Michael Cox: Clark's sad legacy in '84 affair shrinks UN hopes

Helen Clark's anti-nuclear posturing embarrassed the UK and US. Photo / AP

Your columnist Nick Sheppard put the case for former Prime Minister Helen Clark becoming the first woman secretary-general of the United Nations. Let me put the case against such an event.

Our representative to the UN, the Honourable Jim McLay, has only recently taken our hard-won seat on the UN Security Council. For a small player such as New Zealand to get two of the most prestigious and coveted jobs would be unheard of, although Clark is trying hard.

A recent article in the Guardian newspaper and her attempts to learn French (a prerequisite for the French vote), highlight Clark's desire for the job. It would be a huge honour for this country and I believe she would do a good job.

To be successful she will need the Security Council to recommend her to the General Assembly who, in a private vote, must give her a 60 per cent majority. She has on her side that she will be a strong and experienced woman candidate and that she is from the Pacific, which has never had a candidate for the position.

Her positives stop there. Two of the most powerful permanent members of the Security Council, the United States and Britain, will not have forgotten that she led the charge that weakened Western resistance to the USSR during the Anzus debacle in 1984. Although the personnel involved in that fracas have since moved away from their powerful positions, these countries' institutional memories will not have forgiven her.

Former Prime Minister David Lange led the charge against nuclear powered and armed ships visiting New Zealand waters and thereby collapsing Anzus, but it was common knowledge that Helen Clark strong-armed him into his intractable positions which severely embarrassed the US and, to a lesser extent, the UK governments of the day.

A recently published book on this episode, Friendly Fire by Gerald Hensley, an eminent historian who was head of the then Prime Minister's Department, makes some very interesting and apposite comments about Clark's role in the affair. She herself has confirmed his claim that "she was generally regarded as leading the anti-nuclear lobby".

He also wrote that Clark, "when asked by a Wisconsin Congressman [probably Les Aspin who later became Bill Clinton's Secretary of Defence] why she accepted Roger Douglas' right-wing financial policies when she so disliked them, said bluntly that there had been a trade-off by which those on the left, led by her, gained the mandate for the anti-nuclear ship policy in return for going along with his economic reform".

Hensley states: "The long-established policy, backed by the US and UK along with their other allies, was that Western governments believed that the risk of a disastrous war [with the USSR] was best managed by standing together on nuclear deterrence, and not by individual countries [such as NZ] wandering away to show their impatience with the deadlock."

In the UK, then British Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe is reported as minuting, after a meeting with Clark about the policy: "The thought of Helen Clark fills me with dread."

Hensley summed up the whole unfortunate affair thus: "The outcome of this swirl of nationalist resentments was the wreck of New Zealand's longstanding position in the outside world. New Zealand, since 1942, was one of the inner circle of allies in Washington and threw away access and influence with the world's most powerful nation that other and much larger nations would only dream of ever securing. If the purpose was to protect against the nuclear arms race and launch a global demand for a reduction in nuclear weapons, then it failed."

This is Clark's sad legacy and now she will shortly be approaching both these members of the Security Council for their endorsement for the top job in the United Nations.

It may be a few years since this happened, but it's my bet it will be remembered when she comes calling.

Michael Cox was a National MP for Manawatu from 1978 to 1987.