Winston Peters ‘very pleased’ after talking tariffs with Trump diplomat Rubio
Wednesday, 19 March 2025
Foreign Minister Winston Peters says he is “very pleased” after talking tariffs with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Washington DC.
“We came here to listen to the new administration and to be clear about what is important to New Zealand,” Peters told reporters on Wednesday morning.
“We talked about our position, our long relationship, the trading circumstances going forward, the security circumstances going forward, and a wide range of issues.”
Two months into US President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, Peters’ trip to Washington this week has been a chance to meet with top Trump officials and hear directly their policy intentions.
Trump has in the past eight weeks embarked on an extraordinary reshaping of US policy, demanding that allies and partners increase defence spending, and threatening reciprocal and agricultural tariffs on imports to the US to, he claims, bolster domestic production.
“We have put a lot of work in, long before the American elections in 2024, to ensure that if this moment ever came, we'd be as best prepared as a country like New Zealand could possibly be.
“We’ve hit the ground running.”
Peters said he shared some “significant information” with Rubio.
“For example, that since 1870 we’ve been asking about a trade agreement, and I pointed out to him how patient we were.
“On the matter of tariffs, we had set the standard four decades ago, and other countries were catching up in terms of fairness.
“He came away much more confident than when we originally came here.”
Trump has promised to impose agricultural tariffs, which could damage New Zealand’s growing beef exports into the US, now New Zealand’s second-largest export market.
New Zealand’s exports to the US reached $2.8 billion in the year to December, with 181,000 tonnes of beef exports largely driving an 18.8% increase on the year prior.
Peters on Tuesday met with Trump’s national security advisor, Michael Waltz, and afterwards said he had heard the administration’s “expectations”. However, he would not specify what these were, citing a need to discuss first with the Cabinet.
Similarly, on Wednesday, he said Rubio also spoke of expectations, and as he was “well briefed” by Waltz, the discussion was “very wide ranging, very meaningful”.
“It’s a work in progress. We’ve got time in the next few months to make sure that we bed those things in.”
Cabinet is currently considering a new Defence Capability Plan, which the Government has said would map out defence spending with an aim of reaching 2% of GDP ‒ a threshold the US has been pushing Nato allies to meet.
Peters said the Trump administration’s priorities for the Pacific were about security and their capacity to trade.
Rubio was “very much aware of the fact that we have a long-standing relationship with China, that we value our relationship with China when it comes to trade”.
“But at the end of the day, we're talking about not just China. We're talking about the blue continent, the Pacific, in which we are a key player, and he recognises that.”
Also on Wednesday morning, Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke and reportedly agreed on a limited ceasefire for the Ukraine war, being a 30-day pause on strikes on electricity infrastructure.
Peters said Rubio was clear the ceasefire talks were at an “embryonic” stage.
“A ceasefire is never fast enough. That's the sad thing. But we want a lasting ceasefire,” he said.