Paul Thomas: An accident waiting to happen

Paul Thomas

Safe haven or sitting duck?

This week we were offered two diametrically opposed views of New Zealand's security.

An assessment conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit for the Institute of Economics and Peace rated New Zealand the safest country in the world. Over 20 criteria were evaluated, including foreign wars, internal conflicts, respect for human rights, law and order, and the degree of democracy.

The case for being very afraid is spread over six pages in the current Listener. It's made by American foreign policy commentator George Friedman who professes to love New Zealand but describes it as "an accident waiting to happen" and "a scary place" where he wouldn't want his children to grow up.

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".

This divergence essentially re-poses the 25-year-old question: are we better served by adopting a posture of high-minded quasi-neutrality or by accepting the friendship and protection of the most powerful nation on earth, along with the various indignities and occasional sacrifices which that entails?

In his black-and-white world view and punitive tone, Friedman evokes the bullying over-reaction of the Reagan White House and US State Department that helped to ensure the exact outcome they presumably wished to avoid: transforming a highly controversial policy measure championed by a mercurial individual into a component of our national identity.

Yet for all Friedman's hectoring certainty and the relish with which he sweeps pawns off the global chessboard, we should welcome his critique. Questioning our security arrangements might be a dirty job, but someone's got to do it.

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.

Falwell, it should be remembered, believed the Teletubby character Tinky Winky was pushing a subliminal gay message, blamed gays, feminists and abortionists for 9/11, and declared in 1999, "I believe the anti-Christ will arrive within a decade and, of course, he'll be Jewish."

That "of course" really gives the game away. This was such an intellectual mismatch that there should have been a steward's inquiry if Lange hadn't wiped the floor with him.

Our David complex is now being pandered to by the Steinlager ads in which B-list American actors approve of our independence. It's worth bearing in mind that they're being paid to flatter us.

The real question is whether it's sensible, in a changing and often unpredictable world, to treat a foreign policy stance as a component of national identity and therefore above debate, even above politics? Apart from anything else, it's hardly the sign of a maturing, self-confident nation that we can't discuss the issue without shrill accusations of toadying to those awful Americans and putting New Zealanders' lives at risk.

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."

Coincidentally, this week journalist and author Simon Winchester reported from Jiuquan in northwestern China, the main launch centre for China's space rockets. At the entrance to the interplanetary complex he came across a large billboard containing the following slogan: Without Haste. Without Fear. We Will Conquer the World.