Playing with Fire | Middle East Tinderbox | Diplosphere's Take
Pillar Two Pilloried; the Blob comes to Wellington? and more.
Don’t Miss Out - Diplosphere Events
Diplosphere’s upcoming events could not be timelier:
May 7th, Wellington: Playing with Fire: What Scenarios in the Middle East Tinderbox? REGISTER HERE.
What are the possible scenarios for escalation and de-escalation? How to defuse the tinderbox? What does this mean for New Zealand?
May 22nd, Wellington: Where the Bloody Hell Are We? New Zealand's Place in the World. REGISTER HERE.
AUKUS, NATO, Five Eyes: the North Atlantic in the South Pacific? As a multicultural society with a bicultural foundation, how does New Zealand’s geographic position influence our global role— North, South, East or West? Where the bloody hell are we?
Diplosphere Takes
Middle East Tinderbox
Just when things could not have thought to get worse a recent series of tit-for-tat attacks has further raised the temperature in the Middle East. Set of with an Israeli strike on an Iranian consulate in Damascus, the attacks saw the two countries exchange direct fire on their home territories for the time. All the while, the US vetoed a resolution for Palestinian statehood at the UNSC, the fourth time it has employed the veto, and the US Congress passed a military aid bill worth billions for Ukraine and Israel. Our Foreign Minister the week prior was in the United States, and lambasted the use of the veto without pointing fingers. While in Washington Winston Peters praised the US’s role in Gaza: “as it works to try to help end the suffering there”.
AUKUS event at Parliament: Pillar Two Pilloried
Diplosphere’s Dan O’Brien jotted down thoughts after attending the three hour AUKUS Pillar Two event at Parliament organised by the NZ Labour Party. Though enlightening, the discussion would have been more powerful and balanced with opposing views - that is, pro-AUKUS views.
Former PM and UNDP Administrator, Helen Clark spoke and is one of the country’s most vocal critics (the YouTube recording starting at her remarks are here). Some points / thoughts:
Shared Interests vs. Shared Values? Much has been said by officials and repeated in NZ media about shared values with traditional security partners, but shared interests matter too. No matter your political system, from liberal democracy to autocracy, there are shared interests in matters such as climate change, nuclear proliferation, pandemics, free trade - the list goes on. In our hybrid interconnected world, most problems and opportunities to not see nation-state boundaries. As a trade-dependent island nation in the South Pacific, we may share an interest with a country that doesn’t share our liberal democratic values, and share values with a country that doesn’t share our interest. This has certainly happened in the past, for instance, with French nuclear testing in the Pacific (20+ tests in the late 1980s). Modernity takes different forms, and iff we were only to see eye to eye with countries that look like us - the pickings would be slim indeed - and for that matter, they may not wish to trade with us - freely in agricultural and food, at least.
“Friends not allies” (still?): This has been a positioning that has suited New Zealand well to describe our relationship with the United States since the ANZUS rift in 1986. New Zealand’s popular anti-nuclear movement led to a change in law with the 4th Labour government under David Lange. New Zealand endured a US cold shoulder for some time afterwards, but certainly in the past twenty years, its diplomacy has successfully rebuilt a robust relationship.
''We part company as friends, but we part company, as far as the alliance is concerned,''
US Secretary of State, Shultz, 1986, after ANZUS rift
The relationship has bloomed. The question is has it bloomed to the extent that we see the Pacific region in a US strategic competition terms or our own terms, where are the lines that delineate? Strategic competition, balance of power, realist international relations theory, all have the ring of a new “great game”.
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