Truth in world affairs is not a single expert-narrated story.

National Politics

In our ‘official’ ‘United Nations’ world – the world referenced by the expression the international rules-based order – there are about 200 sovereign nation states (ie ‘countries’) which are equal members of the global community of nations. We mean equal in a juridical sense, not an economic or demographic sense; as recognised by ‘one nation, one vote’ in the United Nations General Assembly. Further, in this sanctioned and sanctified view – using the verb ‘sanction’ in its original old-fashioned sense – neither history nor geographical proximity matter; Mexico is as independent of the United States as it is of India.

Before moving on to geopolitics, there are four exceptions allowed within this official view. First is that there are numerous pieces of territory which are understood as too small – in population and/or land area – to be viable independent sovereign nation states. Second, some sovereign nation states – usually neighbours – may form a voluntary Union, whereby certain aspects of their sovereignty are ceded to centralised institutions. Third is that many citizens do not reside in the territories associated with their nationalities. And three exceptions not allowed for, but acknowledged to varying extents: countries that don’t exist but do exist; territories subject to internationally tolerated military occupation; and territories within recognised nation-states pushing for secession, though falling well short of either self-government or union with similarly-placed neighbouring territories.

An example of the first type of exception is Greenland, accounted for as a ‘realm’ territory of Denmark. (Other familiar realm territories are: Cook Islands [in the realm of New Zealand], American Samoa, and New Zealand’s closest foreign neighbour [Norfolk Island, in the realm of Australia].) The second exception is the European Union (noting that, in some circumstances – consider FIFA – the United Kingdom is also a Union of [four] nations). Might Canada join the European Union this century?

The third exception – the diaspora exception – applies to a degree to all nation states; and it applies particularly to New Zealand. New Zealand possibly has more citizens resident outside of New Zealand relative to citizens resident inside New Zealand; at least if we only consider countries with resident populations in excess of one million. Is New Zealand its citizenry or its territory? Given the realities of dual-citizenship, it is probably better defined as its territory along with its residentcitizens and denizens.

The fourth generally accepted exception is territories that are formally non-sovereign. Our example here is Antarctica. We may add the Moon.

Re the unsanctioned exceptions, Taiwan is the obvious example of the first type (other examples include Abkhazia and Somaliland) and Palestine is the obvious example of the second type. For the third (secessionist) type, I would cite Eastern Congo in which substantial domestic forces are in reality more aligned to nearby Kigali than faraway Kinshasa; I would also mention Myanmar’s Rakhine state, home to the Rohingya people.

Geopolitics

While the above ‘national politics’ narrative is real and contains a legal structure satisfying to its liberal architects, it is overlaid by an equally real (and quite different) geopolitical layer. Conflicts of big ego and big ideology can neither be understood nor resolved without substantial reference to geopolitics. Geopolitics is tied to both contested histories and geographical proximity. More than anything geopolitics is about empire (formal and informal), the unequal coalitions and powerplays among and between identities of people beyond and within territorial boundaries.

Geopolitics is about the centres of political power – the ‘great powers’ to use an expression from World War One – and their rival claims over the planet and its people. Geopolitical texts commonly refer to cities that are power centres, such as Washington and Berlin, rather than the countries in which those cities are located. Most conflict in the world can only be understood with recourse to geopolitics, which is largely the sociopathic politics of power masquerading as a set of struggles of ‘Good versus Evil’.

At least the president of the United States, DJT, is in a sense more honest than most ‘democratic’ leaders of powerful countries, in that he frames his acquisitive sentiments in the name of America rather than in the name of Good or in the name of God. Coveted Greenland looms larger in geopolitics than in national politics; in national politics it successfully hides in plain sight, as a large appendage of a semi-sovereign nation with a population barely larger than New Zealand.

Greenland: History

Greenland presently – at least formally – lies within the realm of Denmark, noting that ‘realm’ is itself a sanctioned rules-based exception. Denmark, as a member of the European Union, has delegated aspects of its sovereignty; from Copenhagen to Brussels and Paris and Berlin.

The first question to ask about Greenland is: why is it in the possession of the Kingdom of Denmark? Greenland was never conquered or colonised by Danes or by Denmark. Over 1,000 years ago, Greenland was colonised by Norse (ie Norwegian) Vikings. Greenland’s first people were Inuit, and the present population is substantially an Inuit/Norse mix. Around 500 years ago, Norway and Denmark formed a political union – a kingdom in which Denmark was the dominant partner – which lasted around 300 years. In that age of imperialism, Greenland became formally subject to that kingdom. This was a marriage between Denmark and Norway during the constrained period of the Little Ice Age. Greenland was ‘matrimonial property’ in this Union.

In 1814, Norway was passed on to Sweden through the Treaty of Kiel, in an era in which the wife was regarded as the property of the husband. Thus, Denmark formally gained Greenland as part of the divorce settlement. That remains the historical basis for Denmark’s claim over Greenland today. Though we remind ourselves that today’s reality is that Denmark is a somewhat junior partner in the polyamorous European Union. (Would Denmark get to keep Greenland if Denmark was to do a ‘Dexit’? Or would Greenland be passed on to the other husbands and wives?)

Greenland: Geography

Functionally, at least in geo-environmental terms, Greenland is the northern land-analogue of Antarctica. Arctica. While it doesn’t literally cover the North Pole (except that a large sheet of sea-ice extends from northern Greenland), it is near enough; and its land ice-sheet is certainly the northern analogue of the West Antarctica ice sheet. Based on this analogy, Greenland could become subject to a similar extranationalism to that which governs Antarctica. The difference of course is that Antarctica has no formally resident population; almost nobody was born there. The model could be adapted, with authentic Greenlanders becoming limited-power-landlords over an essentially international territory.

When I was a child, it was very common for families to have a globe in their living rooms, somewhere between the mantlepiece and the piano. About 15 years ago, I was lucky enough to have acquired a 3D jigsaw puzzle of the world; indeed, a small self-assembly globe. To see Greenland in perspective, it’s necessary to look at a globe. Short of that, see this satellite picture of North America from the Turtle Island page on Wikipedia.

(I was privileged to learn about Turtle Island when I visited Winnipeg in May 2019. When I walked through the Peace Park at The Forks, I learned for the first time about Turtle Island. See on YouTube: Winnipeg – the heart of Turtle Island. [And note this 16 December 2025 BBC story FBI foils New Year’s Eve terror plot across southern California, officials say relating to the Turtle Island Liberation Front.] I have a personal story about Greenland. While never having set foot there, I remember having a window seat flying from London to Los Angeles one October day. I saw the sun set somewhere northwest of Scotland; then a couple of hours later I saw it rise again, from the west, over Greenland. This was only possible because at such polar latitudes, an east-west flight is fast enough to be able to reverse the sunset.)

The map, in correct perspective, very much shows Greenland as a not-very-green part of North America. Its closest neighbour is of course Canada; indeed since 2022 Greenland has shared a land border with Greenland, on Hans Island in the Kennedy Channel, following the resolution of the Whisky War between Canada and Denmark. (It is unknown whether the Kennedy Channel was named after a Canadian fur-trader and politician, or the guy who was United States Secretary of the Navy in 1852 and 1853. If the latter, this might give false credence to DJT’s claim on Greenland for the United States.)

Greenland certainly looks to be geographically American – just as Norfolk Island geographically connects to New Zealand (on the Zealandia continent). But a geographical argument must also based on the connectivity between population centres. The flight distances from Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, to other capital cities are: Reykjavik, Iceland (1,430 km); Ottawa, Canada (2,560km); Dublin, Ireland (2,800km); Oslo, Norway (3,150km); London, UK (3,250km); Washington DC, US (3,260km); Brussels, EU (3,520km); Copenhagen, Denmark (3,530); Berlin, Germany (3,820); Moscow, Russia (4,630km); Beijing, China (8,400km).

Washington is closer to Nuuk than is Copenhagen. Dublin is the closest EU capital city to Nuuk, and is a more economically connected city to the North Atlantic than is Copenhagen. Brussels, formal capital of the EU is the same distance from Nuuk as is Copenhagen. Berlin, the geopolitical capital of the EU, is nearly 4,000 km from Nuuk (whereas New York, the power capital of the US is less than 3,000km from Nuuk). Moscow and Beijing are both much further from Greenland, have had no geopolitical influence there, and constitute no plausible geopolitical threat; future security issues in Greenland are more likely to emanate from piracy than from power centres in Asia.

While there is no argument in favour of the United States annexing or otherwise acquiring Greenland, the case for European Union control of Greenland is even weaker than that of the United States. The only European countries with credible claims to form a Union with Greenland are Norway and Iceland, on the basis of shared history and shared maritime geography.

