Jacinda Ardern faces difficult decisions over emerging world order
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s efforts to reconnect New Zealand with the rest of the world have come at a time when the global picture is rapidly darkening, in ways that have massive implications for the country’s foreign policy and the way it interacts with the world.
Ardern spent the last week on a diplomatic trip to the United States, pushing the message that New Zealand was open for business and promoting the country’s tourism, agriculture and hospitality sectors.
It was only her second overseas trip since New Zealand closed its borders at the height of the original wave of COVID-19 back in April 2020.
Ardern shamelessly plugged New Zealand as a tourist destination on The Late Show, launched a new range of net-zero carbon beef in New York and helped introduce New Zealand companies to Black Rock, the world’s largest mutual fund company.
She even got to spend an hour and a half meeting with President Biden, and came away with a promise to look at non-tariff trade barriers – including those keeping New Zealand dairy farmers from supplier baby formula in the midst of the US shortage.
But for all the work Ardern did hustling for New Zealand business, her trip was overshadowed by a series of global events that point to a dark decade ahead for the global community, and some very difficult choices for a small Pacific country like New Zealand.
First came the news of significantly expanded Chinese ambition in the South Pacific, in the form of a proposed far reaching security pact between China and 10 Pacific nations.
Coming hot on the heels of the recent Solomon Islands/China deal, Ardern’s government found itself on the back foot domestically, with the opposition asking hard questions about how such a far-reaching proposed agreement could come as such a surprise, and whether the Government was doing enough to engage with Pacific neighbours.
More broadly, growing Chinese ambition in the region threatens the delicate foreign policy balance successive New Zealand governments have tried to strike. Since almost the dawn of the 21st century, New Zealand has looked to the United States and the US-led international order to guarantee its security, while increasingly looking to China and its rising middle class to underpin its economic growth. New Zealand’s recovery from the GFC was supported by rising exports to China, supercharged in 2008 by the signing of a world first Free Trade Agreement.
But as the rest of the world is finding, greater economic engagement with China has not resulted in political liberalisation from the Chinese government. Instead, China is trending in an increasingly authoritarian direction internally, and now raising its security ambitions internationally. This up-ends some of the core assumptions that have driven western policy towards China since the age of Richard Nixon.
These trends led Rodney Jones, one of New Zealand’s leading experts on China, to suggest this week that the country may need to rebalance its foreign policy away from trade and towards a security focus.
This seemed to be the trend after Ardern’s meeting with Biden, with joint statements about raising ambition, and noting concern about China’s activity in the pacific. These statements were met with a blistering response by China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian who accused New Zealand and the US of trying to “create disinformation and attack and discredit China.” This underscores the tension New Zealand faces in its relationship with China and how dependent the country has become on a major trading partner that does not always share New Zealand’s interests.
Traditionally, moving away from China would mean deepening New Zealand’s relationship with the US and asking it to play a more active security role in the region.
But Ardern’s US trip also highlighted growing problems within the United States that casts doubt on its reliability as a long term partner. Last week’s Texas school shooting illustrated perfectly the ongoing democratic stalemate in the US – where policies popular with the vast majority of voters, such as gun control, are unable to be progressed due to the Jim Crow-era filibuster rule.
This ongoing gridlock is feeding rising voter anger at the Biden administration and raises the spectre not only of a return to the White House for Donald Trump in 2024, but also the election of isolationist “American First” Republican candidates up and down the ballot.
An America under a second Trump term, strengthened by a more Trumpist Senate and House, would be unlikely to want to play the more active global role on liberalising trade, combating climate change and countering global extremism and authoritarianism that New Zealand wants to see from the world’s sole hyperpower.
The picture then for New Zealand is an authoritarian turn from its major trading partner, and then a more isolationist turn from its largest security partner.
And all of this is happening against a backdrop of rapid technological change, from the social media echo chambers that are deepening America’s internal divisions to the Chinese government’s expanding use of biological and digital surveillance on its own citizens.
This emerging order will mean difficult decisions ahead for Ardern and New Zealand as a country in the years to come.
As a small trading nation at the bottom of the world, New Zealand’s interests have always been in a liberal, open and democratic world order built on multilateralism and dialogue. As the country reconnects with the world in the post-pandemic years, we may see that vision slipping further and further away.
Hayden Munro was the campaign manager for Labour’s successful 2020 election win. He now works in corporate PR for Wellington-based firm Capital Communications and Government Relations.
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