Matthew Hooton: A new search for security

Sunday, 19 July 2026

Matthew Hooton is editor-in-chief of The Post and Sunday Star-Times.

OPINION: Do they still teach “New Zealand’s search for security” in social studies classes at secondary school?

It was a staple of the Cold War era. The fall of Singapore and its British naval base to Japan in February 1942. US marines arriving to protect us in the following months. The formal ANZUS alliance with Australia and the US in 1951. The SEATO pact - our region’s equivalent of NATO - in 1954. The various proxy wars between the democracies and communist blocs, including in Korea, Malaya, Borneo and Vietnam, in which over 100 New Zealand soldiers lost their lives. The anti-Vietnam War movement, the anti-nuclear campaign, and then the dispute with the US and rise of our so-called “independent foreign policy” in the 1980s. The story ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall and liberation of Eastern Europe in 1989, and the final dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

It’s all probably a bit old and fact-based for today’s school curriculum and classrooms, but Cold War 2 means the issue is back.

After the fall of Singapore, New Zealand was quick to shift loyalties from the British empire in decline to the new American hegemon that was emerging. As so often, it was the New Zealand Labour Party that led the historic change, with National soon falling into line.

Our war leader Peter Fraser sent no less than his Labour Party deputy leader and Minister of Finance Walter Nash to Washington as effectively our first ambassador to the US. This would be like Christopher Luxon sending Nicola Willis off to be ambassador in US, while remaining Minister of Finance, but when the commute involved much more than Air New Zealand Premier Lux to New York and a couple of hours on the Acela express south to Washington DC.

Something like the 1940s switch of loyalties has been under way since the 1990s.

After China’s economic liberalisation really took off in the 1980s - and despite its People’s Liberation Army killing as many as 10,000 students in Tiananmen Square in 1989 - New Zealand began quickly shifting our diplomatic focus to Beijing by the mid-1990s. Based on a diplomatic strategy called “if we’re not first, we’re last”, we decided to become China’s best little friend in the west.

Under the Maoist sounding slogan “The Four Firsts”, we helped China embrace global capitalism by becoming the first developed country to agree to China joining the World Trade Organisation, the first to recognise it as a market economy, the first to begin negotiations for a free-trade agreement (FTA) and the first to conclude them in 2008.

It was a bipartisan effort and continued under the Key Government form 2008 and 2017 and into the early Ardern Government, at least until Covid.

We now find ourselves economically dependent on China similar to, although to a much lesser extent, the way we were still economically dependent on the UK when it joined the then-European Economic Community in 1973.

Our defence tilt from the UK to the US in the 1940s and decades that followed involved three democracies with similar values. The UK didn’t really take offence. The economic shift to China involves an authoritarian dictatorship with enormous and ever-growing military power and the ambition, common to all great powers, of expanding its influence regionally and globally.

New Zealand talks about having an “independent” foreign policy but there is no such thing. As Donald Trump has learned this year, not even the foreign policy of the US - with the the most powerful economy and military in the history of the world - is “independent” of Israel and Iran. Earlier, Vladimir Putin had to learn Russia’s foreign policy isn’t independent of Ukraine and its friends. China is not free to act “independently” against Taiwan.

The suggestion New Zealand can ever make foreign policy choices independently of our only ally Australia, of our economic protector China, of our friends and trading partners in the South Pacific and South East Asia, and of our ultimate security guarantors in the US and Nato is just another example of our arrogant and naive belief in “Kiwi exceptionalism” that prevents us from facing our economic and other challenges squarely in the face and making sensible decisions to address them.

We have choices to make about our national security and economic destiny that we cannot make “independently” but only by taking into account every other countries’ intentions and capabilities, respecting our existing reliance on some of them and understanding there are no issues at all on which we can achieve anything acting alone.

Since Jacinda Ardern’s historic 2022 decision to become the first New Zealand prime minister to attend and address a Nato Leaders' Summit, New Zealand has clearly been leaning back towards the democratic camp. Chris Hipkins and Christopher Luxon have followed in her footsteps and Winston Peters has always had a preference for our traditional alliances.

That’s the direction we are heading but, as Dita De Boni’s piece in today’s Star-Times indicates, that will very likely soon come at the cost of our favoured economic relationship with China. There are other options.

Australia and Fiji’s new “Ocean of Peace” Alliance could lead to a Pacific security pact that excludes all great powers. It could grow to include Singapore and South East Asia. Or we could opt for neutrality the way Sir Bob Jones’ New Zealand Party controversially proposed way back in 1984. Alternatively, we could decide to expand our economic relationship with China to include defence.

In this sense we do have some control over our new search for security and The Post and Star-Times are platforms to debate it. But, whatever path we choose, don’t think it means we can ever be truly “independent”. Foreign policy is about interdependence. Once we accept that, our debate about how to navigate Cold War 2 and assure our security can be much better informed.

Sorry for the heavy content so early on a Sunday. Enjoy the rest of today’s Star-Times.

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