alliances, and the US can be seen to interject in NZ democracy as well. Helen Clark went even further, arguing that “the US spies, the UK spies, New Zealand spies, so many countries spy”. Yet, despite all this, the US has been a longstanding and essential ally to Aotearoa, and clearly aligns more closely politically and culturally. Nonetheless, China remains an unignorable presence in NZ’s region — a reality that Aotearoa cannot disregard. That is what realist foreign policy is — dealing with the international context one has, rather than one it wishes for.
NZ’s supposedly ‘new’ foreign policy is thus neither truly independent, nor truly realist, nor prompted to safeguard Aotearoa’s public interest. On this note, New Zealand’s apparent plans to join AUKUS seem likely to be materialised without public input. Furthermore, at the same time that the New Zealand government made cuts to its own Defence Force budget, it has surreptitiously agreed to allow the US defence industry to expand into its economy — in June, it signed the 'Statement of Principles for Indo-Pacific Defense Industrial Base Collaboration'. Coming off the back of recent news that the NZ Defence Force “has been helping the US military with artificial intelligence-powered weapons”, Defence Minister Judith Collins motivated this in terms of “shared interests” with the US. However, its ostensible secrecy should raise questions over whether this government is genuinely interested in protecting New Zealand’s democracy from outside hegemonic interference or public opinion about foreign or defence policy.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biography
Lucas Knotter is a Lecturer in Politics and International Studies at the University of Bath. He specialises in questions of sovereignty, self-determination, and IR theory, and has frequently commented on New Zealand’s (geo)political affairs. Image credit: Unsplash/Jeanne Rouillard.