Late in December 2018, Winston Peters stepped up to a podium in front of a vast glass wall at Georgetown University in Washington DC. Before him was an audience of American diplomats, officials and students, whom he couldn’t resist needling as he began his speech. “New Zealand is a small but well-functioning democracy. Indeed, looking increasingly well-functioning against some international comparisons,” he noted, to knowing chuckles from the anti-Trump crowd.
Quickly, however, Peters settled into an address devoid of his usual jokes and comic asides. Instead, he began to chart an ambitious vision of New Zealand foreign policy grounded in the relationship between New Zealand and the US: two partners, he said, who shared a “special connection” stronger than almost any other. That connection was “now coming into sharper relief in the Asia-Pacific”, he noted. Sticking carefully to his script, Peters explained that “the region is becoming more contested and its security is ever more fragile. It is New Zealand’s view that the Asia-Pacific region has reached an inflexion point, one that requires the urgent attention of both Wellington and Washington.”
Throughout his speech, Peters studiously avoided pinpointing the country he felt was contributing most to the insecurity he warned of. But in a question session afterwards, a student made the subtext explicit: how could New Zealand compete against the vast resources of China?
It was a question Peters had already answered. “The significant focus of our visit to Washington is to share our concerns and enlist greater US support in the region closest to New Zealand,” Peters had said in his speech. Enunciating every word, he had added, “We unashamedly ask for the United States to engage more and we think it is in your vital interests to do so. And time is of the essence.”
Since the collapse of our military alliance with the US over nuclear ship visits in 1986, which led the American ambassador at the time, Paul Cleveland, to remark that the US would “not be able to trust” New Zealand, we have insisted that we have an “independent foreign policy”. In practice, that meant we worked with the US on espionage and the occasional military operations, with Australia in the Pacific and with China in pursuit of economic growth. Mostly, that balancing act held because nobody paid us much attention. New Zealand faced no major security threats, China was focused on its own challenges and US foreign policy was focused on the Middle East.
By the time Peters made his speech, that had changed. New Zealand and US officials were watching with deepening concern as Chinese diplomats fanned out across the Pacific in search of allies. A stream of Chinese hacking and propaganda efforts have disturbed New Zealand communities. Rumours abound about China’s efforts to establish military bases in the Pacific. As New Zealand’s Secretary of Defence, Andrew Bridgman, said last year, our “strategic environment has deteriorated more quickly than we imagined”.
In response, New Zealand has dramatically deepened its relationship with the US. Over the past decade, we have welcomed US vessels to our ports, regularly participated in military exercises in the Pacific, and pursued closer ties with Western alliances such as Nato. Our diplomats sometimes issue joint statements with partners in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance. Even our spies have become more open about the relationship, to the point where the head of the SIS, Andrew Hampton, recently travelled to Washington DC to appear on 60 Minutes alongside his American counterpart in a stunning display of solidarity.
Peters’ speech made it clear New Zealand is no longer sceptical of a US presence in our region: we are actively calling for it. The US is taking us up on the offer. In years to come, this dramatic change in our foreign policy will further dominate our lives, affecting the places we can go, markets we can sell to and the security of our home. So, how did we go from being a partner the US could no longer trust to a strategic ally, growing ever closer?
Security pact
It is hard to remember the fear in the months following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941. At the time, my grandmother was a child in Amberley, north of Christchurch. One of her abiding memories is of listening to her mother suggest a plan if Japan invaded: the family would go to a nearby cliff and jump. That fear lasted even after the war’s end, driving New Zealand and Australia to insist that the US give them a security guarantee in exchange for their consent to a final peace treaty with Japan. That deal led eventually to the birth of Anzus: a formal military alliance under which the US promised its support if the two countries were ever threatened.
Paired with the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, to which New Zealand contributed and received some products of US intelligence, we were one of the US’s closest allies. But horror at nuclear testing in the Pacific and growing concern about the risk of nuclear war abroad prompted a shift in mood. By 1982, the US Embassy was reporting to Washington: “These New Zealanders are wary of what they see as cultural and political dominance by the United States and they believe that New Zealand’s interests would be best served by a rejection of traditional alliances, with the hope that such a neutral stance would spare the country from involvement in any future superpower conflict.”
The sentiment spilled over into protests against visits by US warships equipped with nuclear weapons and the Lange government’s passing of legislation barring nuclear-capable ships from our waters.
For many New Zealanders, a legend was born: a Pacific David had stood up to America’s Goliath and won. US officials had a different view.
Lange was not opposed to Anzus or nuclear-capable ships: he emphasised during a visit by US secretary of state George Shultz that “Anzus was fundamental to our economic and defence way of life”, and indicated he could find a compromise. But much of his party was determined to implement a nuclear-free policy, giving him little wiggle room. Shultz later told a NZ diplomat, “Your prime minister could not keep his word.”