Greenland: Demography

Greenland’s population of just under 60,000 is only slightly higher than the populations of the American realm territories of American Samoa and the Northern Marianas Islands. Guam has three times more people than Greenland. The American Virgin Islands, with 100,000 people, is more populated than Greenland. The largest American realm territory, Puerto Rico, has 300 times as many people as Greenland. Of these ‘countries’, only Puerto Rico is a serious candidate to become the 51st state of the United States. The Virgin Islanders don’t even drive on the same side of the road as the rest of the United States.

I suspect that the DJT vision for Greenland is for it to become something like the former Panama Canal Zone; a former American territory that existed when I sailed through the Panama Canal in 1974. Of course we are aware that DJT would like to re-acquire that Panamanian territory for the United States.

Greenland is different though, in the same way that Antarctica is. It has many potentially valuable mining resources; and it lies on economically significant sea channels which are becoming more navigable thanks to climate change. And it has global environmental values. A collapse of the Greenland Ice Sheet would drown all of Manhattan and most of the rest of New York; as well as much of other cities mentioned above such as Dublin, London and Copenhagen.

Greenland as Arctica

Greenland’s people can become landlords – but not landlords with monopoly power – able to procure citizens’ royalties (public property rights) from both extractive industries and the use of its sea-lanes. Greenland requires a Treaty of Nuuk, with a limited concession of sovereignty in return for those benefits; but a concession that leaves property rights in Greenland essentially the same as property rights in Antarctica.

Antarctica today represents geopolitics done quite well.

The Greenland question needs to be addressed. It is not sufficient for it to become a de facto territory of Europe – which eventually means Berlin. And it is too large a landmass to be independent in the way that Iceland is.

Warning

By understanding Greenland essentially as an inhabited Anti-Antarctica – as Arctica – we have to realise that the present United States regime may seek to undermine (literally and metaphorically) current arrangements for Antarctica. And when DJT turns his gaze southwards, he may look upon independent sovereign countries in the South Pacific as parts of his growing fiefdom. The South Pacific is America’s gateway to McMurdo Sound, in Antarctica. A number of ‘independent’ and proud countries in the South Pacific – Tonga, for example – already dutifully vote largely according to the United States’ say-so in the United Nations.

If Antarctica becomes a template for Greenland, that’s a definite improvement on the present accidental and unsustainable arrangement; but only if Antarctica’s present governance arrangements are preserved.

Watch what happens if Nasa’s Artemis Program successfully re-lands American men on the Moon. The Washington regime may lay claim to privileged property rights over the Moon – much as Wentworth acquired New Zealand’s South Island in 1839, requiring a treaty (Treaty of Waitangi) to repudiate that claim. If the United States believes it owns the Moon, it may stake a similar claim on Antarctica; and also seek to extend its Pacific realm. Citing America’s security! And breaking the Seventh and Tenth Commandments.

While current American-led geopolitics poses a deeply problematic story for resource-rich and low-populated territories, the expert-led official story of international politics is problematic too. The status-quo is not necessarily the best solution.

*******

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Post-pandemic economics and the rise of national populism – Wherever we look today, whether it be through a political, economic, or security lens, we can see the consequences of post-pandemic economic instability.

And politically, the rise of national populism is in evidence, as is an apparent anti-incumbent mood among voters.

In this podcast, Paul G Buchanan and Selwyn Manning assess the global Zeitgeist and what impact post-pandemic economics is having on geopolitics and geo-economics.

INTERACTION WHILE LIVE:

Paul and Selwyn encourage their live audience to interact while they are live with questions and comments.

To interact during the live recording of this podcast, go to Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/

Remember to subscribe to the channel.

For the on-demand audience, you can also keep the conversation going on this debate by clicking on one of the social media channels below:

• Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/
• Facebook.com/selwyn.manning
• Twitter.com/Selwyn_Manning

RECOGNITION: The MIL Network’s podcast A View from Afar was Nominated as a Top Defence Security Podcast by Threat.Technology – a London-based cyber security news publication. Threat.Technology placed A View from Afar at 9th in its 20 Best Defence Security Podcasts of 2021 category.

You can follow A View from Afar via our affiliate syndicators.

Post-pandemic economics and the rise of national populism – Wherever we look today, whether it be through a political, economic, or security lens, we can see the consequences of post-pandemic economic instability.

And politically, the rise of national populism is in evidence, as is an apparent anti-incumbent mood among voters.

So today, Paul and I will assess the global Zeitgeist and what impact post-pandemic economics is having on geopolitics and geo-economics.

Live Audience: Remember, if you are joining us live via the social media platforms, feel free to comment as we can include your comments and questions in this programme.

INTERACTION WHILE LIVE:

Paul and Selwyn encourage their live audience to interact while they are live with questions and comments.

To interact during the live recording of this podcast, go to Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/

Remember to subscribe to the channel.

For the on-demand audience, you can also keep the conversation going on this debate by clicking on one of the social media channels below:

• Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/
• Facebook.com/selwyn.manning
• Twitter.com/Selwyn_Manning

RECOGNITION: The MIL Network’s podcast A View from Afar was Nominated as a Top Defence Security Podcast by Threat.Technology – a London-based cyber security news publication. Threat.Technology placed A View from Afar at 9th in its 20 Best Defence Security Podcasts of 2021 category.

You can follow A View from Afar via our affiliate syndicators.

And at a macro level, Paul and Selwyn assess how ‘Post-Colonial Blowback’ is a power giving rise to the Global South and its worldwide influence in global geopolitics.

INTERACTION:

Paul and Selwyn encourage their live audience to interact while they are live with questions and comments.

To interact during the live recording of this podcast, go to Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/

Remember to subscribe to the channel.

For the on-demand audience, you can also keep the conversation going on this debate by clicking on one of the social media channels below:

• Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/
• Facebook.com/selwyn.manning
• Twitter.com/Selwyn_Manning

RECOGNITION: The MIL Network’s podcast A View from Afar was Nominated as a Top Defence Security Podcast by Threat.Technology – a London-based cyber security news publication. Threat.Technology placed A View from Afar at 9th in its 20 Best Defence Security Podcasts of 2021 category.

You can follow A View from Afar via our affiliate syndicators.

In an analytical essay titled ‘A moment of friction’ political scientist Dr Paul Buchanan wrote how we are living within a decisive moment of world affairs.

Paul wrote of a decisive moment of transition for the world’s contrasting and conflicting powers, and stated that 2024 is significant; “… because it is the period where force has become the major arbiter of who rises and who falls in the systemic transitional shuffle.”

So in this podcast, the first episode of A View from Afar, Series 5, Paul and Selwyn focus on this writing, and take listeners on a journey through this example of strategic study, a discussion that will help us to place a context to the world, as we are currently experiencing it.

(Ref. https://www.kiwipolitico.com/2024/04/a-moment-of-friction/ )

Paul and Selwyn encourage their live audience to interact while they are live with questions and comments.

To interact during the live recording of this podcast, go to Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/ Remember to subscribe to the channel.

For the on-demand audience, you can also keep the conversation going on this debate by clicking on one of the social media channels below: Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/ Facebook.com/selwyn.manning Twitter.com/Selwyn_Manning

RECOGNITION: The MIL Network’s podcast A View from Afar was Nominated as a Top Defence Security Podcast by Threat.Technology – a London-based cyber security news publication. Threat.Technology placed A View from Afar at 9th in its 20 Best Defence Security Podcasts of 2021 category.

You can follow A View from Afar via our affiliate syndicators.

Timing is everything. And from China’s perspective, this week’s visit by its foreign minister to New Zealand could be coming at just the right moment. The visit by Wang Yi to Wellington will be his first since 2017.

Anniversaries are important to Beijing. It is more than just a happy coincidence that the visit is taking place during the tenth anniversary year of the signing of a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership between China and New Zealand.

That agreement, signed during a visit to Wellington by Xi Jinping in November 2014, marked the start of glory days for bilateral trade. New Zealand’s exports to China have roughly doubled in value since Xi’s visit. They now stand at nearly $NZ21 billion annually. Imports are not far behind, but there is still a trade surplus of some $NZ3 billion in New Zealand’s favour.

Indeed, China has been New Zealand’s biggest two-way trading partner since 2017. A consistent flow of agricultural exports to China – especially milk powder and meat – helped to keep New Zealand afloat during the Covid-19 pandemic while both countries’ borders were closed.

However, New Zealand’s exports to China fell last year for the first time (except for covid-affected 2020) since the 2014 pact was signed. Goods exports took a particular tumble, falling $NZ1.7 billion from 2022 levels in the year to December 2023. Only a post-pandemic recovery in services exports, driven by travel, was able to mask a greater fall. But it was not enough to prevent a $NZ500 million drop overall.

The removal of China’s last remaining tariffs on New Zealand dairy products at the start of 2024 may provide some hope for improvement this year.

