While Winston Peters has been invoking nostalgic recollections of American marines in the Pacific during World War Two, a former Australian Prime Minister and some of that country’s top foreign policy analysts have concluded that the age of the US in the Asia-Pacific is over.
As if to underline that, there are now reports that the Trump administration is to pull the funding for the very institution at which Peters made his comments, the East-West Center in Hawaii.
The Center has long served as a promoter of US foreign policy across the Pacific.
Peters proved to be a highly supportive guest who was still keen to litigate the domestic political debates of 70 years ago.
“We also recall certain protestors, in New Zealand and across the Indo-Pacific, chanting “Yankees Go Home!” during the rancorous days of the late 1960s,” he said.
“Some of those protestors chanted those words perhaps unaware that, just a few decades earlier, their parents and grandparents had been praying that the Americans would arrive to save them.”
And in words that may well have been inspired by his political advisor, Jon Johansson, who, as an academic, taught American politics, Peters argued that “the enduring experiment in democratic government that America’s Founders created still stands, unbowed.”
Really?
“Appreciating this history also serves to quiet the breathless language of panic because what we see now is what many of our predecessors have seen before.
“So, one lesson is that cool heads and quiet diplomacy will succeed where talk of “fighting” will not.
“My view of the strategic partnership between New Zealand and the United States is this: we each have the right, indeed the imperative, to pursue our own foreign policies, driven by our own sense of national interest.
“But close friends do not need to be, and should not be, confrontational and rude with one another, as New Zealand sometimes was towards the United States in the mid-to-late 1980s.
“And we should never forget what binds and unites us, bonds stronger and more long-lasting than the controversies and headlines of the moment.”
But New Zealand has gone further than Peters’ rhetoric in Hawaii.
RNZ has reported that the New Zealand Defence Force and Rocket Lab are now deeply involved in a space programme designed to target China.
This has been revealed due to RNZ obtaining documents under the Official Information Act.
It has not been pro-actively made public by the Government.
But the net effect of the involvement and Peters’s speech in Hawaii suggests that while we are trying to get closer, Australia has begun to talk about detaching itself from the US
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Meanwhile the New Zealand Prime Minister has been trying (somewhat unsuccessfully) to build a coalition of free trade countries to oppose Trump and his tariff war.
What Christopher Luxon and Peters may fail to understand is that the tariff wall is a product of the United States’ retreat from globalisation.
The tariffs are part of a much bigger picture, which shows that the US is no longer willing to continue as the sole global superpower.
That much was the overriding theme of a Canberra conference earlier this month convened by the former Australian Liberal Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull.
Turnbull was the second Prime Minister from his party after John Howard.
Howard once famously declared that Australia was the United States’ deputy sheriff in Asia.
Turnbull totally rejected that claim, saying that Australia should not assume that America First, Trump style, will evaporate any time soon.
“Trump makes it very clear he is both a less reliable and a more demanding ally,” he said.
“How do we in Australia recalibrate?
“Certainly, we need to do more and be more resilient and independent.
“And yet, with an exquisite bad timing, decisions in recent years have made us far more dependent on America just as America was becoming less dependable – not through weariness or neglect but now by deliberate design.”
The eminent Australian strategic studies academic (and frequent visitor to New Zealand) Professor Hugh White took up the theme.
“What we’ve discovered, even before Donald Trump appeared, is the United States is not prepared to do what’s necessary to prevent Russia from reasserting its position in Eastern Europe as a great power because it’s not prepared to go to war with Russia,” he said.
“I think it’s right not to be prepared to go to war with Russia, but that is the strategic consequence of America’s reluctance.
“And in Asia, it transpires that the United States has not been willing to do what has been necessary to preserve the military superiority, maritime superiority in the Western Pacific necessary for it to resist China’s challenge.
“It now finds itself in a position that if it faces a military challenge from China, it would face a war that it can’t win and can’t deter.”
White said the strange thing about Donald Trump and one of the most confusing things about this moment in history, is that it is Donald Trump who understands the underlying dynamics of America’s strategic position better than the foreign policy establishment under Presidents Obama and Biden who launched the “pivot to Asia.”
“In fact, Donald Trump’s doing us a favour by making clear to us things we’ve been determined not to recognise for ourselves,” he said.
Those “things” are simply that Trump wants to focus United States foreign policy on the Western Hemisphere and is happy to leave Russia to dominate Eur-Asia while China dominates East Asia.
The underlying theme at Turnbull’s forum was that Trump had made what was likely to be an irreversible change to the strategic status quo in Asia.
Heather Smith, a former deputy Director General of Australia’s Office of National Intelligence, said that threats had been building for Australia for a long time, but the fragmentation of the international economic system was now a fact.
“The post-Cold War order isn’t collapsing, it has now collapsed,” she said.
“The US is dismantling all the foundations of its global hegemony and the values underpinning our bilateral relationship.
“This dismantling is not necessarily going to be reversed by a change of administration going forward.
“Once we lose those principles, it’s a long way back to get them back.”
It is a view shared in Singapore.
“We believe that the announcements made in the last few days have, quite frankly, exceeded the expectations of most observers or stakeholders,” Singapore’s Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan told the Financial Times ten days ago.
“To us, this is truly an inflexion point.
“The reason why we call this the end of an era is because it is very clear that the architect, the master planner, the developer of the rules-based multilateral system of economic integration, has, for a variety of reasons, decided that it now needs to, in fact, almost engage in the demolition of the same system it created in that unusual peak of generosity and ambition.”
Balakrishnan said Singapore was in a trade war, and it was preparing its population for that.
Internationally, he said he wanted to use Singapore’s membership of two key trade agreements, the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), to form the basis of a multilateral trading system.
New Zealand obviously supports that, and Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has taken the initiative to bring the CPTPP and the European Union together.
This week, he spoke to Singapore Prime Minister Lawrence Wong and EU President Ursula von Leyen about this.
But what is clear from the talk at Malcolm Turnbull’s Forum in Canberra and from Balakrishnan’s words is that it is no longer possible to rely on the United States for security or trade.
Someone needs to tell Winston Peters.
