Source: New Zealand Government
Kia ora, aloha, good morning.
Interim President of the East-West Center, Jim Scott, distinguished guests.
It is an absolute pleasure to be here in Hawaii, leading a cross-party delegation through the Pacific. New Zealand’s commitment to the Pacific is foundational to who we are as a people. It transcends governments, political parties, and the disruptive events and controversies of the moment.
A core and enduring part of New Zealand’s approach is our determination to work with our Pacific brothers, sisters and cousins to forge together a more secure, more prosperous and more resilient future, which grows opportunities and possibilities for our peoples.
Our delegation is looking forward to an open, free-flowing discussion with you, representatives of the East-West Centre. This institution has, for generations, sought to promote dialogue about the developments in our region and the United States’ place in it. As the name of this Centre implies, the world works best when different cultures – from East to West – come together.
Before we start our discussion, I wanted to offer some reflections – as New Zealand’s Minister of Foreign Affairs – about the relationships binding New Zealand, the United States, the Pacific and the broader Indo-Pacific.
New Zealand and the United States are Pacific partners, as Hawaiians know well. Indeed, Auckland and Honolulu are two of the great Pacific cities: the northern and southern points of the so-called Polynesian triangle. Many, many Polynesians scattered across our vast, oceanic region have, over many, many generations, migrated to Auckland and Honolulu. These two wonderful cities stand as diverse, vibrant testaments to Polynesian histories and cultures.
We gather in Honolulu at an important, uncertain, anxious time in world affairs. Every day, we wake up to headlines about confronting events that are happening on the world stage.
It is a common human tendency to think that the events or ravages of the moment are unprecedented. That the challenges we face are uniquely urgent or complex. Indeed, the most overused word in politics is ‘crisis’. This, coupled with the hyperactive social media age we live in, can generate an urge to react too quickly and too stridently. To set out absolute principles to defend. To draw battle lines. To pick sides. To form teams. To fight.
But, being in Honolulu, it’s hard not to take a longer view of what the world is currently experiencing and of the choices facing New Zealand and our Pacific partners.
This morning, we were hosted on the USS Missouri, where the Pacific part of World War II formally came to an end. This was a reminder of the history of shared sacrifice that forever binds New Zealanders, Americans and people from throughout the Pacific.
Our peoples have fought, and died, together in defence of a free, open and democratic region . A region in which our people are free to elect their own political leaders and to worship the god of their choice. And a region, the Pacific, that lives up to the promise of that name.
But this dark, painful chapter in our history also provides the backdrop to the efforts we have collectively made, in the eight decades since, to painstakingly build an international order based on dialogue, compromise, diplomacy and trust. This determination not to go back to an era of global wars – to prefer jaw, jaw to war, war – must always be at the forefront of our minds.
In recent weeks, the tendency to hype up a debate about how international trade works into a black-and-white, polarising issue has been unfortunate and misguided. The use of military language – of a “trade war”, of the need to “fight”, of the imperative to form alliances in order to oppose the actions of one country – has at times come across as hysterical and short-sighted.
For a small country like New Zealand, when events are moving fast and changing day-by-day, the best course is almost always to be cautious, to be modest, to be pragmatic, and to be practical. To wait for the dust to settle before making choices we may later regret.
Working closely with our one formal ally, Australia, we are guided by a cool-headed assessment of New Zealand’s interests. Those assessments are formed by equally sober analysis of our relative strengths and vulnerabilities, rather than any desire to draw sharp lines in the sand, especially during times when the sand is shifting so fast its final shape is unknown.
There are historical parallels here. Notwithstanding our strong, indispensable and long-standing partnership during and since the two World Wars of the 20th Century, the governments and peoples of New Zealand and the United States have not always seen eye-to-eye. We have often fought side-by-side, but we have sometimes differed on certain military conflicts. New Zealand pursued a position on the nuclear issue with which the US disagreed. And US Presidents have not always been popular back home.