But forecasts for China’s economy are mixed and a bumpy post-Covid 19 recovery seems likely. After an expansion of 5.2 per cent in 2023, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicts China’s economy will grow by only 4.6 per cent this year and 4.1 per cent in 2025.

Given its food-focused exports, New Zealand is particularly vulnerable to sluggish Chinese economic growth. Tourism is also affected: visitor numbers from China for November 2023 were just 52 per cent of those seen during the same month four years earlier, before the pandemic.

A visit by Wang Yi cannot solve these wider macroeconomic problems. But it will put New Zealand’s crucial relationship with China in the spotlight.

There is every chance the trip could set the stage for an anniversary year visit to Wellington by Xi Jinping later in 2024.

However, whether this occurs will be highly dependent on New Zealand’s next steps in relation to Aukus.

It can be taken as read that Wang will have strong words for Winston Peters, his New Zealand counterpart, about Wellington’s apparent enthusiasm to entertain joining ‘Pillar II’ of the new pact.

The tea leaves are still being read after Labour lost power in the October 2023 election and a new three-way, centre-right coalition led by the National Party’s Christopher Luxon took office the following month.

A joint statement issued by Australia and New Zealand after the countries’ foreign and defence ministers met in Melbourne in early February claimed Aukus was making ‘a positive contribution toward maintaining peace, security and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific.’

Reaction from the Chinese Embassy in Wellington to the text was typically furious. In an apparent reference to another section of the joint statement which expressed ‘grave concerns about human rights violations in Xinjiang’, a spokesperson argued that ‘groundless accusations have been made on China’s internal affairs’.

Meanwhile, on Aukus, the Embassy asserted that the pact ran counter to ‘the common interests of regional countries pursuing peace, stability and common security’. The spokesperson asked ‘relevant countries’ to ‘cherish the hard-won environment for peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific region, and be prudent with their words and action to maintain peace, stability and development’.

An indirect, yet ultimately harder-hitting rebuke came from the Chinese Ambassador to New Zealand himself, Wang Xiaolong. Lamenting a lack of options after a last-minute cancellation of a flight to Auckland the day after the joint statement was issued, the Ambassador posted on X: ‘Stuck at Wellington airport clueless as to what to do due to the cancellation of my flight to Auckland and the lack of alternatives. Right now, I am really missing the high-speed trains back in China.’

The displeasure could not be clearer.

Earlier, New Zealand’s new government had sought to move swiftly on Aukus, particularly after Labour itself had laid the groundwork for the new Government by issuing a set of three hawkish defence blueprints just months before the election.

In December, Judith Collins, the defence minister, said that a failure to join Aukus in some form was ‘a real opportunity lost by the previous government’. Christopher Luxon then appeared to back her, telling media: ‘we’re interested in exploring Pillar II, particularly in Aukus, and the new technologies and the opportunities that may mean for New Zealand’. Meanwhile, Winston Peters called for greater NZ-US cooperation in the Pacific, saying ‘we will not achieve our shared ambitions if we allow time to drift’.

However, the Aukus tide may be turning.

Bonnie Jenkins, the US Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security, visited New Zealand in early March and told media: ‘we’re still in the process of having discussions about additional partners’, adding ‘that’s not where we’re at right now’.

Speech notes for an address to be given by Jenkins also seemed restrained.

The lack of a concrete Aukus membership offer is not a new argument. In May 2023, New Zealand’s then Labour Prime Minister Chris Hipkins called the idea of joining ‘purely hypothetical’.

However, gradual shifts in language since then – culminating with Luxon’s comments in December – had suggested that a more specific proposal was afoot.

A looming US election was also a logical reason for New Zealand to act on Aukus sooner rather than later.

But perhaps nothing had ever really changed. A new government in Wellington might have been getting ahead of itself.

Alternatively, it could be that a rethink is now going on in Canberra, London and Washington over the merits of asking Wellington – or others – to become involved with Aukus at all.

In New Zealand itself, opposition to the deal also appears to be increasing in intensity. Labour is appearing to back away from its ‘open to conversations’ approach to Aukus that was set by former Prime Minister Chris Hipkins during a visit by Anthony Blinken to New Zealand in July.

In February, Phil Twyford, the party’s associate foreign affairs spokesperson, described Aukus as an ‘offensive warfighting alliance against China’. And David Parker, Labour’s main spokesperson, said ‘we’re not convinced we should be positioning China as a foe’.

The same month, high-profile former Labour Prime Minister Helen Clark co-wrote an opinion piece in the New Zealand Herald newspaper with Don Brash, a former right-wing rival. The strongly-worded article called on Luxon to ‘reassert New Zealand’s independent foreign policy by making it clear that we want no part of Aukus’.

Finally, questions are being asked in Australia about the future of the original purpose of Aukus – to give Canberra nuclear-powered submarines – following a US decision to cut production of ‘Virginia’ class submarines in half from 2025.

Adding to the uncertainty is Donald Trump’s presumptive nominee status in the US presidential election campaign. A survey conducted in August 2023 found 37 per cent of Australians thought Canberra should pull out of the wider Anzus alliance if Trump wins in November. Meanwhile, Trump’s own stance on the Aukus deal remains unknown.

If all is not well with ‘Pillar I’ of Aukus, it is hard to see an expansion to ‘Pillar II’ in the short-term.

For China’s Wang Yi, the potential wavering over Aukus is an opportunity.

The clock is certainly ticking, but no final decisions have been made.

There is still time for Beijing to make its case to Wellington.

Geoffrey Miller is the Democracy Project’s geopolitical analyst and writes on current New Zealand foreign policy and related geopolitical issues. He has lived in Germany and the Middle East and is a learner of Arabic and Russian. He is currently working on a PhD at the University of Otago on New Zealand’s relations with the Gulf states.

This article can be republished for free under a Creative Commons copyright-free license. Attributions should include a link to the Democracy Project (https://democracyproject.nz)

In this the twelfth episode of A View from Afar for 2023 political scientist Dr Paul Buchanan and Selwyn Manning note and discuss some of the big world events that have occurred and are occurring in 2023.

And in particular, Paul and Selwyn discuss the rise of the Global South; evaluate the the wars that continue to rage in Ukraine and Gaza; and tensions in the South China Sea.

Plus they note, with particular reference the trends that will become prominent in 2024, including the decline of Western democracies and a rightward turn in many places (including in Argentina and New Zealand in their respective 2023 elections).

INTERACTION WHILE LIVE:

Paul and Selwyn encourage their live audience to interact while they are live with questions and comments.

To interact during the live recording of this podcast, go to Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/

Remember to subscribe to the channel.

For the on-demand audience, you can also keep the conversation going on this debate by clicking on one of the social media channels below:

• Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/
• Facebook.com/selwyn.manning
• Twitter.com/Selwyn_Manning

RECOGNITION: The MIL Network’s podcast A View from Afar was Nominated as a Top Defence Security Podcast by Threat.Technology – a London-based cyber security news publication. Threat.Technology placed A View from Afar at 9th in its 20 Best Defence Security Podcasts of 2021 category.

You can follow A View from Afar via our affiliate syndicators.

New Zealand’s international relations are under new management. And Winston Peters, the new foreign minister, is already setting a change agenda.

As expected, this includes a more pro-US positioning when it comes to the Pacific – where Peters will be picking up where he left off. Peters sought to align New Zealand more closely with the United States under his ‘Pacific Reset’ policy that he launched while serving as foreign minister under Jacinda Ardern’s Labour-New Zealand First coalition government from 2017-2020.

Peters is wasting no time in getting back on the foreign affairs horse.

Just three days after being sworn in as a minster, he gave his first speech on foreign policy at the US Business Summit in Auckland last week.

Peters was lavish in his praise for the US in his address, arguing that Washington had been ‘instrumental in the Pacific’s success’. But he noted that ‘there is more to do and not a moment to lose. We will not achieve our shared ambitions if we allow time to drift.’ Adding that ‘speed and intensity’ would be needed, Peters said ‘the good news is that New Zealand stands ready to play its part.’

The early timing of the speech itself is a sign that New Zealand’s new, yet very familiar foreign affairs minister is unlikely to wait around when it comes to taking major decisions.

It was an important, agenda-setting address.

There were strong hints that New Zealand’s new Government wants to move swiftly when it comes to Wellington’s potential involvement in in ‘Pillar II’ of the AUKUS defence pact that currently involves Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Peters’ disclosed in the Q&A to the speech that he had already talked to Judith Collins, the new defence minister, about New Zealand’s AUKUS stance.

The previous Labour government’s position was that AUKUS remained a hypothetical question while no formal offer existed for New Zealand to join ‘Pillar II’ of the high-level defence pact that currently involves Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.

