Winston Peters to meet senior Aukus officials in Washington

Wednesday, 10 April 2024

Foreign Minister Winston Peters will meet high-ranking US diplomats Antony Blinken and Kurt Campbell later this week for discussions likely to include New Zealand’s interest in the Aukus defence pact.

Peters has spent recent days in New York, speaking at the United Nations General Assembly about the war in Gaza and sitting down with UN Secretary General António Guterres.

He now heads to Washington DC, where he will separately meet US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and deputy secretary Kurt Campbell, a key figure behind the development of the Aukus defence technology-sharing agreement between Australia, the United Kingdom, and United States.

He will also meet Australian Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy, who is in Washington DC this week to further Australia’s acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines through the Aukus pact.

The pact is broadly considered a response to China’s growing military might. Campbell recently said the pact could help deter China from invading Taiwan, which it claims as its territory, a linkage the Aukus countries have previously been wary of making.

Speaking to reporters from New York on Wednesday, Peters declined to speculate on what might be on the agenda for the meetings.

“I haven’t attended the meeting yet, I haven’t had a change to read the agreed agenda yet. When I get there I’ll be able to tell you,“ he said.

However, Campbell was the first US official to suggest New Zealand participation in Aukus in 2023 and ‒ though Peters says he is following the path laid out by the prior Labour Government ‒ his coalition Government has expressed greater certitude about deepening New Zealand’s security relationship with the United States.

The Government is exploring whether it might join the so-called second “pillar” of Aukus, which involves the sharing of non-nuclear and cutting-edge defence technologies. According to the US Ambassador to Japan, writing in the Wall Street Journal, Japan will soon join the Aukus pact, however this has not been announced by the three countries.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon this week said the Government “declare very strongly [our] wanting to be a very important part of the ANZUS relationship”, in reference to a decades-old security treaty between Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, from which New Zealand was suspended from in the 1980s.

Former Prime Minister Helen Clark, who has been criticising the Government for its interest in Aukus and a deeper security relationship with the US, told the Australian Associated Press there had been an undemocratic “lurch” away from New Zealand’s bipartisan foreign policy position.

Peters said Clark was “making premature comments without any basis or substance towards her so-called conclusion she’s already arrived at”.

He said ANZUS had the same status as it did in 1984, when a Labour Government that Clark was part of passed law to ban nuclear, including nuclear-powered US ships, from New Zealand.

Two years later, the US suspended its treaty obligations to New Zealand, but the treaty was never formally repealed and Australia and the US retained their defence alliance.

Peters, however, declined to explain his own view of the status of ANZUS for New Zealand. He did say there had been “decades of change” since the 1980s.

“Here we are in a new world, in 2024, when the issue is much more acute, much more clear, and the reception we’ve got here reflects that.”

While in Washington DC, and in advance of a US election contest between US President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, Peters will be meeting Republican senator Lindsey Graham, Democratic senator Chris Van Hollen, and a senior trade official in the former Trump administration, Stephen Vaughn.

“We’re talking to everybody,” he said.

Peters was in New York while much of the United States was captivated by a total eclipse of the sun. He watched the eclipse from a New York street and said it was “spectacular”.

The United States was often considered a very divided country, he said, but as the eclipse occurred “all of sudden” everyone appeared “seriously united” for a moment.

“Perhaps we need a whole lot more of that.”