New Zealand finally has a foreign policy debate worthy of the name.

Foreign Minister Winston Peters got the ball rolling in his recent Institute of International Affairs speech.

Peters highlighted realism — which he identified with the idea of “taking the world as it is, not how we wish it to be” — as the National-led coalition’s guide on foreign policy.

The imperative to prudently leverage New Zealand’s agency as a small state practising diplomacy in an increasingly contested international environment was emphasised.

A clear position was taken on great power politics. There was a call for “an engaged America in the Pacific”, with the recent Cook Islands–New Zealand–US agreement to develop a port in the Penrhyn atoll in the Cook Islands celebrated as “a triple win”.

Our top trade partner, China, was not directly mentioned once. It did not need to be.

One would have to be living on the moon not to know which country Peters was blowing the whistle on for the “testing of missiles without permission”, practising “geopolitical manoeuvring in the Pacific”, and conducting “naval exercises edging ever-further southwards”.

The ruckus over the 2025 China-Cook Islands Comprehensive Strategic Partnership in 2025 inevitably came to mind as Peters identified the Cook Islands as “the most prominent” of our regional “foreign policy challenges”.

The rebuttal from Labour was swift, delivered in a speech less than 48 hours later by Labour foreign policy spokeswoman Vanushi Walters.

Walters’ vocabulary was very different. Front and centre were words such as identity (which she identified as a synonym for our values); moral clarity; defending peace; multilateral international institutions, notably the UN Charter and the International Criminal Court; international law; and maintaining equidistance between great powers.

The take-home from the Peters-Walters exchange is that there is an increasing divergence over how to define and implement our independent foreign policy.

This should not be a surprise. Truth be told, the cross-party consensus on New Zealand’s foreign policy has been fraying for quite a while.

A broad agreement characterised Wellington’s foreign policy during the Liberal International Order that lasted from the end of the Cold War in 1991 to the rise of China as peer competitor to the US after the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09.

That consensus risks becoming collateral damage in an increasingly tumultuous international environment.

The inclination to take this view is regrettable but compelling.

Earlier this year, a former Prime Minister publicly denigrated a sitting Prime Minister’s foreign policy as “a disgrace”, and the incumbent responded by appearing on media rather than having a private conversation with his predecessor.

Our current trajectory points away from consensus, toward increasing polarisation of foreign policy views.

Indeed, the differences transcend the political parties and have a broader inter-era quality.

For example, a little over a year ago, when our top trade partner China’s foreign policy in the South Pacific presents a significant challenge to New Zealand’s foreign and domestic security policy, two former New Zealand Prime Ministers from different political parties attended the 80th anniversary of World War 2 in Beijing.

The reason these foreign policy differences risk becoming intractable is because they reflect more fundamental disagreements over how to achieve security in an increasingly turbulent world.

Should security be achieved by investing in defence and alliances? How should we reconcile realism’s de-emphasis of explicit moral considerations in foreign policy with liberal values, international law, and multilateral international institutions?

Can we realistically avoid aligning with one side in the post-2017 era of US-China ‘strategic competition’?

At the University of Otago, I teach a paper that explores how we can interpret international security through the lens of the major theories of foreign policy — realism and its non-realist alternatives, which are known as liberalism and constructivism.

One core reading in the paper is by Stephen Walt, a professor from the Kennedy School at Harvard University.

Walt makes an insightful observation which bears on our increasingly fractious foreign policy discourse.

According to Walt, “everyone uses theories — whether he or she knows it or not — and disagreements on policy usually rest on more fundamental disagreements about the basic forces that shape international outcomes”.

If Walt is correct, and I believe he is, then we are in for a rough ride.

This is not necessarily a counsel of despair.

New Zealand has faced far harder times than the present and emerged the stronger for it. Think World War 1, the interwar years from 1919-39, World War 2, and the Cold War from 1946-91.

Hard times are exactly when leadership is required. And whichever party takes over the foreign policy reins after this year’s general election will have ample opportunity to demonstrate true leadership. — Newsroom

  • Dr Nicholas Khoo is an associate Professor, Politics, University of Otago.