But while playing for time in an election year, the then Prime Minister Chris Hipkins signalled in July that New Zealand was at least ‘open to conversations’ about joining the pact in some form. And Labour’s expedited release of three major defence strategy documents in August, just prior to the election campaign, laid the groundwork for at least formal consideration of involvement in AUKUS.

The reports also paved the way for New Zealand to spend vastly more on its military and to take a more security-focused approach to the Pacific – recommendations that Peters will probably be keen to implement.

Wellington and Washington have been becoming closer since at least November 2010, when US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited New Zealand’s capital to sign the ‘Wellington Declaration’. The relatively short agreement served to clear the air after decades of chequered bilateral relations stemming from the Fourth Labour Government’s introduction of a nuclear-free policy in the 1980s.

Going nuclear-free (which prevented visits from US warships) saw New Zealand cast out as a US ally. Washington formally suspended its obligations to Wellington under the ANZUS defence treaty in 1986. But nearly 40 years on, US-NZ relations are rapidly deepening, a trend that has been accelerated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Western concerns over China’s rise in the Indo-Pacific.

Since February 2022, New Zealand has imposed sanctions on Russia, joined US-led groupings such as Partners in the Blue Pacific (PBP) and the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) and sent its Prime Ministers to successive NATO summits. And in May 2022, Jacinda Ardern visited Joe Biden at the White House, where a 3000-word joint statement called for ‘new resolve and closer cooperation’.

Meanwhile, a string of senior US officials have visited New Zealand just this year, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Kritenbrink and the White House’s Indo-Pacific coordinator, Kurt Campbell (who Joe Biden recently nominated to become his new Deputy Secretary of State).

If New Zealand does join AUKUS, it could spell the effective end of the country’s ‘independent foreign policy’. The ANZUS break-up of the late 1980s, the end of the Cold War and the acceleration of globalisation had allowed New Zealand to free itself from blocs. Wellington talked to anyone and everyone, building solid, trade-focused relations with China and others in the Global South – while not neglecting Western partners, including the United States.

Peters may think the current geopolitical environment justifies a new approach.

If he does, he should prepare for significant pushback. Helen Clark, who was Prime Minister during Winston Peters’ first term as foreign minister from 2005-8, posted on Friday that New Zealand was now ‘veering towards signing up’ to AUKUS despite bipartisan support over decades for the independent foreign policy stance.

This added to criticism from Clark earlier in the year, including in August, when she argued the new defence blueprint showed New Zealand was ‘abandoning its capacity to think for itself & instead is cutting & pasting from 5 Eyes’ partners’.

It should also be remembered that Winston Peters, while undoubtedly powerful and highly experienced, is only one Government minister. The views of Judith Collins – the defence minister – remain unknown in any detail, while the foreign policy positions of Christopher Luxon seem more centrist than radical.

Moreover, with the US now firmly focused on the war between Hamas and Israel – and its own presidential election year fast approaching – it is far from guaranteed that the hypothetical AUKUS question will turn into a concrete one for New Zealand anytime soon.

Moreover, Peters’ initial ministerial comments on New Zealand’s own position towards the Middle East suggest there is plenty of room for nuance. Calling the death toll in Gaza ‘horrific’, Peters welcomed a short-lived extension to the ceasefire on Friday, but called for all parties to ‘work urgently towards a long-term ceasefire’.

And in a radio interview earlier last week, Peters said ‘the ceasefire is not good enough, we’re going to have find a way forward through this and a peaceful solution – that’s what New Zealand and the Western world has got to put its focus on’.  Peters added ‘internationally we need to be talking to people across the political divide who are making sense on this matter’.

Talking to all sides and playing a small role in facilitating a sustainable political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would very much be in keeping with New Zealand’s independent foreign policy approach – and Winston Peters is already speaking out strongly about the war.

With Christopher Luxon passing up on the opportunity to attend COP28 in Dubai at the weekend, Winston Peters will have the chance to make the Government’s first ministerial trip to the Middle East to begin this dialogue. The Gulf states would be a natural starting point for these discussions.

Meanwhile, on Ukraine – the war that helped to speed up New Zealand’s alignment with the US in 2022 – Peters was open to the idea of New Zealand upgrading its military support to Ukraine by sending Kyiv light armoured vehicles (LAVs). While noting that the decision was not up to him alone, he added ‘if we can help we should be doing the best we can’.

Labour had denied a request from Ukraine to provide the LAVs in 2022 and of late had preferred to make financial contributions to Kyiv’s war effort – the most recent being a $NZ4.7 million package announced by Chris Hipkins in July at the NATO leaders’ summit in Lithuania.

It all adds up to a complex picture.

Winston Peters has no shortage of global issues to address.

And there could be some major changes ahead for New Zealand foreign policy.

*******

Geoffrey Miller is the Democracy Project’s geopolitical analyst and writes on current New Zealand foreign policy and related geopolitical issues. He has lived in Germany and the Middle East and is a learner of Arabic and Russian. He is currently working on a PhD at the University of Otago on New Zealand’s relations with the Gulf states.

The COP28 countdown is on.

Over 100 world leaders are expected to attend this year’s UN Climate Change Conference in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which starts next Thursday.

Among the VIPs confirmed for the Dubai summit are the UK’s Rishi Sunak and Brazil’s Lula da Silva – along with King Charles and Pope Francis.

On the other hand, Joe Biden and Xi Jinping are both unlikely to join in – and neither is Australia’s Anthony Albanese.

It remains to be seen which camp New Zealand’s new Prime Minister will fall into. Christopher Luxon is only expected to be formally sworn in as PM on Monday, following the conclusion of several weeks of coalition negotiations to form a new government.

But in theory, this would still leave plenty of time for Luxon to fly to the ‘World Climate Action Summit’ opening event for world leaders, which is being held from December 1-2.

Luxon positioned his National Party firmly in the centre during the election campaign, committing New Zealand to meeting its emissions reductions targets and telling sceptics ‘you can’t be a climate denier or a climate minimalist in 2023’.

Beyond the issue of climate change itself, COP28 would be a valuable initial networking and relationship-forming opportunity for New Zealand’s new Prime Minister. And to some extent, the Dubai gathering would be a make-up affair for Luxon, after he missed the APEC summit in San Francisco in mid-November due to the ongoing coalition negotiations.

It is safe to say that the ongoing war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas will be a major topic of sideline conversations at this year’s COP.

While Luxon missed the chance to meet Xi and Biden at APEC, COP28 would be a good chance for Luxon to hear the views of a range of other world leaders – particularly voices from across the Middle East.

Somewhat surprisingly, New Zealand’s former PM Jacinda Ardern never went to a COP summit during her six years in office. The last time a New Zealand PM was represented was in 2015, when John Key attended COP21 in Paris.

Coincidentally, 2015 was also the year that Key visited the Gulf states on a three-country tour of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the UAE that sought to jumpstart New Zealand’s bid to strike a free trade deal with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). The bloc’s membership also includes Bahrain, Oman and Qatar.

In September, New Zealand’s then Labour government began talks with the UAE on a new bilateral Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement – or CEPA. The CEPA could be a stepping stone to finalising a wider free trade agreement with the GCC that has been in the works since 2006.

With trade opportunities in the Gulf beckoning and no end in sight to the war in Gaza, the Middle East is likely to be higher up the foreign affairs agenda for New Zealand than might have previously been thought.

On the climate front, COP28’s head appointed by host UAE, Dr Sultan al Jaber, has emphasised ‘inclusivity’ as a key plank of this year’s event. Bringing together a wide range of countries around the table, despite deepening geopolitical polarisation driven by the Gaza and Ukraine wars and tensions in the Indo-Pacific, may be the summit’s most impressive achievement.

Israel pledged in July to send a 1000-strong delegation to Dubai, led by both its Prime Minister and President. The size will now be greatly reduced – but, remarkably, Israel is still coming and will still have a pavilion at COP28. While the war has strained relations between the UAE and Israel that were normalised under the Abraham Accords in 2020, diplomatic ties remain in place.

Speaking shortly prior to the outbreak of the war that began on October 7, the UAE’s Ambassador to New Zealand, His Excellency Mr. Rashed Matar Alqemzi, told me in an interview that ‘we are bringing the world together’ and emphasised the welcome being extended by COP28 to women, religious organisations, youth and indigenous peoples.

In New Zealand’s case, this includes Māori, whose role at Expo 2020 in Dubai was ‘greatly valued’ according to Alqemzi. New Zealand’s Iwi Chairs Forum, a coalition of Māori tribal leaders, was given the task of leading a ‘Festival of Indigenous and Tribal Ideas’ during the Expo. Two years on, COP28 will be held on the same Expo 2020 site on Dubai’s southern fringe.

