Andrew Little – banging the drums of war

ByJohn Minto

We shouldn’t be surprised at last week’s defence assessments which argue for more defence spending and closer relations with “traditional allies” (European countries) in plans to contain and isolate China.

The assessments were produced by our defence establishment of conservative Eurocentric officials who hated the break with the US when we developed our anti-nuclear policy in the 1980s. They were appalled we were ejected from ANZUS and terrified at the prospect New Zealand would have a much more independent foreign policy and not automatically follow the stars and stripes.

These people – New Zealand’s deep state – have co-operated closely with the US for many decades. They are the people at our end of the “five eyes” spying alliance with “likeminded European countries” – the UK, USA, Australia and Canada are the other four. These are the people who grease the wheels of our co-operation with US global strategies – put on public display so obsequiously when we raided the Kim Dotcom mansion on behalf of corporate Hollywood in 2012.

With the Russian invasion of Ukraine last year they have seized back the initiative driven New Zealand hard back into the US orbit. In the space of 18 months we have had two Prime Ministers attend NATO meetings, have supplied military hardware to a war on the other side of the world and now have promised to dramatically increase Defence Force spending at the behest of the US.

They are determined to bury the last vestiges of any independent foreign policy we may have thought we had.

What is surprising though is that the new alignment in the US strategies against China have been so warmly endorsed by Defence Minister Andrew Little and the Labour government. As former Prime Minister Helen Clark says New Zealand is “abandoning its capacity to think for itself”.

Andrew Little’s announcements on Friday are helping to divide the world into competing camps. This is precisely what happened before the First World War as European countries split into empires pitted against each other with irresponsible, rising rhetoric deepening the divide and fanning resentment and hatred of the “other side”.

Wars always begin with words and Andrew Little delivered some of those words on Friday to the delight of the US and the dismay of China.

However Little’s words are not the voice of New Zealand. We must reject attempts to pressure us into the US camp. We must rebuild our voice as one of reason, responsibility and independence rather than mindless camp followers of the most brutal and destructive empire humanity has ever seen.

We must firmly reject being any part of AUKUS.

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29 Comments

  1. So is the answer independence with no defence capability at all? That doesn’t sound so smart either.

    1. I’m not sure I follow your point. For a fraction of the money currently spent on providing stormtroopers for the US to occupy human countries, we could have anti-ship missiles to sink any Australian or American ships that near our shores, and a secret police to arrest local subversives being paid by the CIA through front operations like the ‘National Endowment for Democracy’ ‘fellowships’. That would be plenty of protection.

  2. The original New Zealand Labour Party was founded as an anti-war socialist party, opposed to the pro-war capitalist Liberal and Reform parties.
    All three of the first founding members of the Labour Party to become MPs Harry Holland, Peter Fraser and Bob Semple had served prison sentences for their opposition to the First World War, the first major inter imperialist conflict for redivision of the world’s resources and colonial possessions.
    There is no way that any of the first Labour MPs would have posed for pictures before a war wagon in a lead up to another world war.

  4. I am not a Labour supporter and Andrew Little was a dreadful Minister of Health but he is on the right path with calling for build up of our armed forces and imroving ties with ANZUS. America is not perfect but China has a different set of values to us and it’s human rights are not that great .

    2. So, Trevor, America’s slaughter of millions in the Middle East and South East Asia is in line with your values? How very interesting.

    3. Wow Trevor – I think they are pretty much on an equal footing.
      How many countries has the USA, that great democracy bombed since world war II
      How many countries has China bombed since WWII

      They are both shits as far as I am concerned.

      I doubt really that the USA is a real democracy.
      and
      Of course I know China is an autocracy with more billionaires than any other country in the world!

      Independent foreign policy would be a fine thing.

  6. Has Minto taken the time to look at how China is ramping up it’s own defence spending?

    Or if so wondered at the reasoning behind these significant increases?

    Or if the aircraft carriers that China are increasingly bringing into service are more offensive rather than a defensive assets?

    Probably not.

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/04/china-military-budget-increase-again-appropriate-level#:~:text=Wang%20Chao%20said%20defence%20budget,2021%20and%206.6%25%20in%202020.

    1. What’s your point? I hope the Chinese liberate Hawa’ii from American occupation, but what does that have to do with us?

      2. I guess you would like China to liberate the Māori from the occupiers of NZ then MK?

      3. I hope the Chinese liberate Hawa’ii from American occupation MOHAMMED KHAN

        Swapping one foreign occupier for another is not a liberation.

        Occupation of Hawaii by China, wouldn’t be any more liberating than the US occupation of Hawaii. Occupation of Hawaii by China, wouldn’t be any more liberating than a successful occupation of Hawaii by the Japanese Empire would have been.

        Or for that matter, no more liberating than the attempted occupation of Hawaii by the Russian Empire would have been.

        All expansionist capitalist empires are rapacious and racist.

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMox2zT2s90&ab_channel=HistoryClass

    2. “Has Minto taken the time to look at how China is ramping up it’s own defence spending?”

      Probably and he has probably done what China has presumably done, which is to look at the list of violent, and mostly disastrous, operations that have involved frequently illegal US military interventions on foreign soil since 1945.
      Minto also probably looked at which superpower refuses to be bound by international judicial courts and similar bodies. Who is making a better effort to be responsible global citizen.

      USA’s record of very real military violence speaks far louder than any increase in China’s economic muscle and corresponding increases in its budgeted spending.

  7. This entire government has been a disaster from its 2017 start to (hopefully) its finish in October. There is not a single competent person in the entire cabinet (perhaps not in any of their MPs either). Worst Government of my lifetime, and that includes Muldoon who at least built things like the Marsden Oil Refinery, as opposed to this utterly reprehensible government that literally tore it down. Jacinanomics has left this country in a state of both despair and ruin. Slow clap.

  9. Eh! The israil government saying,, our biblical place shall stone age those dare question, eh! why you fear the question.

  10. Eh! The israil government saying,, our biblical place shall stone age those dare question, eh! why you fear the question.

  13. Minto living in the 80s still.
    China isn’t what it use to be.
    And we are way behind the times in terms of military preparedness.

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