Let’s slaughter the sacred cow

A few days ago Adam drew attention to an interesting article, by Joanne Black,  in the current print edition of the Listener. That article was entitled Heads in the sand.

The article gave considerable prominence to views by US forecaster George Friedman on how NZ’s past foreign policy positioning may well have cost us dearly in terms of help from the US as an ally.

Today Paul Thomas in the NZ Herald, a piece called ‘An accident waiting to happen’ considers Friedman’s views together with what might be taken as the contrary view of the Institute of Economics and peace.

Thomas notes that :-

Friedman’s thesis is that, as a small exporting nation, we’re acutely vulnerable to any disruption of the international trading system. A combination of arrogance and naivete has left us friendless in a dangerous world, reduced to crossing our fingers and hoping “she’ll be right”.

“If the United States and China ever came to a conflict, the willingness of the US to convoy New Zealand ships might not be there. It would certainly convoy Australian ships.” The US, he insists, wouldn’t be prepared “to risk American lives on behalf of New Zealand’s economic interests”.

Thomas discusses that. He makes the point in his article:-

The fact is that our above-the-fray posture has become something of a sacred cow, an article of faith that shouldn’t be questioned and needn’t be debated. This is partly the National Party’s fault for giving the impression, particularly during the feckless Brash interregnum, that it wanted to change the policy without having the debate. The net result of that manoeuvring was to further entrench the policy while making it even harder to have the debate.

It’s partly because of the self-congratulatory mythology that has grown up around our defection from Uncle Sam’s posse. An example of this is the embarrassing significance accorded David Lange’s debate with the American evangelist Jerry Falwell at the Oxford Union in 1985.

This was supposedly a David and Goliath confrontation in which plucky little New Zealand secured the moral high ground once and for all. In fact, it pitted perhaps our most brilliant parliamentarian ever, a superb orator, renowned wit, and seasoned debater, against a southern fried religious huckster and certifiable dingbat.

Indeed the holier than thou smugness occasioned in NZ by this, does NZ no favours.

In Adam’s view this was compounded in the Clark years by the belief, despite all evidence to the opposite that ‘NZ is in a benign strategic environment’. Manifestly that is hogwash. The increasing need for nations to secure supplies of food and water, plus the global aspirations of China and India mean that NZ should look very carefully at the strategic situation and take such steps as possible to improve our security.

As Thomas further noted in his Herald piece:-

As an Australian foreign policy academic quoted in the Listener article says, “I don’t know whether New Zealand will ever look at these issues and start to reverse course or modify its forward thinking, but I think it needs to.”

It is time that we had the debate. Else one day we will wake up and it will be too late. We will have spent all our time worrying about  inconsequential matters like Tony Veitch, rugby and not enough on the issues of foreign policy, trade and economics.