The aim for ‘full inclusivity’ is more controversial, however, when it refers to the involvement of oil companies and their executives at the summit – including Dr Sultan Al Jaber himself, who also heads the UAE’s state-owned oil company, ADNOC.

Since he was given the role in January, Al Jaber’s appointment has frequently been criticised by climate campaigners, with one likening it to putting a tobacco company in charge of the World Health Organization.

The counter-argument – as put by Al Jaber himself in a speech to oil company executives in October – is that fossil fuel producers are ‘central to the solution’ and need to stop ‘blocking progress’.

While these words are unlikely to convince campaigners who see greenwashing, there is some cause for optimism ahead of COP28.

A recent agenda for the summit released by Al Jaber called for a ‘responsible phase-down of unabated fossil fuels’ – a reference to the burning of oil, gas and coal without the use of carbon capture technology.

The call to ‘phase-down’ the use of at least some fossil fuels altogether represents a small, yet significant shift from earlier this year, when Al Jaber was called out by former UN climate head Christiana Figueres for speaking merely of ‘phasing out fossil fuel emissions’.

On the other hand, ‘phase-down’ is weaker than the total ‘phase-out’ language used by a recent UN report and agreed upon by the EU as its negotiating position for COP28.

The debate over phasing-down vs. phasing-out is unlikely to go away any time soon.

The need for speed has to be balanced with fairness – especially for the world’s poorest.

In his agenda, Al Jaber called for global emissions reductions of 22 gigatons – almost half the current level – by 2030, but also for a ‘just energy transition’ that ensures energy supplies remain affordable and reliable to all.

Threading this needle will not be easy.

Some parallels might be drawn with New Zealand’s own attempts to reduce agricultural emissions, which make up half of the country’s greenhouse gases – mainly due to the methane produced by livestock.

After originally pledging to bring farming into the country’s Emissions Trading Scheme, Jacinda Ardern’s Labour-led Government agreed in 2019 to work with industry groups on an alternative pricing model and technologies to reduce agricultural emissions.

A deal was announced at the end of 2022, but it collapsed this year with key industry players and Christopher Luxon’s National Party withdrawing their support. Now in Government, National is delaying the introduction of a pricing system until 2030 – well beyond Sultan Al Jaber’s deadline for action.

At the global level, agriculture is a small contributor when it comes to emissions.

By far the lion’s share comes from the burning of fossil fuels – oil, gas and coal.

While the Gulf may be looking to a future beyond oil – and focusing on education, services and technology – the fact remains that there are plenty of players with a lot to lose and everything to gain from delaying the decarbonisation process.

New Zealand’s chequered experience with a joint government-industry effort to reduce agricultural emissions may offer a salutary lesson.

Keeping everyone at the table is harder than it looks.

Still, it is worth keeping the bigger picture in mind.

Al Jaber’s drive for inclusiveness is very much in keeping with the UAE’s current overall foreign policy stance.

Despite pressure from Western capitals, Abu Dhabi has steadfastly maintained relations with Moscow since Russia invaded Ukraine – and the UAE has resisted the temptation to cut its newly forged diplomatic ties with Israel, despite overwhelming backing on the ‘Arab street’ for the Palestinian cause.

Meanwhile, with COP28 just around the corner, Ambassador Alqemzi says his message for the summit’s critics is ‘let’s see what the UAE will do – and then we can talk again’.

It is a pivotal time for the Middle East.

Christopher Luxon could learn a great deal in Dubai.

*******

Geoffrey Miller is the Democracy Project’s geopolitical analyst and writes on current New Zealand foreign policy and related geopolitical issues. He has lived in Germany and the Middle East and is a learner of Arabic and Russian. Disclosure: Geoffrey attended the recent Global Media Congress in the UAE as a guest of the organisers, the Emirates News Agency.

The BRICS are back.

Johannesburg will this week host the 15^th annual summit of the BRICS, an acronym for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

The loose grouping may be about to become tighter – and bigger.

Some 40 countries have expressed interest in joining the BRICS, which already represent over 40 per cent of the world’s population and 30 per cent of global GDP when measured using purchasing power parity (PPP).

Potential new BRICS members span the globe, from Africa to Asia and Latin America. Candidates and formal applicants include Argentina, Egypt, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

The timing of the surge in interest might seem surprising.

After all, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has seen Vladimir Putin become a pariah in the West – and problematic even elsewhere, thanks to the arrest warrant for the Russian president issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in March.

South Africa and the ICC’s 122 other member states are obliged to enforce the warrant – which explains why it was decided ‘by mutual agreement’ that Putin would attend this week’s summit only virtually.

This does not mean the Global South wants to completely isolate Russia. Heads of state from 17 African countries – including South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa and Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi – attended a Russia-Africa summit in Moscow in July.

Ramaphosa is among those working the diplomatic track to try and find a pathway to peace in Ukraine. He is not the only one: in early August, Saudi Arabia also hosted talks in Jeddah that included representatives from more than 40 countries – including China, India, the US and Ukraine itself. On this occasion at least, Russia was not invited.

It remains to be seen whether the BRICS can – or want to – transform themselves into a larger grouping of Global South countries.

For New Zealand, the potential for an enlarged BRICS poses something of a dilemma.

Until now, the BRICS has been mainly an informal grouping. There is no BRICS secretariat.

However, if the BRICS decide to expand their club and adopt more formal structures, New Zealand would almost certainly rule out engagement because of Russia’s involvement.

Wellington has firmly backed the Western position on Ukraine since the war began, placing sanctions on Moscow and sending military support to Kyiv.

At the leader level, a visit to China in June by New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has been the exception that proves the rule.

The travel patterns of Hipkins and his predecessor, Jacinda Ardern, have heavily favoured Western destinations such as Australia, EU countries, the UK and the US. Only a handful of trips have been to countries that would be considered part of the Global South.

The picture looks a little different when it comes to the travel schedule for Nanaia Mahuta, New Zealand’s foreign minister.

This year, Mahuta has visited three of the BRICS countries – India, China and South Africa. She has also visited Indonesia – for ASEAN meetings – and, in the Pacific, Fiji and Vanuatu.

To be fair, these destinations have been part of a wider travel schedule in 2023 that has also included Brussels for a NATO foreign ministers’ meeting, as well as stops in Japan and Singapore. Mahuta also recently met US Secretary of State Antony Blinken when he visited Wellington.

Still, there might be something to the notion that Mahuta might be more ‘BRICS-friendly’ than other ministers in the Labour Cabinet. This includes the more pro-Western Hipkins and Ardern, and the Government’s notably hawkish defence minister, Andrew Little.

For example, Mahuta has attempted to put the brakes on New Zealand joining Pillar II of AUKUS. During Blinken’s visit, she told media ‘I’ll be really clear, we’re not contemplating joining AUKUS’, at odds with her own Prime Minister’s line that New Zealand was ‘open to conversations’ on the matter.

And in June, Mahuta gave a speech to the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs (NZIIA) conference in which she rejected ‘binary choices’ and said New Zealand’s ‘global partnerships are not exclusively with those mirroring our views’.

Of course, rhetoric is one thing – and actions quite another.

Mahuta has yet to visit Latin America, for instance. In fact, aside from John Key’s attendance at an APEC summit in Peru in 2016, no New Zealand Prime Minister has made an official visit to Latin America since 2013.

Moreover, the Government recently announced that funding for the Latin America Centre of Asia-Pacific Excellence (CAPE) – New Zealand’s only real centre of government capability for engagement with the continent – would be cut entirely from mid-2024. Given the opportunities, the decision appears perplexing at best.

New Zealand’s engagement with the Middle East is also worth considering. Mahuta visited the United Arab Emirates and Qatar as part of her inaugural foreign trip in November 2021, while Damien O’Connor, the trade minister, quietly visited Riyadh last year to chair the first meetings of New Zealand’s Joint Ministerial Commission with Saudi Arabia since 2018.

On the other hand, New Zealand Prime Ministers generally prefer to change planes in the Gulf on their way to Europe without making a stopover – a lost opportunity. The last leader to visit the region was John Key in 2015.

Further west, Helen Clark was the last Prime Minister to visit Egypt – which has officially applied to join the BRICS – in 2007, when she opened New Zealand’s embassy in Cairo.

Morocco has also been suggested as a potential BRICS member, although a report at the weekend rejected earlier suggestions that Rabat had made an official application. The country is home to Africa’s largest port, while Marrakech is hosting the annual meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) in October.

The BRICS contenders are clearly still hedging their bets.

After all, the biggest achievement of the BRICS so far has been financial in nature: the BRICS-backed New Development Bank (NDB) was launched in 2015 and has provided loans of more than $US30 billion to date.

This is still small when compared with the World Bank, but the NDB is growing and could become an important player in climate finance. There are parallels with China’s Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) that counts New Zealand as one of its members.