Alan Tidwell, director of Georgetown University’s Centre for Australian New Zealand and Pacific Studies in Washington, says, “There was tremendous [US] concern that the anti-nuclear contagion would catch on” among other American allies. To prevent that, the US suspended its Anzus commitments to New Zealand, stopping the flow of intelligence, calling off joint military exercises and curtailing our diplomats’ access to the US Department of State. In 1986, the US formally withdrew its security guarantee to New Zealand.
Pivot to Asia
For decades, the relationship was “unnaturally frozen”, according to Brian Harding, who leads the Pacific Islands programme at the US Institute of Peace, a government think tank. In 2009, he served as the Australia and New Zealand desk officer at the Pentagon, where he found that “what happened in the 1980s created some really calcified views in the navy in really important quarters”.
Senior US naval officers believed there needed to be a demonstration that “adopting nuclear-free policies would have an effect” on the relationship with the US, he says. “There was also a sense that you can do without New Zealand: a small country that for most of history was not in a strategically located place.”
Even by 2009, however, that was changing. Geopolitical competition with China was beginning to heat up; then-president Barack Obama had announced a much-vaunted “pivot” to Asia. It was increasingly clear that the Pacific would be an important diplomatic battleground.
The impact of that realisation was highlighted in mid-2010, when assistant secretary of state Kurt Campbell travelled to Vanuatu to represent the US at the annual Pacific Islands Forum meeting, an unprecedented leap in the seniority of US officials at the event. As the US raced to engage, however, its officials realised how far behind they were. As one White House official told the Listener, “Our engagement with the Pacific atrophied over decades of neglect.”
It wasn’t just a lack of diplomats or a paucity of resources. US officials used to dealing with countries whose populations number in the tens of millions found it hard to fathom countries like Tuvalu, population 11,400, or Nauru, population 13,000.
When those officials tried to engage with countries such as the Marshall Islands, where the US had poisoned several atolls through dozens of nuclear tests, they often didn’t know their own atomic history. When they reached out to countries such as the Solomon Islands, they spoke about an idealised World War II history without appreciating the thousands of unexploded bombs they had left behind.
The Americans needed a “translator”, a New Zealand diplomat once told me of US attempts to engage in the Pacific. Despite New Zealand’s own fraught history in the region, it was much better placed to serve in that role than anyone else. More than anything, this explains the rapid turnaround of the US-NZ relationship: New Zealand had suddenly acquired geopolitical value.
“If the US is interested in engaging more with the Pacific Islands, then all of a sudden the relationship with New Zealand is really important,” says Harding. There, “New Zealand is a heavy hitter”.
Usefully, so much time had passed that few Americans outside the Pentagon thought about Anzus any more. According to Tidwell, “The only people who think about that rupture are in New Zealand.”
So the US began wooing its old ally. Assistant secretary of state Campbell overrode the objections of old admirals to reinvigorate the relationship, says Harding. In 2010, secretary of state Hillary Clinton travelled to New Zealand to announce a “Wellington Declaration”, establishing a new “strategic partnership” with this country focused on “practical co-operation in the Pacific”. Two years later, New Zealand and the US’s defence ministers announced a “Washington Declaration” creating a new framework for defence co-operation.
US marines began travelling to the North Island for training exercises and Kiwi soldiers travelled to California in return. Representatives of New Zealand’s intelligence agencies and foreign ministry were embedded in their US counterpart institutions. NZ vessels began participating in the US’s major Rimpac (Rim of the Pacific Exercise) naval exercises near Hawaii for the first time in decades. Most notably, given that ship visits were the cause of the Anzus fracture, in 2016, a US Navy warship (the destroyer USS Sampson) visited New Zealand for the first time in 33 years. Our navy has even contributed ships to US-led patrols through intensely contested areas such as the South China Sea.
Until recently, little of this co-operation pierced through to public attention, in part by design. After signing the Washington Declaration, then-defence minister Jonathan Coleman played down its importance, insisting that “it is not Anzus in drag”. Nonetheless, the extent of the co-operation was profound: not long after Coleman’s statement, the US ambassador to New Zealand, David Huebner, declared the relationship “is now the best it has ever been”.
It has grown only closer since. Georgetown University’s Tidwell says apart from Australia, there is no other country with which NZ officialdom is so intertwined. “On the whole, the New Zealand public doesn’t understand the depth of the relationship.”
Pacific friends
New Zealand is one of many countries with which the US has been deepening its bonds. It has revitalised its alliances with South Korea and the Philippines, and rebuilt a defence partnership with Australia, Japan and India dubbed the Quad. The biggest of these efforts, however, is Aukus. Originally framed as a deal under which Australia would acquire nuclear-powered submarines from the US and UK, the partnership, says a former senior US defence official, has evolved into wholesale “integration of our defence communities”, the primary value of which is “deterrence” of China.
To Bruce Stokes, a member of the independent US Council on Foreign Relations and a senior visiting fellow at Washington think tank the German Marshall Fund, it looks like “we’re trying to grow a Nato”.
The strategic importance of that effort for the US became clear in late March 2022, when documents emerged online showing that China and the Solomon Islands were on the verge of signing a wide-reaching security agreement. It said: “Solomon Islands may, according to its own needs, request China to send police, armed police, military personnel and other law enforcement and armed forces to Solomon Islands to assist in maintaining social order.”
