Trump’s new man in Wellington will need a lot more than self-deprecation to turn the tide

Saturday, 4 July 2026

Henry Cooke is The Post’s political editor.

OPINION: As he introduced himself to a small group of journalists on Friday morning, new US Ambassador Jared Novelly told a story about his first job.

Despite being born to a wealthy oil family, he worked in an ancient cold storage warehouse so full of pollutants his saliva and snot would run black. A few weeks into the job after watching his colleagues spit this black gunk into the bottom of the elevator shaft, he realised it was his job to clean it up.

Novelly won’t need that much time to learn that his new job is not so different to his old one.

Someone higher up the chain hoicks something up, and all the way down at the bottom of the world, he attempts to clean it up.

New Zealand is not in the best of moods with the superpower at the other side of the Pacific right now. This entire column could be spent listing the reasons, from the decision to destabilise the Middle East (again) with a bomb dropped on schoolchildren to the erratic tariff regime to the abrupt and likely deadly freezing of aid money to the world’s poorest.

As Novelly was happy to discuss, recent polling suggests Kiwis see the US as more of a threat than China, and China as more of a friend than the US.

Given all that, Novelly’s decision in his first few public engagements to lean into self-deprecation was wise. He started his speech to the assembled diplomatic corps on Thursday night by noting that he wasn’t very good at public speaking.

When pressed on how he had got the job he said he had kept saying “pretty please” (he’s a major Republican donor). He told reporters at his press conference that he was probably getting exact facts or figures wrong, which he was. He was happy to raise a toast to our head of state King Charles III on Thursday night, despite no one responding with a toast to his.

Donald Trump’s last ambassador to New Zealand, Scott Brown, was not so prone to self-effacement. Brown was a walking and drumming embodiment of American masculinity, a Reaganite archetype obsessed with his collection of rock music memorabilia. It is difficult to imagine him truly laughing at himself, which is something Novelly seemed happy to do. He will remind any viewer of US media drama Succession far more of the self-mocking Roman Roy than his Machiavellian brother Kendall.

This somewhat humorous tone gave a softer edge to what Novelly was actually saying. It’s far easier to tell New Zealand you want to “fix our nuclear thing” when you say you want to do it by using a time machine (there was a DeLorean at his first event) to go back in time to the 1980s, especially when you follow it up with the silly idea of bringing an aircraft carrier into Auckland harbour and staging a basketball game on it. (Novelly, after saying all this, noted it was actually a decision for Kiwis to make not for the US, perhaps realising he had overstepped.)

Novelly also used the fact of the press conference itself as a tool. Asked about the polling that found Kiwis preferring China to the US, he suggested the existence of the free press in both the US and New Zealand - but not in China - should cause New Zealand to think through “whether you really know who your friends are“. Here he said he was not doing something he plainly was doing: scolding the country.

“I'm very disappointed. I don't mean to scold New Zealanders, but [I am] disappointed that they feel that way.”

The bumbling sections of the press conference - he does not appear to understand our film subsidies - made the sections that he had been well-briefed on very obvious. He freely admitted that our nuclear free status was the first thing he was briefed on. And he was very keen to talk about the potential to mine critical mineral reserves in the Pacific, going on an extended riff on “golf-ball” sized bits of cobalt from the seas surrounding the Cook Islands, where he will be cross-accredited to.

It is these critical mineral exploitation opportunities where the US is far more likely to find favour than any push to revisit our nuclear free policy, at least for the time being. The Government is actively interested in critical mineral partnerships with the US, which would likely last for far longer than Trump does in the White House. Nuclear policy, not so much.

It is true, as Defence Minister Chris Penk said recently, that New Zealand’s only ally Australia getting nuclear-powered subs may force a rethink. But it is also true that there is no need to have that conversation now, when the subs are far away from being delivered, if they ever are. Even Winston Peters might be retired by the time they arrive in the 2040s.

Novelly met with Peters and other politicians at a closed-door event on Thursday, ahead of a larger 250th birthday bash for the country in the evening. He may naturally see a bit of a fellow traveller in Peters, but really the NZ First leader is far more enamoured with Nigel Farage than the US President. Peters may find a lot to like in the US administration, but as a veteran foreign affairs minister he also values predictability and trust within relationships.

The ambassador himself was happy to admit that Trump was not predictable. He likened his boss to a Silicon Valley disrupter, someone “like Elon Musk” who entered a room with a grenade and blew everything up. This might play well in rooms full of investors, but Kiwis broadly dislike Musk, while backing moves to rein in the excesses of Silicon Valley with a social media ban.

You could see a flavour of the Kiwi repulsion to this kind of attitude in the immediate response from the Prime Minister to the time machine suggestion. Luxon, who is often quite reticent to criticise the US, suggested Novelly “go and read some history” to understand why New Zealand was so “proud” of our nuclear-free laws. Luxon is not the kind of guy you can imagine marching against nuclear visits in the 1980s, but he knows how to read a poll, especially in an election year.

One could also understand if Luxon had built up more than a little resentment toward the current administration, which has now cut off economic recoveries in New Zealand twice in his short time in office, first with Liberation Day, then with the invasion of Iran.

Near the end of the press conference, Novelly was asked about Iran. He did not answer in much detail other than to say a “nuclear-armed Iran would be an existential threat to everyone on the planet”. He’s not wrong. The problem for him is just how many Kiwis think a nuclear-armed US led by an impulsive “disrupter” is an existential threat all of its own.