The BRICS want to issue more loans in local currencies, circumventing the US dollar that currently underpins much of the international system. A common BRICS currency could be an ultimate end goal.

It is unlikely that New Zealand would be a fan of every BRICS aspiration – and Russia’s inclusion perhaps makes the bloc too hot to handle, at least for the time being.

But the BRICS could yet turn into something akin to APEC, an economic-focused bloc of countries big and small, from different continents.

This could entail all manner of meetings and summits – an outcome that could provide valuable and more effective face-time opportunities for Wellington.

As things stand, New Zealand is too small for the G7 or G20. It is in the wrong region to join a geographically-focused bloc such as ASEAN or the EU. And APEC – while having laudable aims –has lost momentum as geopolitical tensions between its members continue to build.

One thing is clear.

Fifteen years on, the BRICS are not going away.

New Zealand needs to think more about them.

*******

Geoffrey Miller is the Democracy Project’s geopolitical analyst and writes on current New Zealand foreign policy and related geopolitical issues. He has lived in Germany and the Middle East and is a learner of Arabic and Russian. He is currently working on a PhD on New Zealand’s relations with the Gulf states.

In this the ninth episode of A View from Afar for 2023, political scientist Dr Paul Buchanan and journalist Selwyn Manning examine why there is a trend toward military dictatorships in North Africa.

And, in particular, Paul and Selwyn analyse the reasons why countries like Sudan, Chad, Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso and Guinea have all become part of a challenge to a weakened western-led global order.

In this podcast, Paul and Selwyn examine why events in North Africa are connected to authoritarian multipolarity, a realignment of global power that favours the Russian Federation’s Putin regime.

And, within this context, Paul and Selwyn address the complexities of Russian Federation involvement in the African continent – involvement that includes the notorious Wagner mercenary group; Russian state controlled energy giants like Gazprom that act as envoys of the Kremlin; and how Western powers appear unable to address geopolitical and terrorist-caused instability in the region.

The Questions include:

• How and why have Africa’s dictators found a powerful ally in the Kremlin?
• Who benefits from the Russian-North African alliance and what does this association look like?
• Where does all of this leave terrorist groups, such as ISIS, in the region?
• Why has Africa become a divide between liberal democratic and authoritarian power blocs in the emerging multipolar global constellation?

INTERACTION WHILE LIVE:

Paul and Selwyn encourage their live audience to interact while they are live with questions and comments.

To interact during the live recording of this podcast, go to Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/

Remember to subscribe to the channel.

For the on-demand audience, you can also keep the conversation going on this debate by clicking on one of the social media channels below:

• Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/
• Facebook.com/selwyn.manning
• Twitter.com/Selwyn_Manning

RECOGNITION: The MIL Network’s podcast A View from Afar was Nominated as a Top Defence Security Podcast by Threat.Technology – a London-based cyber security news publication. Threat.Technology placed A View from Afar at 9th in its 20 Best Defence Security Podcasts of 2021 category.

You can follow A View from Afar via our affiliate syndicators.

In this the sixth episode of A View from Afar for 2023 political scientist Dr Paul G. Buchanan and Selwyn Manning present a two-part episode to analyse what to make of New Zealand Prime Minister, Chris Hipkins’ bilateral meetings with People’s Republic of China’s President Xi JinPing and other leaders of the PRC.

In part one, Paul and Selwyn also consider how the PRC-NZ trade relationship is seen in the eyes of New Zealand’s security partners.

Then, in the second half of today’s podcast, Paul and Selwyn analyse the most recent events in Russia – events that have taken shape since Wagner Commander Yevgeny Prigozhin’s pronounced intent to mobilise his mercenaries against the Russian Federation’s top two military heads, and, while doing so, pronounced that the Kremlin’s decision to invade Ukraine was based on falsehoods.

What should we expect next? What is the real state of Putinism? What do the political and power elites in Russia make of President Vladimir Putin’s handling of the matter?

Weeks prior to this event happening inside Russia, Paul and Selwyn analysed the question: How stable is Russian President Vladimir Putin’s hold on power? It’s a question that all those who watch Russian affairs have now been confronted with.

In this episode Paul and Selwyn unpack the complexity, look at what has changed as opposed to what has been said.

INTERACTION WHILE LIVE:

Paul and Selwyn encourage their live audience to interact while they are live with questions and comments.

To interact during the live recordings of this podcast, go to Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/

Remember to subscribe to the channel.

For the on-demand audience, you can also keep the conversation going on this debate by clicking on one of the social media channels below:

• Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/
• Facebook.com/selwyn.manning
• Twitter.com/Selwyn_Manning

RECOGNITION: The MIL Network’s podcast A View from Afar was Nominated as a Top Defence Security Podcast by Threat.Technology – a London-based cyber security news publication. Threat.Technology placed A View from Afar at 9th in its 20 Best Defence Security Podcasts of 2021 category.

You can follow A View from Afar via our affiliate syndicators.

In this the sixth episode of A View from Afar for 2023 political scientist Dr Paul G. Buchanan and Selwyn Manning will present a two-part episode to analyse what to make of New Zealand Prime Minister, Chris Hipkins’ bilateral meetings with People’s Republic of China’s President Xi JinPing and other leaders of the PRC.

In part one, we will also consider how the PRC-NZ trade relationship will be seen in the eyes of New Zealand’s security partners.

Then, in the second half of today’s podcast, Paul and Selwyn will analyse the most recent events in Russia – events that have taken shape since Wagner Commander Yevgeny Prigozhin’s pronounced intent to mobilise his mercenaries against the Russian Federation’s top two military heads, and, while doing so, pronounced that the Kremlin’s decision to invade Ukraine was based on falsehoods.

What should we expect next? What is the real state of Putinism? What do the political and power elites in Russia make of President Vladimir Putin’s handling of the matter?

Weeks prior to this event happening inside Russia, Paul and Selwyn analysed the question: How stable is Russian President Vladimir Putin’s hold on power? It’s a question that all those who watch Russian affairs have now been confronted with.

In this episode Paul and Selwyn will unpack the complexity, look at what has changed as opposed to what has been said, and consider the effect Russian instability has on NATO and BRICS aligned states.

INTERACTION WHILE LIVE:

Paul and Selwyn encourage their live audience to interact while they are live with questions and comments.

To interact during the live recording of this podcast, go to Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/

Remember to subscribe to the channel.

For the on-demand audience, you can also keep the conversation going on this debate by clicking on one of the social media channels below:

• Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/
• Facebook.com/selwyn.manning
• Twitter.com/Selwyn_Manning

RECOGNITION: The MIL Network’s podcast A View from Afar was Nominated as a Top Defence Security Podcast by Threat.Technology – a London-based cyber security news publication. Threat.Technology placed A View from Afar at 9th in its 20 Best Defence Security Podcasts of 2021 category.

You can follow A View from Afar via our affiliate syndicators.

LIVE@MIDDAY NZ Time – 8pm US EDT – In this the first episode of A View from Afar for 2023 political scientist Dr Paul Buchanan and host Selwyn Manning will examine the pros and cons of New Zealand, and other APAC nations, joining the AUKUS security defence pact.

Specifically, Paul and Selwyn will examine the following questions:

* What is AUKUS’s purpose?

* What are the risks to New Zealand’s national and public interest?

* What does AUKUS ‘success’ look like? What could its failure look like?

ALSO, Paul and Selwyn will headline:

* The latest on the US Pentagon leaks. What really is happening here?

* The Global Geopolitical Theatre and how stable is Russian Federation’s president, Vladimir Putin’s regime?

INTERACTION WHILE LIVE: Paul and Selwyn invite and encourage you to interact while they are live with questions and comments.

They recommend you do so via EveningReport’s YouTube channel, as Facebook is undergoing significant changes. Here’s the link: Youtube (remember to subscribe to the channel).

You can also keep the conversation going on this debate by clicking on one of the social media channels below:

• Facebook.com/selwyn.manning
• Youtube
• Twitter.com/Selwyn_Manning

If you miss the LIVE Episode, you can see it as video-on-demand, and earlier episodes too, by checking out EveningReport.nz or, subscribe to the Evening Report podcast here.

RECOGNITION:

The MIL Network’s podcast A View from Afar was Nominated as a Top  Defence Security Podcast by Threat.Technology – a London-based cyber security news publication.

Threat.Technology placed A View from Afar at 9th in its 20 Best Defence Security Podcasts of 2021 category. You can follow A View from Afar via our affiliate syndicators.

