AUT's Dr. Marco de Jong sits down with Diplosphere - Marco has emerged as an important Pacific-centred voice in the generational debate on NZ’s foreign policy. We talk about the history of regionalism in the Pacific in the second half of the 20th century and the institutions that emerged in response to issues such as whaling, nuclear testing, and environmental degradation - and why this history matters to today.
Why is NZ changing from a successful approach in the Pacific? What are the upsides and downsides of the AUKUS Pillar 2, the language of containment, deterrence, and great power politics for a small island state like NZ? Do we have a “shadow” foreign policy that sits behind a stated foreign policy? What advantage do we gain from “strategic alignment” with “traditional partners”, to use officials’ language?
We discuss too Marco’s groundbreaking work in shedding light through Official Information Act requests, and why transparency is needed, to let the public in on a debate, which at present, is largely held behind closed doors.
00:00 Why the Story of Pacific Regionalism Matters
11:15 The “Taking the Lane” Slip of the Tongue
16:00 Language, Media and Doublespeak
21:00 The US Indo-Pacific Strategy that Underpins AUKUS
25:00 Risk of Repeating Past Self-Injuries in Pacific
27:00 Transparency and OIA requests
35:00 Personal Cost
Quotes:
Anti-nuclearism is tied to regional self determination in very complex and intimate ways.
At the height of the Cold War, Pacific nations came together and signed the second regional nuclear free zone treaty, the Treaty of Rototonga, which banned the use, testing, stationing, possession of nuclear weapons within the zone. Now we see increased geopolitical competition. We see the same kind of narratives and the same kind of approach of, say, New Zealand and Australia to a different peer rival or geostrategic competitor, instead of the USSR, now it's China. And we see the same approach broadly, which is that New Zealand seeks to contribute to the strategic denial of China and the region through defense diplomacy and development.
New Zealand gains power from its regional standing. There's certainly a tension there between what I see as a discrepancy between a stated foreign policy and a shadow foreign policy with respect to the Pacific. A stated foreign policy, which is in support of Pacific regionalism and its priorities, which in this case is development, climate action, regional disarmament, and a shadow foreign policy based around the preservation of US military primacy in the region and against China. And so that my concern is that I don't think we're being clever and how we balance that. New Zealand has, to use the words of officials, a “non-discretionary interest in the regional security and stability”, but I don't think that's shared by major powers.
Falling victim into this kind of inevitable, as you say, zero sum contest and adopting its language and adopting the kind of priorities I think does cut down our flexibility and diplomatic agency and the way that we've been able to build relationships, from the global north to the global south and across the east and the west.
We're tied into the region intimately, throughout demography, geography, and our genealogy. This AUKUS-led military approach is so blunt. It is the bluntest of tools. It has no ability to fix things like climate change, the dysfunction within the UN system. It actually could worsen a lot of these issues because it breaks down our tolerance in the multilateral system.
It's clear that our officials see our national interests as best served and underpinned by, in their words, US's ability to main, maintain influence and efficacy as a global superpower.
References:
Newsroom (2024) - Aukus Pillar II compromises NZ’s principled, independent voice
Newsroom (2024) - NZ’s independent foreign policy hugely compromised
Terence O’Brien (2021) - NZ, Australia and China: A False Choice
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