For the US, Australia and NZ, this was a nightmare. All three had watched growing Chinese aggression further north: Chinese threats to invade Taiwan were increasing in frequency and seriousness, as were the number of attacks or trespasses by China-aligned vessels on other nations in the South China Sea.
Closer to home, China was conducting a trade war with Australia, had launched hacking attempts on Australian and New Zealand institutions, and was attempting to influence the margins of Australian and New Zealand politics. Now, it seemed, China was trying to establish a military base in the Pacific. According to Charles Edel, Australia chair at another prestigious Washington think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “When the Solomon Islands happened, the warning lights went up in Washington.”
Officials in Washington, Canberra and Wellington sprang into gear in an unsuccessful effort to stop the Solomon Islands from signing the pact, and a successful one to convince Pacific nations to reject a potential regional security agreement with China. But our effort to stymie China’s outreach to the Solomons and other Pacific nations came at a diplomatic cost, illustrating some risks from its growing alignment with the US. The Solomons then-prime minister Manasseh Sogavare called the concerns of the US, Australia and New Zealand “hypocritical” given the rise of alliances such as Aukus and their own deepening alignment.
At least some other Pacific Island governments agreed that the militarisation of the region was a joint US-China phenomenon. In recently leaked briefing documents, Tonga’s foreign ministry denounced New Zealand’s actions over the Solomons agreement as “nothing short of frantic”, and said it echoed “the condescending rhetoric that we, unfortunately, see too often from ANZ leadership”.
The encounter highlighted a tension at the heart of New Zealand’s foreign policy: its value to the US is as a Pacific translator, but if some Pacific nations react negatively to US efforts to counter China in the region, deeper alignment with the US might hamper our Pacific reputation and ability to play that role.
Walking the tightrope
Under the current government, the alignment with the US is set to continue. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon last month “reasserted” the importance of Anzus to New Zealand, prompting Opposition leader Chris Hipkins to respond: “Anzus is not an active part of our foreign policy and hasn’t been for a long time.”
Also in April, Peters returned to Washington as Foreign Minister and met US Secretary of State Antony Blinken. The pair issued a joint statement airing the possibility of New Zealand “engaging practically” with Aukus “as and when all parties deem it appropriate”.
These moves have sparked the first meaningful foreign policy debate in New Zealand politics in decades. Former prime minister Helen Clark, prominent in Labour’s 1980s ban on US nuclear ship visits, recently denounced “geopolitical games driven from elsewhere” and warned of a “profoundly undemocratic” effort by the government to “lurch” away from bipartisan settings and towards the US. Hipkins, under pressure from dovish members of his party, has expressed concern as well. “I don’t think we want to be wedged into particularly a conflict between China and the US … where we are picking one side or the other,” he said.
After his return from Washington, Peters sought to dampen expectations of this country imminently joining “pillar two” of Aukus – the “non-nuclear” part of the pact in which partners share advanced military technology and “interoperability”. New Zealand had yet to be invited, he said, and was yet to consider what the agreement might mean.
Yet even as this debate emerges into public view, a misperception continues. Our shift towards the US began more than a decade ago and has continued under successive governments (including the one Hipkins led). We are not confronted with two potential pathways to choose from; New Zealand has already picked a side. After a decade of quietly rebuilding ties, the US now stands as our closest partner bar Australia – itself one of the US’s most vocal supporters. The choice for New Zealand is not between maintaining an “independent” foreign policy or aligning with the US; it is between detaching ourselves from the US or doubling down on our present course.
Influential friends
On a good day, Wellington’s Frank Kitts Park is heaven. Children scramble up the newly refurbished seagull slide, clamber over a model waka, and race through a rope tunnel. Soon, a Chinese friendship garden will be built nearby, where locals can sip tea and wander past sedate rock pools. The garden’s backers hope it will prompt residents to reflect on the strength of New Zealand’s relationship with China.
Walk further south and the edge of the park begins to more closely resemble a fortress than a playground. Concrete walls loom up, buttressed with regular pillars and set off by overhanging parapets. The mood turns grey. Tucked away on one of the walls is a blackened old memorial installed by the US in 1951. Intended to commemorate the defence of New Zealand by American soldiers in WWII, the plaque is inscribed with a reminder. “To the people of New Zealand: If you ever need a friend, you have one.”
Seven decades on, New Zealand has once more taken the US up on the offer. We are many years into the biggest foreign policy shift since the 1980s. If we choose to continue, we will once more become one of the US’s closest partners. If we choose to withdraw, it will require us to consciously unwind a decade of diplomatic effort.
Either way, New Zealand must choose: it can no longer pursue a foreign policy of independent drift. According to US analyst Edel, “The agenda could potentially be limitless, and it’s up to New Zealand to define.”
Reporting for this story was supported by a travel grant from the US-NZ Council, an Auckland-based think tank. The council had no editorial control over the content of this article.