On 29 October 2022, the New Zealand Listener published 10 Billion reasons to be cheerful, an article by Greg Dixon summarising “futurologist” Hamish McRae’s 2022 book The World in 2050: How to think about the future. (Note also the accompanying article, A blast from the past; and the letters responses.) The headline was somewhat worrying; I am sure many readers would have wanted there to be rather fewer than ten billion reasons for McRae’s optimism. Dixon’s article incongruously followed an editorial by Nigel Roberts, Back on the Brink, with the following highlighted “In 1962, I didn’t think the missile crisis would result in a nuclear war. Of today’s crisis I’m not so sure”. In addition to the Listener story, McRae gave this interview on RNZ (4 October 2022): The World in 2050: How to Think About the Future.

An important bit of context is that Hamish McRae had in 1994 published The World in 2020, in which he seems to have got many predictions correct (though not the coming significance of the internet, and social media). It should be noted that McRae’s focus was as a business and economic futurist, in the context of a world economy made up of ‘countries’, rather than a global economy of ‘people’. Thus, the achievement of having lifted many people out of poverty is based essentially on the economic success of nations (in the conventional sense of per capita average incomes) rather than of people, with the supposition that the success of a country translates to the success of its people.

A contrary point of view would point to the appalling day-to-day air quality in cities such as Beijing, New Delhi, Lahore, and many other large but smaller and less well known cities. At best, the success of 2020 vis-à-vis 1990 is that environmental poverty has displaced income poverty. Taking a more realistic view of the world in just before 2020, when looking at matters of inequality and debt entrapment withinnations, not all was as rosy in 2019 as he perceived, in McRae’s improved middle-class world.

Nicolai Kondratiev

Helpful to thinking about future history in quarter-centennial chunks, is the (fate of, and speculations of) Russian historical economist Nicolai Kondratiev (1892-1938). Kondratiev was murdered by Josef Stalin, it is said, because he believed that the 1930s’ crisis of western capitalism (the Great Depression), would be temporary; the west would eventually recover. More important for us is that Kondratiev in the early 1920s had predicted the great 1930s’ crisis of western capitalism; a crisis which, if we include World War 2 (as we should), can be argued to have lasted from 1926 to 1946.

Kondratiev is best known for his long wave hypothesis, which suggested there has been a fifty-year economic cycle characterised by alternating downswings and upswings. That would mean, in each century, there would be two of each type of cyclical ‘swing’. (Kondratiev’s work was taken up by Joseph Schumpeter – mentioned in my 30 November essay How do Left-Wing Elites Make their Money? – in his 1939 tome Business Cycles.)

Conveniently perhaps, the century years may be cusp years for this cycle, or at least for our thinking about it. Thus, possibly back to the sixteenth century (or before), we can consider world history (or, realistically, European history given the hegemony of Europe over the world from that century) in 25-year chunks. For each century, the first quarter-century was one of optimism and progress, albeit laced with large doses of inter-kingdom violence. The second quarter-century would be a period marked by deep crisis; crises which would bring about profound change, including significant technological and intellectual advances. The third quarter would be much like the first (another upswing), though probably not as violent. And the fourth, a downswing like the second, but not as revolutionary.

From my point-of-view as a political economist with an interest in economic crises, we may see the core decades of socio-economic crisis as the ‘thirties’ and the ‘eighties’. (In that context, we may understand the history of New Zealand becoming the country it is today as being rooted in the 1830s, a decade most definitely not associated with the expansion of empire, hence the reluctance of the British crown to take us on; and certainly the then reluctance of the British Treasury to commit money to the cause of what would later come to be seen as the ‘Britain of the South’.)

So, my prediction – in line with Kondratiev – is that the 2030s in particular will represent a turning point for humanity; a kind of prediction that Hamish McRae’s methodology restricts him from making. (Turning points are notoriously hard to predict, but the hardest part is to predict the ‘what’, then the ‘when’; the ‘whether’ is comparatively easy to forecast.) Probably the ‘what’ will not become apparent until around 2050. The nuclear-risk notwithstanding, my sense is that we are looking at an implosive rather than an explosive crisis.

If the post-crisis world-orders are not clarified until the end of each crisis period (eg 1850, 1950, 2050), then the Kondratiev crises themselves have usually been clearly signalled – in bits – in the early ‘twenties’ of each century (and also in the ‘seventies’ of each century). We have had enough rumblings just in the last three years – indeed a ‘perfect storm’ of pre-shocks – to suggest that the future will not be a predictable extension of the past.

While Kondratiev ‘cycles’ should not be treated as in any way deterministic, or even that any historical turning point will happen on cue, they are useful as a way of warning us that the medium-term future will most likely not be a case of the ‘linear progress’ as suggested by McRae’s form of ‘futurology’.

Hamish McRae

One point to note is that Hamish McRae belongs to what I call here the ‘Pollyanna generation’, born 1935 to 1945. The progressive gains of the twentieth century fell into their laps (especially the post-depression post-war socio-economic reforms established by their parents’ and grandparents’ generations); then that generation largely dismantled those reforms. (We may note here David Thomson’s 1989 book Selfish Generations?, in which he argues that the twentieth century welfare state had its own implicit sunset clause. And note this review in the Social Policy Journal of New Zealand, by Ann Reeves.)

McRae is a socio-technological optimist who sees the wellbeing of peoples as closely tied to the economic success of the nation states they belong to (and presumably hold allegiance to). In that sense, I feel that the underlying globalisation of the 1990s and 2000s – with its detachment of many people from their nation states, the creation of an effective global citizenry (English-speaking; though, for most, not as their first language) – has not been well understood. It means that the present phase of the reassertion of nation states is much more fraught than he understands. Far from being the vehicles for beneficent growth, nation states and their rigid rules-based structures are becoming barriers to non-elite human development.

Despite his emphasis on nation states, McRae uses the word ‘we’ a lot. I heard the same use of ‘we’ a lot in the third episode of Brave New Zealand World (on artificial intelligence). The ‘we’ in these contexts, I understand to be ‘humanity’ (as a single collective). But it really means ‘elite humanity’, with the sense of each nation being a different delivery system for national elites cloned from a supra-national ‘liberal’ template; a template highly infused with the largely outdated western ‘progressive’ assumptions of the Pollyanna generation. These values of economic growth are not the values of today’s progressive young.

An interesting quote from McRae in the Listener article is: “[One of] the two most important of these [technological challenges] will be productivity in the service sector.” He is thinking firstly about productivity in services such as health, education, and journalism; this is the techno-visionary utopian view that forever-improving high-tech will raise life expectancy (due to more and better medical interventions), will create more and better ‘human capital’, and will enable ‘us all’ to be better informed. (My guess is that we will see retrogression on those laudable outcomes; technology in those industries can also have retrograde consequences.)

But what about the other service industries? In my Using the Sex Industry to Critique Textbook Economics, I looked at ‘personal services’, with the sex-industry as my principal example. In this case, it’s very hard to increase productivity in the way McRae means. Some of these services represent ‘retreat-industries’, occupations people go to when they are casualties of productivity increases in sectors more amenable to technology. As well as the sex industry, this probably includes the ‘street-retail’ sector ubiquitous in the ‘third world’ cities where so much of humanity lives. These industries are generally characterised by overcapacity (especially excess labour capacity); they become more productive when overcapacity reduces, their ‘marginal product of labour’ is typically zero.

The ‘elephant in the room’ however is ‘producer services’. These are often well-paid services – especially financial, management, marketing, public relations, and other overlapping professional business services – performed by businesses and consultants for other businesses, for governments and for government-dependent entities. Not producers of consumable services, these are the service industries to which elite labour migrates; these are ‘problem solvers’ who market their services in part by upplaying the competitiveness problems of their potential clients. ‘Producer services’ is a sector with significant predatory elements. (As a very current example, we may note the destructuring of AUT University, where a capricious management is tithing that institution’s academic wing; see ‘Huge distress’: Post-grads students feel impact of AUT staff cuts, RNZ 6 December 2022.)

In today’s world, the problems of non-elites represent income-earning opportunities for the new service-sector elites who work not by solving these problems, but by profiting from them, and perpetuating them.

This exchange in Kathryn Ryan’s interview (27′ 15″) with Hamish McRae is instructive:

Ryan: “One final point, I think you just touched on it when you said 70 percent of the economy being services … are we going to see, are we already seeing, a significant shift from manufactured goods and consumer goods which we binged on in the second half of the twentieth century, to economies built on services, and many of these services being ‘problem-solving’? And I raise these because of the crises of climate change and environmental degradation, population explosion over the last 100 years. Might many of our economies be built on services, and might many of those services be about solving our problems? Is that too optimistic?

McRae: “no you’ve put your finger exactly what I’m trying, on one of the themes I’m trying to say. I suppose, I’ll plead guilty to being an optimist … a service-based economy inherently uses less resources than a manufacturing-based economy. Once you’ve got one decent car you can’t drive another one at the same time. True it would be nice to travel more, but maybe we’ll spend longer where we are and travel less frequently. So I think that a world where we try to live better, live more orderly lives, have a nicer time, eat well, is actually not a bad world, rather than one that insists on absorbing more resources in ways that are not much fun; I don’t really want to drive around in a big American truck, I’d much rather have my Prius and my vintage car.”