Some of us have been around long enough to witness the ironies in the cycles of history. In two World Wars, New Zealanders were there from the beginning – and our country lost more people per capita than almost any other. We have also contributed military forces towards trying to solve countless other conflicts, alongside other Western countries. So we know about sacrifice and burden-sharing.
But we also recall certain protestors, in New Zealand and across the Indo-Pacific, chanting “Yankees Go Home!” during the rancorous days of the late 1960s. Some of those protestors chanted those words perhaps unaware that, just a few decades earlier, their parents and grandparents had been praying that the Americans would arrive to save them.
We also recall the order-shattering change throughout American history. Presidents as different as Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan all, in historically significant ways, upended their inherited orthodoxies. Yet the enduring experiment in democratic government that was created by America’s Founders still stands, unbowed.
Appreciating this history also serves to quiet the breathless language of panic because what we are seeing now is what many of our predecessors have seen before. So, one lesson is that cool heads and quiet diplomacy will succeed where talk of “fighting” will not.
My view of the strategic partnership between New Zealand and the United States is this: we each have the right, indeed the imperative, to pursue our own foreign policies, driven by our own sense of national interest.
But close friends do not need to be, and should not be, confrontational and rude with one another, as New Zealand sometimes was towards the United States in the mid-to-late 1980s. And we should never forget what binds and unites us, bonds stronger and more long-lasting than the controversies and headlines of the moment.
We should give each other the benefit of the doubt and a fair hearing, seek to understand each other’s perspectives, and find common cause and common purpose.
New Zealand looks forward to working with the new US Administration to support a peaceful, prosperous and resilient Pacific and wider Indo-Pacific region. We look forward to continue partnering across the interdependent areas of security, economics and development.
We were in Washington DC recently, to meet representatives of the new US Administration, including the Secretary of State and the National Security Adviser. One message they had for us was that the United States expected New Zealand to carry our share of the burden in keeping our part of the world safe and prosperous.
This New Zealand government, through decisions on defence capability and development spending, is seeking to meet that challenge under difficult fiscal conditions. To carry, like we did in the war that ended on the USS Missouri, our part of the burden of keeping our region and our world safe, free and open. We do this because it’s the right thing to do. Because it’s in New Zealand’s interests.
One message we carried to Washington DC was that New Zealand wants, indeed needs, for the United States to remain an active, engaged and constructive partner in the Indo-Pacific.
Our discussions here in Honolulu over the next few days are designed to reinforce that message, and to carry forward the generations-old commitment of New Zealanders and Americans to work together for a more peaceful, more prosperous, and more resilient Pacific.
On this score, we valued our discussions in Washington DC last month and we look forward to more constructive dialogue in the days ahead. We acknowledge there is uncertainty and indeed anxiety over aspects of current US policy towards the Pacific. Part of that is a natural and regular consequence of a change of Administration in Washington. Part of it relates directly to recent US decision-making on such issues as development spending and tariffs – positions that, in our view, are still evolving.
But our message to both our American friends, and to our Pacific family, is a timeless one. As we work through the issues facing us today, let us treat one another with open minds, hear each other out, opt for quiet rather than megaphone diplomacy, and remember our collective purpose of pursuing and protecting a free, democratic, open, prosperous and resilient Pacific. Let us proceed carefully, cautiously, and always as friends.
In the coming days, we will be reflecting about the past as we contemplate the future. We will be having dialogue about the Pacific with representatives of the US Government, the governments of Northern Pacific countries Palau, Marshall Islands, and the Federated States of Micronesia, as well as the Hawaiian state Government.
We will be visiting the Bishop Museum, one of the world’s largest repositories of Pacific artefacts, and Pearl Harbor – where the Second World War was dramatically changed on one, fateful day. And we will be laying a wreath in honour of American and New Zealand servicemen who died in defence of our region.
As we go through this interesting and important programme here in Honolulu, we will seek to remember those enduring values and interests that unite New Zealand, the United States and the Pacific. And we will continue to promote careful, pragmatic, quiet dialogue – aimed at deescalation and practical problem solving, rather than premature posturing.
That is the Pacific Way.
Thank you.
