Strategy shows NZ’s desire to re-engage with US
Jacinda Ardern’s appearance before yet another an influential American organisation is becoming more than a habit.
It is evident that it is a strategy.
Ardern appeared yesterday as a special guest of the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations in a webinar hosted by its president, Richard Haass, one of the United States’ foremost commentators on international relations.
A few weeks ago, she appeared on the AxeFiles,a CNN show hosted by veteran political analyst David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s former chief of staff and currently the director of Chicago University’s Institute of Politics.
In April, she appeared for a discussion with the US Chamber of Commerce executive Myron Brilliant.
She also took part in a virtual summit of 40 countries hosted by the US on climate change in that month.
And she joined VicePresident Kamala Harris in March to speak to the European Parliament to mark International Women’s Day.
This is not Ardern, the antiTrump icon, flirting with the domestic US audience through the LateShow.
This is New Zealand sending a loud and clear message that it wants to reengage seriously with the United States, including an ambition by Ardern to get there for a meeting with President Joe Biden.
There was no such ambition last term.
Mercifully, there was no awkward invitation to her from Donald Trump, which she would have been honourbound to accept.
The high-level Washington DC visit was left to former Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters when he visited former Vice-President Mike Pence to push for a free trade deal in November 2019.
The United Nations’ leaders’ week in late September is a possibility for Ardern, assuming it is not cancelled.
She will be fully vaccinated, as will most attendees, and if any trip is worth her spending two week’s isolation on return, it would be the job-lot that a UN trip offers.
Meeting dozens of leaders for the price of one stint in isolation would seem a fair price, so long as it included a proper meeting with Biden and Harris.
Factors in both the United States and New Zealand governments suggest the potential for a new era of diplomatic synergy, including the fact that both Government’s are from the same side of the fence.
Both have been acknowledged for their management of Covid-19.
Both are committed to action on climate change, and to multilateral organisations such as the World Health Organisation and the World Trade Organisation.
There is the big issue of what the US does about the Comprehensive and Progressive agreement for Trans Pacific Partnership – which Ardern is encouraging the nation of 328 million to return to.
And there is the issue of dealing with China, be it bilaterally, through Anzus, Five Eyes, the Quad, the G7, Nato or the so-called alliance of democracies that Biden wants to shore up.
China appeared to be the priority on Biden’s agenda during his first overseas trip, to attend the G7 in Britain and the Nato summit in Brussels.
He got statements on China written into their communiques – for the first time in a Nato statement, which declared its concern about China’s “coercive policies”.
Some of the key players in the Biden Administration are old friends of New Zealand, such as Kurt Campbell, the Indo Pacific co-ordinator on the National Security Council, who helped to restore relations with the US after the nuclear rift.
He is the top Biden official who recently declared that the US considers the era of engagement with China to be over and that it was now the era of competition.
Such a definitive statement is not likely to be one that our Prime Minister would embrace but she is clearly willing and ready for a new era of engagement with the US.