See the Pollyanna problem! What planet are they on? Both interviewee and interviewer paint a world economy piloted by problem ‘solving’ elites as utopian; an economy dominated by elites who make money off the problems they cannot solve, and have no interest in solving. If that’s 100 million elite global citizens and another billion technicians providing ancillary services to them, that leaves 89% of the world’s population in 2050 in dire straits. The expansion of marketing and marketed services – from public relations to sexual relations – will prove to be more dystopian than utopian. (We may also note that ‘people smugglers’ represents the bottom end of the same market that has ‘immigration consultants’ at the top end.)

‘Piloting’ our way out of trouble like this is not likely to work; especially when the pilots have already crash-banged-walloped the world into the problem-state that it is in. (Useful reading: The Shock of the Anthropocene, 2017, by “scientific historians” Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. See reviews in The Guardian and New Scientist, with the latter referring to the piloting issue as “raising the spectre of a new self-selecting scientific geocracy” of problem solvers.) It’s fitting that the new Oxford ‘word of the year’ is Goblin mode (Guardian, 5 December 2022).

Hamish Macrae sees a better future arising from both higher productivity and a continuation of labour expansion into these understudied service industries; occupations and industries in which the assessment of productivity is extraordinarily difficult. How do we measure the productivity of elite problem-solvers? Further, if the future world is dependent on problem-solving services, what happens if the problems are actually solved? What does a successful post-problem-solving economy look like? Might it be even worse than an economy with a multitude of unsolved problems? (Obviously, such an economy need not be worse! But we have no well-enunciated vision of what a problem-solved economy looks like.)

We should also note that problem-solving has always been central to economic life. Many services presently purchased by the poor are to a large extent ‘problem-solving’ too. Personal services are either pro-pleasure or anti-pain; all the latter fit the ‘problem-solving’ moniker.

And a final note on McRae; his disparaging views about the future of Russia. If the global-warming scenarios are as bad or worse than widely-predicted today, Russia may be sitting on some of the world’s most promising (and underpopulated) real estate. The hitherto inhospitable territories of Russia may become some of the most attractive for immigration; whether by liberal means or by conquest.

The Surveillance, Propaganda and Geopolitical Dystopia

We should be aware of just how prescient George Orwell’s 1984 has proved to be, in 2022. (In an important sense, Orwell was not making a prediction for the year 1984; though that did prove to be a prescient year in New Zealand’s history. Rather, he was making a commentary about post-war life in 1948, and the concerns about how his experiences of World War 2 might be projected forward into a tri-partite cold war era. The story I heard was that 1948 was the provisional title of that book.)

In 2022 the propaganda war is between Orwell’s ‘Oceania’ and ‘East Asia’, whereas today’s physical war is between ‘Oceania’ and ‘Eurasia’. In 2022 the geopolitically-contested territory is Ukraine; in the 1960s it was Vietnam. There is a fourth geopolitical contestant, symbolised by Iran (and by the concept of ‘caliphate’, and, before that, Samuel Huntingdon’s 1996 Clash of Civilisations thesis); a contestant which has played an important role in late-modern times only since 1979, so which did not figure in Orwell’s book. In the post-Orwellian narrative, we may call this still-divided geo-bloc ‘West Asia’.

While bloc geopolitics was an important part of Orwell’s dystopia, it is the ubiquitous role of surveillance and propaganda today that may be especially problematic in affecting non-elite human life in the next quarter century. While Orwell emphasised propaganda from official sources, today we are subject to prominent cultural narratives from both pro- and anti-government sources. We in ‘Oceania’ (ie ‘The West’) can see how authority-sourced propaganda is stressing out ‘East Asia’ and ‘Eurasia’ (and ‘West Asia’). We find it harder to see, from the inside, such direction of information in our own bloc; that was, of course, George Orwell’s main point.

Macroeconomic Dystopias

In its essence, the capitalist world economy depends on the production of mass-produced ‘wage goods’ (which include those consumer services which accompany a mass-consumption society); indeed, that’s how the post-industrial-revolution captains-of-industry past-and-present made their fortunes. The problem now is that we need a massive edifice of consumer debt in order to support such spending. If we attempt to unravel that edifice in the next 25 years, the resulting deflationary depression will make The Great Depression seem rather innocuous.

If the working-class cannot afford to buy wage goods, it’s not only the human producers of wage goods that become redundant; it’s also the machines – the robots, if you like – whose main purpose (we understand) is to produce wage-goods more cheaply. This constitutes a deflationary technological dystopia; widely feared also in the 1820s and 1920s.

On the other hand, higher wages – starting to happen today – if uncontained, can lead to a cost-inflationary spiral; a process of competitive access for resources that could be exacerbated by elites wanting to spend or restructure their savings before they become worthless. This constitutes an inflationary dystopia.

If we move away from a global economy based on wage-goods to a global economy based on elite-goods, then we regress into an eighteenth-century-type world of extreme privilege, servitude, drug-assisted-ennui, and criminal desperation. Haiti, anyone?

Or we could move into the kind of capitalist world Karl Marx foretold, in which austere capitalists would keep building capitalist unconsumables until the whole edifice collapses under its own weight. (There were anti-capitalists in the 1920s’ Labour Parties who promoted pro-capitalist policies in order to bring forward the date of capitalist collapse.)

Other Candidates for Coming Revolutionary Crises

I avoid the phrase ‘existential crisis’, because, in history, Kondratiev crises have always given way to better times.

In Aotearoa New Zealand, we have just seen a locally-made television series Brave New Zealand World. It looks at these topics: nuclear war, climate change, pandemics, biological warfare, and artificial intelligence. The last two of these topics (and indeed the first) might better have been characterised as ‘artificial evil’; as such the final programme gives an unintended insight into why (at least until 2020) we – and especially the political left – never trusted ‘scientists’. Another interesting theme of the series is the idea that global elites – such as those from Silicon Valley – are eyeing up this South Pacific archipelago as a bolt-hole from which new beginnings might be possible; indeed, scheming another round of colonisation. (On bolt-holes, I cannot help but think of the final scenes from Don’t Look Up!)

Interestingly, there was no episode on socio-economic catastrophe. Maybe that’s now seen as too mundane; or maybe the new catastrophists struggle with the nuances of economics’ discourse? Perhaps we need a follow-up to Don’t’ Look Up, called Don’t Look Down? Kondratiev and Schumpeter were socio-economists, who instinctively looked to socio-economic history. As such, demography and epidemiology fall into that socio-economic brief. So does the intellectual bankruptcy of Stalin’s Soviet Union and its socialist offshoots; a bankruptcy that has, for example, made nuclear exchanges thinkable. Further, top-down politics has created (and exported) what I think of as AU; ‘artificial unintelligence’. It’s not so much humanity being displaced by robots; more it is humanity becoming robotic.

My underlying Kondratievan optimism, however, is reflected in this parody: ‘You can roboticize some of the population all the time, and all of the population some of the time; but you cannot roboticize all of the population all the time.’ We become hidebound by rules, and the ruling elites who make and enforce those rules. Humanity finds a way out, however, and we are only just seeing a bit of this in China (and in Iran) these last two weeks.

In my view the essential economic threat is liberal mercantilism, which represents a fusion of ‘nationalism’, the ‘sovereignty of exclusive property rights’, and growth as ‘the accumulation of wealth’; where wealth is conceived (in a financial sense) as being ‘money, combined with many types of tradable assets’. Liberal mercantilism is indeed the root cause of the previously mentioned ‘existential’ threats – threats that result from the linear growth mindset: climate change, trickle-down inequality leading to heightened pandemic risks, and the AU idea that new technology can always come to rescue economic growth. (Also see my Northern European Mercantilism and the Covid‑19 Emergency, Evening Report, 9 April 2020; and this reference to “individualistic mercantile capitalism” in The Shock of the Anthropocene review – a crisis centuries in the making.)

Dialectic

I would however argue that an even bigger danger than capitalism in its present form is anti-capitalism, including some of the sentiment from the ‘occupy’ movement of 2011/12. This is where anti-establishments went wrong in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s; we still have the legacies of anti-capitalist totalitarian states which formed in those decades. The challenge is to move away from the blunt primitive capitalism which our older elites still take for granted, and to address the three components of liberal-mercantilism: nationalism, an absence of inclusive public property rights (of economic democracy), and the equating (throughout the now 500-year-old modern era) of wealth as money.

Maybe, following the formal dialectic process, we need a synthesis of capitalism and anti-capitalism; a synthesis that evolves liberalism, dumps mercantilism, and develops democratic structures more local, more global, and less national.

*******

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.