She saw it risked upsetting the delicate truce between various ethnic, religious, historic and economic forces in the Middle East, which is probably the most that can ever be hoped for to maintain peace in that region.
Clark’s decision saved the lives and limbs of the army personnel she always took a special interest in and protected New Zealand’s integrity and honour.
New Zealand being a friend of the US meant her decision was more diplomatically powerful than it would have been if we were non-aligned.
This infuriated George W. Bush’s Administration at the time, but the diplomatic damage was temporary, partly thanks to efforts after 2005 by her new US-leaning Foreign Minister, Winston Peters.
By early 2007, the relationship was repaired to the extent that Bush welcomed Clark back to the Oval Office. In January 2008, the US finally agreed to join New Zealand, Singapore, Brunei and Chile’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade talks. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice then enthused about New Zealand and Peters in Auckland later in the year.
That laid the foundation for John Key, Murray McCully and Tim Groser to normalise NZ-US relations for the first time since the mid-1980s’ anti-nuclear dispute.
The 2010 Wellington Declaration between McCully and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton agreed to deepen strategic relations, leading to the resumption of US naval visits. Groser took the TPP to near-completion before heading to Washington DC as ambassador.
Key so charmed Barack Obama that their friendship went beyond Oval Office meetings, extending to playing golf in Hawaii.
Yet sometimes Clark’s prudent scepticism about US intentions risks crossing into something closer to knee-jerk anti-Americanism, as is probably only to be expected of any liberal academic of the Vietnam era.
So it was on Monday when the former Prime Minister and UN Development Programme boss took to X, formerly Twitter, to criticise the new coalition Government for signing New Zealand up to a joint statement with the US and 12 other friends opposing attacks by the Yemen-backed Houthi terrorist group against international shipping in the Red Sea.
The Houthis, whose slogan is “Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse Upon the Jews”, are Shia Islamists but on those matters are acting in support of the Iran-backed Sunni terrorist group Hamas, which attacked Israel on October 7.
Clark worried that New Zealand supporting the statement risked a “slippery slope” towards supporting the US more widely.
But, as Clark herself demonstrated with her different handling of Afghanistan and Iraq, there is no slippery slope.
New Zealand chooses when to agree with statements by the Five Eyes and our other friends and when not to.
If we sign up when we agree, it makes it more meaningful when we don’t. It would have been extraordinary had New Zealand not wanted to stand with the other Five Eyes countries, plus the likes of Denmark, Germany, Japan, South Korea and Singapore against the Houthis
Clark, like most of us, seems to pine for the golden age of liberal institutionalism and the rapid advance of the rules-based system between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11 in particular, but which remained relatively strong until Donald Trump’s election as US president in 2016.
There’s no doubt that liberal institutionalism is the best system for the world in general and for small countries like New Zealand in particular.
The 1990s saw huge advances, including the 1991 liberation of Kuwait without a further march to Baghdad, the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), the 1994 conclusion of the Uruguay Round trade talks and the consequent formation of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
It was the fastest advance of liberal institutionalism since immediately after World War II, before the Soviet Union obtained nuclear weapons, when the US led the formation of the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the forerunner of the WTO.
But the advances in liberal institutionalism in the 1940s and 1990s didn’t occur because all the countries of the world decided to live and trade in peace together. They happened because those were the two eras of the past 80 years when there was a unipolar system, with the US having complete global hegemony.
It was the US, if you like, that used its complete military and economic dominance to put the rules-based system in place. As Clark seems no longer to accept, liberal institutionalism always needs to be underpinned by the most uncompromising realism, and a single dominant power - whether the Roman, British or American empires.
Without that underpinning, the rules-based system that Clark and anyone remotely sensible prefers is impossible.
In her criticisms of Israel, the US and New Zealand’s stances, Clark calls constantly for a ceasefire in Gaza and political negotiations towards a two-state solution. That is where the Oslo process was heading, until the 2006 Palestinian elections which led to the terrorist group Hamas taking power in Gaza, with the PLO still running the West Bank.
PLO boss Mahmoud Abbas is now into the 19th year of his first three-year term, but has almost certainly done the right thing holding on as a dictator rather than risking the West Bank also falling to Hamas or some other terrorist group.
Palestinians have in fact never been too keen on the two-state solution, with many, like Hamas and the Houthis, committed to the complete destruction of Israel and pushing the Jewish people into the sea.
An uneasy truce between them is the best that can hoped for.
That may also be true of the rivalry between the US and China. Whichever one prevails will determine the shape of the next rules-based system.
Just as Clark herself knew as Prime Minister, the coalition Government knows which side of that divide New Zealand’s interests fall.
- Matthew Hooton has over 30 years’ experience in political and corporate communications and strategy for clients in Australasia, Asia, Europe and North America, including the National and Act parties and the Mayor of Auckland.
