What an ‘independent foreign policy’ should mean
Last week, Foreign Minister Winston Peters attended the April 4 meeting of Nato ministers of foreign affairs in Brussels, marking 75 years since the alliance’s founding. Those gathered in Brussels had much to celebrate. According to SecretaryGeneral Jens Stoltenberg, Nato has been “the strongest, most enduring and most successful Alliance in history”. Since 1949, it has grown from 12 to 32 members, whose combined populations number almost a billion people.
Over the past two years, Nato has responded with a remarkably unified sense of purpose to the Russian war against Ukraine, with its collective strength further bolstered by the recent accession of Finland and Sweden.
But the anniversary was also clouded by several concerns, including that Russian aggression against Ukraine persists, and that a possible change of president could imperil the pivotal role of the United States in the alliance.
Peters announced after the event that New Zealand would soon conclude a new partnership agreement with Nato. He explained that “as our shared values of human rights, the rule of law, freedom and democracy come under sustained attack, our long-standing co-operation with our traditional partners must be enhanced”. He had already signalled earlier that his European trip was primarily to meet with “traditional partners”.
For some in New Zealand these comments will raise questions about our vaunted “independent foreign policy”.
In fact, our foreign minister’s trip offers an opportunity to contemplate independence in foreign policy from the perspective of other democracies.
On the eve of the April 4 meeting, Peters met with Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski, a robust proponent of Nato solidarity and support for Ukraine. Sikorski garnered international attention in February with a pithy put-down of Russian falsehoods when speaking at the United Nations Security Council.
As a New Zealander of Polish descent who is currently a visiting professor at the University of Warsaw, I know well how Poles like Sikorski value independence in foreign policy.
When Poland and other former members of the Warsaw Pact joined Nato in the 1990s, they were asserting independent foreign policy choices denied by the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
These states are acutely conscious that solidarity amongst democracies is not a constraint on independence, but a means of assuring it against a malign power with a track record of aggression against its neighbours, as palpably demonstrated in Ukraine today.
This sentiment is felt viscerally by Poles for deep-seated historical reasons. In 1944, my father fought in the tragically costly Warsaw Uprising to try to retake the city from Nazi occupation, with the ultimately forlorn hope of also avoiding post-war Soviet domination.
He came to New Zealand as a displaced person because of the likelihood of being imprisoned (or worse) by Poland’s postwar Communist rulers, as was the case for many fighters in the Uprising.
As a young man, Foreign Minister Sikorski himself was granted asylum in the United Kingdom in the 1980s for challenging communist authoritarianism.
It is hardly surprising then that the foreign ministers of Poland and neighbouring states look at Ukraine’s ordeal with the apprehension that they would be in comparable positions if they were not in Nato. For them, the alliance is a vital guarantor of their independence.
Too often in New Zealand, independence in foreign policy is selectively interpreted as the freedom to take different stances from those “traditional partners” referenced by Peters.
In dismissing recent charges of Chinese cyber-hacking, Beijing’s Ambassador in Wellington urged New Zealand to revert to its “independent foreign policy”.
He did not seem to fathom that being independent means being able to disagree with China on certain issues, just as New Zealand did with the United States on nuclear ships in the 1980s and the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Recently, Associate Professor Nicholas Khoo of Otago published an opinion piece asking critics of possible New Zealand involvement in Pillar 2 of Aukus to explain what they mean by independence in foreign policy and how it distinguishes us from others.
After all, members of the diplomatic corps would have regarded it as a statement of the obvious when Peters told them last December that: “We do have an independent foreign policy, but the coalition Government also believes you have independent foreign policies too, forged through your own national experiences and the cultural expectations that grew out of them... an independent foreign policy means different things to different countries”.
For Poland and other Nato members, independence is not only compatible with being in an alliance, but is indispensable for it. If independence for New Zealand means being able to disagree with “traditional partners” but does not also mean freely choosing to align with them at times to pursue mutual interests, then it means little.
In today’s global security environment, it remains critical that democracies stand together, as Nato members and New Zealand have in the face of Russian aggression.
Notwithstanding their imperfections, democratic alliances remain a vital source of independence, especially for small states.