ISDS a bigger threat than Isis

THE NOTION of an existential threat has gotten wide currency lately, as part of the effort to establish legitimacy of a military response to the ongoing violence in the Middle East. Isis - the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria - has been called such a threat.

When the PM, John Key, acting on his own initiative, decided to expose 140 New Zealanders to potential dangers in Iraq, he invoked the claim of existential threat with respect to Isis.

But what exactly is an existential threat?

The general understanding of the term is that the implicit danger posed is to the very life - the existence - of the country under threat. To qualify, the source of the threat would require the means and intention to deprive its target of essential elements of existence, either political, economic or in actual physical terms - the lives of its citizens.

Few can doubt that Nazi Germany posed such a threat with its expansionist and racist ideology and its capable military backed by a formidable industry.

But Isis? An existential threat? To the West, and to New Zealand in particular?

There's no denying that they're a brutal bunch, skilled in the warfare suited to the area - that is, a guerrilla war that relies on co-operation of local populations either through intimidation, or attraction, for continued support necessary to maintain a military campaign of duration.

However skilled they may be at recruiting propaganda of their horrific exploits, they lack the capacity, the ability and the intention of sailing to our shores.

Isis is the consequence of George Bush's strategic and tactical failures in Iraq. They are focused on the Syrian-Iraqi region in which this Sunni force, estimated at 25,000 fighters, seeks to restore the Islamic caliphate that existed until WWI. They want to redraw the arbitrary national boundaries that England's Gertrude Bell drew in 1921 to protect the oil and other economic interests of the Empire. Bell had the prescience to write about the Arabs: "No one knows exactly what they do want, least of all themselves, except that they don't want us."

Theirs is a regionally based conflict, tribal in structure, fanatically religious in ideology. The proper solution is containment, in that all the other military choices enlarge the conflict.

There does exist a threat to the economic, legal, and political system of New Zealand, one that might properly be characterised as existential. And nobody in our Government, and few beyond our shores is talking about it.

It is called ISDS. The Investor-State Dispute Settlement. ISDS is a means whereby investors (read corporations) may sue a government for lost corporate profits due to regulatory barriers of the defendant country. Regulatory barriers like environmental protections, health and safety rules, generic pharmaceuticals.

ISDS is part of the invasive TPPA (TransPacific Partnership Agreement), a trade agreement written to benefit multinational corporations. Those corporations, disguised as "investors", can marshal an army of high-priced litigators to take on the local and national rules of any partner country.

Here is the most alarming element. Only "investors" can sue countries (states) under the treaty, and only states (taxpayers) get to pay damages for breach of the treaty. The states can't sue the corporation/investors. That means for corporations it's heads I win, tails you lose.

New Zealand taxpayers will get to pay big time but nana will no longer have access to the generic medications she needs to live free of illness.

The informed reader may judge which is the more serious threat to our future as a democratic independent nation, providing for the common good and prosperity, Isis or ISDS? Two threats separated by a single acronymic letter, in the latter case by the letter "D".

So far that "D" is the grade I'd give to this Government in its blithe assurances.

Unlike Isis, We can learn about TPPA and ISDS, and join together to prevent this train wreck.

John Key says, in another worrisome context: "If you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to worry about." Yeah, right. ISDS is an existential threat we should all be worried about.

Jay Kuten is an American-trained forensic psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand for the fly fishing. He spent 40 years comforting the afflicted and intends to spend the rest afflicting the comfortable.