Team politics on the world stage

By political convention, the major parties shelve their differences when it comes to foreign affairs and security matters. On the world stage, they’re team players. That’s one reason why National Prime Minister John Key has been so solidly behind former Labour Prime Minister Helen Clark in her attempts to win the top job at the United Nations.

Under a less obvious convention, the travelling media also face informal pressures to be positive on matters affecting the national good. Therefore, it was not entirely unexpected that the PM’s New York visit last week generated headlines back home such as ‘‘John Key warns US of risks in failing to ratify TPP’’ even though the speech in question basically recycled what United States president Barack Obama said in a Washington Post article five months ago.

In fact, the claimed ‘‘risk’’ that China could reap the geo-political rewards of a failure to pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement has been something Obama administration officials have been telling Congress in vain for the past 15 months.

However, headlines such as ‘‘Key repeats Obama warnings on TPP’’ wouldn’t have quite the same pizzazz.

Key’s media coverage of his New York visit was entirely consistent with a recurring theme of our national self-image: namely, that we are a courageous small nation that speaks truth to power, and punches above our weight on the world stage.

Last week, we got a double serving of this form of national comfort food. At the UN, Foreign Minister Murray McCully also seemed keen to play the role of the principled little battler, telling it like it is.

For the last time during our current stint on the 15-member Security Council, New Zealand was chairing the proceedings. Resolving the war in Syria would never be easy. Yet talking about Syria at the UN struck McCully as the right thing to do.

Supposedly, the ceasefire breakdown that made success ‘‘much more challenging’’ also ‘‘made it that much more right’’ to keep on talking.

McCully’s bromides on Syria came the day after Russia had accused the US of refusing to provide the council with the full set of documents outlining the details of the Russian/American ceasefire deal.

The Security Council meeting McCully was chairing was at risk of talking, it seemed, without being fully informed on exactly what it was talking about.

Ultimately then, last week’s events seemed more like a media pageant, in which our PMgot to talk about Important Things in Important Places to Very Important People.

Still, on this occasion at least, we were shadow-boxing above our weight.